The Friend review — Divine portrayal of the human-animal bond
This adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s bestselling 2018 novel, about a woman who befriends a Great Dane in the aftermath of her best friend’s suicide, is tender-hearted and thoughtful.
The Friend (M)
119 minutes
In cinemas
3.5 stars
Do animals have feelings? I think there’s some agreement they do, particularly when it comes to the cats and dogs we keep as pets. Perhaps less so for the goldfish. Yet how “human” are these feelings? Can a dog, for example, have what we call a broken heart?
That is one of the questions posed in The Friend, a thoughtful and tender-hearted adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel. Other themes include the nature of friendship, the human-animal bond, and the emotional reverberations of suicide.
The always amusing Bill Murray shares top billing but the out-and-out stars are British-born Australian actor Naomi Watts and a Great Dane named Bing. The setting is Manhattan. She is Iris, a writer struggling with her book, and he is Apollo, a five-year-old, 70kg hound with a hangdog look.
Iris and Apollo become roommates in her small apartment after Apollo’s owner, Walter (Murray), kills himself. “There’s a pony on your bed!’’ exclaims a neighbour who drops by.
Walter, who we see in flashbacks, was a writer and writing teacher who married three times and had affairs with his students, including Iris.
“That dog is so Walter,’’ observes one of the wives when she and Iris take Apollo to the park. “You mean the swinging balls?” Iris replies.
The problem for Iris is that dogs are not allowed in her building. She is warned she will be evicted from the rent-controlled apartment. This dilemma – whether Apollo stays or goes – is the undercurrent of deeper questions she comes to face.
While she and Walter had but a brief affair, they remained firm friends. “We talked for hours,’’ she remembers. “It was effortless. Like breathing together.”
One of the ex-wives admits feeling jealous of this friendship because it was something she and Walter did not have.
Watts, a dual Oscar nominee, is outstanding throughout. In one scene she rests her head on the prone Apollo’s side and cries. She is weeping for her lost lover-friend and for her dead father. “What do dogs think when they see humans cry?” she thinks. “How do you explain death to a dog?”
The book Iris is working on is a collection of Walter’s correspondence. The publisher wants it now, for reasons I suspect many writers will relate to. “Dead Walter is suddenly hotter than live Walter.”
Her progress is complicated by her feelings for Walter and, gradually but deeply, for his dog. Apollo, with one blue eye and one brown eye, does look sad. He clings to one of Walter’s old T-shirts. He likes being read to (in the novel, his favourite writer is the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke).
The Friend, which I highly recommend, is a challenging work of fiction to adapt for the screen. It is an interior novel in which none of the characters is named and where almost everything takes place as a conversation inside the narrator’s head.
The New York-based filmmaking duo Scott McGehee and David Siegel succeed by letting the story take its time. At the outset it’s an entertaining dramedy about a woman trying to look after a dog who is bigger than she is.
From there it develops into a slow-build drama that reaches powerful peaks in two sequences: when Iris talks to her therapist, and an imagined scene where Iris and Walter meet to discuss her book and, then, his suicide.
There are two nice backstories to this movie about friends. First, Murray is notoriously hard to hire. He refuses to receive scripts via email. Watts and he are friends, since working together on the 2014 film St Vincent, and she arranged for the novel and the script to be hand-delivered to him. He said yes to the role.
Second, to prepare for the movie, Watts and Bing, who hails from Iowa, had regular meetings at her home in New York. Whenever the canine star came over, accompanied by his trainer Bill Berloni, Watts had to hide her own dog, a Yorkshire terrier/chihuahua cross named Izzy, in another room because there was a chance the two would not be friends.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout