The Friend: Best-In-Show Performances Distinguish Quiet Drama

By Liz Braun

Rating: B+

After her close friend dies, a New York writer inherits his massive dog.

That’s the basic premise of The Friend, a gentle and affecting drama from directors David Siegel and Scott McGehee about grief, loss, and the unconditional love available from a dog. There are cat people and there are dog people, but only one of those companion animals has been dubbed man’s best friend.

Bill Murray, seen in flashback, is Walter, a renowned writer and academic with a great circle of friends and a complicated romantic life. One of his dearest friends is Iris (Naomi Watts), a fellow writer and former student of Walter’s. Iris lives a very orderly life in a small, rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan.

Walter ends his own life. (Not a spoiler: his funeral is at the beginning of The Friend.) His death leaves Iris feeling unmoored; in voiceover, she asks questions about his death and his mindset at the time, wondering what he was thinking.

Brief conversations — at a dinner party and later at Walter’s service — quickly establish the bright, sharp, competitive environment of the writer’s world. Iris, however, seems kinder than her colleagues. She is friendly with two of Walter’s three wives (Noma Dumezweni, Carla Gugino, Constance Wu) and she is also close to Walter’s adult daughter, Val (Sarah Pidgeon). Val’s mother is one of womanizing Walter’s many co-ed conquests.

Iris is stunned to discover that Walter has left Apollo, his massive Great Dane, to her care. For starters, Iris is a cat person. And there are no pets allowed in her apartment building. Worse yet, being assigned the dog tells Iris something about her relationship with Walter that she maybe hadn’t acknowledged.

But she takes the dog. Apollo (played by Bing, a very good boy) is flattened by grief at the loss of his master. The dog lies down and stares, refuses to eat, and hogs Iris’ bed. She sleeps on the floor or on the couch as a result. Pressure from the building superintendent to get the dog out of there has Iris scouring shelters and rescues in the hope of finding Apollo a forever home.

Otherwise, Iris will be evicted.

Early on in The Friend, Iris comments that she feels as if she’s losing control, as if her life were being written by someone else. She is failing to finish a book of Walter’s letters, failing to finish her own novel, failing to find Apollo a home. The discovery that dogs are not welcome in a lot of places — apartment buildings, office buildings, stores — prompts Iris to champion the dog.

The dog returns her efforts a hundredfold. She and Apollo slowly become friends. A visit to her shrink and a visit with a ghost, where she can express anger and frustration, mark the beginning of real change in Iris’ life. She has to consider her relationship with Walter and the devastation left behind in the wake of his death.

Iris discovers that the unconditional love dogs provide can be life-altering.

There’s a lot going on under the calm, beautifully acted surface of The Friend. The story concerns love, grief and letting go, but it’s also about life in middle age and stepping outside one’s safety zone. The terrific cast includes Tom McCarthy and Ann Dowd; the performances are understated and affecting, and Watts is absolutely wonderful as Iris.

The Friend is based on the bestselling novel by Sigrid Nunez. It played here first at TIFF last fall.

The Friend. Written and directed by David Siegel and Scott McGehee. Starring Naomi Watts, Bill Murray, Carla Gugino, and Sarah Pidgeon. In theatres in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City and Vancouver April 4, expanding into other Canadian cities April 11.