Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel The Friend was a critical success — winning that year’s National Book Award for Fiction — that also managed to find broad mainstream appeal. While Nunez’s novel is a work of discursive autofiction laden with allusions to literature and philosophy, its story of a woman who learns to love a Great Dane unexpectedly thrust upon her is an approachable one for readers of more conventional stories of the bonds between people and animals. In their film adaptation of The Friend, writer-director duo Scott McGehee and David Siegel tip the novel’s balance away from Nunez’s introspective musing and toward the earnestly emotional dog-lover story. Given the fruitlessness of translating the internal life of a novel’s first-person narrator for the screen, centering the external plot is an understandable decision. Yet in focusing on the surface of The Friend, McGehee and Siegel ultimately fail to craft a compelling film: the tone too often veers toward flat sentimentality rather than emotional depth, and the additions made to pad out the relatively thin plot are clichéd and poorly integrated.
Naomi Watts plays Iris, a writer who is in bereavement for her best friend Walter (Bill Murray), who has died by suicide. Walter was a well-known writer and a well-known womanizer, and left behind a widow, two ex-wives, and an adult daughter who was the product of a brief affair. He also left behind heaps of correspondence he had enlisted Iris and his daughter, Val (Sarah Pidgeon), to edit for publication prior to his death, a project which Iris struggles with in her state of grief — and frustration, as this project prevents her from writing a novel she’s been trying to complete for a year. Walter’s widow, Barbara (Noma Dumezweni), throws an additional wrench into Iris’ life when she implores her to adopt Walter’s Great Dane, Apollo, as Barbara doesn’t like dogs and Walter had previously expressed that Iris should take care of the dog in the event of his death. Caring for Apollo quickly consumes Iris’ life: he barely fits into her one-bedroom apartment; her superintendent (Felix Solis) repeatedly reminds her that dogs are not allowed in her building, putting her at risk for eviction; and Apollo’s separation anxiety is so acute that he tears apart her apartment if left home alone. In caring for Apollo, though, Iris slowly begins to accept her own grief and unresolved feelings toward Walter.
Watts is given a tricky job in playing Iris, as the character’s sublimated grief requires her to communicate complex emotions nonverbally, and many of her scenes require her to talk at length to a dog. Watts, though, manages to give a dynamic and affecting performance: she is an energetic, emotionally bold actor, and her full-bodied commitment compensates for vague characterization on McGhee and Siegel’s part that persists for much of the film. Meanwhile, the dog she is tasked with acting opposite, Bing, is uncannily expressive, with soulful eyes and a gentle gait, so that even when Watts must repeatedly deliver variations on “bad dog” or “good boy,” the rapport between owner and pet feels natural, and sometimes genuinely touching.
If the film’s human and canine stars are consistently engaging, the same cannot be said of the supporting cast. Though The Friend features an enviable ensemble of actors — Ann Dowd, Constance Wu, and Carla Gugino among them — each secondary role is so thinly written that none are given the opportunity to make much of an impression. This flatness of characterization also extends to the quality of the film’s aesthetics. The Friend is composed mainly of two-character scenes, and McGehee, Siegel, and cinematographer Giles Nuttgens’ framing of them is functional but dull and repetitive — nearly every scene either consists of two actors framed in medium shots with shot-reverse-shot editing, or of two actors in a medium shot walking side-by-side. Costuming and mise en scène, too, reveal a generally bland aesthetic; the film’s tony downtown Manhattan setting is filmed in shades of beige and grey, and the characters’ peacoats, cardigans, and scarves blend in all too seamlessly.
The Friend’s most notable shortcoming, though, is its reliance on cliché and narrative contrivance, which undercuts the complexity of Iris’ grief. The main conflict in her career is that she suffers from writer’s block, a conventional idea of a writerly problem revealing little of Iris’ own feelings and values regarding writing — notably, this replaces one of the more fascinating subplots in Nunez’s novel involving teaching writing workshops to patients in a recovery program for abused women. The character Val, not present in the novel, is also problematic, as she is never developed or well-integrated enough to justify the inclusion, leaving the addition of Walter’s long-lost daughter to function mainly as a surface-level plot complication. Awkward narrative additions like these suggest a struggle to externalize a narrative that relies on rigorously internal emotional development, and while McGehee and Siegel are largely successful in developing the tender relationship between Iris and Apollo, their handling of the other narrative elements is clunky enough to drag down the entire film.
A few scenes late in The Friend do, however, provide genuine emotional depth and complexity. In one, where Iris breaks down in a therapy session, we witness one of the first instances where she articulates out loud her emotional response to Walter’s passing, and the scene is filmed and written with patience and focus by McGehee and Siegel, while also providing a well-used opportunity for bravura acting by Watts. Likewise, the film’s final scenes, in which Iris begins to accept the aging Apollo’s ultimate mortality, are treated with a subtlety and grace that gently, but honestly, lead the viewer past the end credits. If The Friend generally falls short, then, both as a literary adaptation and on its own cinematic terms, its best moments at least manage to effectively portray the complexities of “moving on” from grief.
DIRECTOR: Scott McGehee, David Siegel, & Stacey Battat; CAST: Naomi Watts, Bill Murray, Noma Dumenzweni, Sarah Baskin; DISTRIBUTOR: Bleecker Street; IN THEATERS: March 28; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 3 min.
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