The Friend

As it turns out, there are a pair of friends in “The Friend,” celebrated author Walter Meredith (Bill Murray) and Walter’s Harlequin Great Dane, Apollo (Bing), both pals of creative writing professor Iris (Naomi Watts). We see Walter happen upon the apparently abandoned Apollo in the movie’s first scene, though we don’t see the dog, segueing instead to a dinner where Walter is regaling friends, including Iris, about finding the massive pooch. Drawing heavily on Murray’s own persona, this scene establishes Walter as a charming raconteur, though by composing the scenes almost exclusively in close-ups of Walter and Iris despite other people present, directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel are also quietly impressing upon us their intimate connection. He might have a trail of ex-wives, but Iris is his soulmate. Soon after, Walter dies and Iris is bequeathed Apollo, which is also the first time we get a look at him. It’s funny, there might not be another actor more capable of stealing a movie than Bill Murray, but even he would have to admit that he’s no match for Bing, those expressively droopy eyes are shrewdly framed to make him look like a movie star.

By all accounts, Nunez’s novel was as much about writing and being a writer. And though McGehee and Siegel’s adaptation includes those ideas by showing us Iris teaching her class, and editing Walter’s final book, and even occasionally playing around with perspective, they often come across underbaked and less essential. The writers and directors prefer to foreground the conventional aspects of the story, a cat person seemingly content living alone in her booklined, rent-controlled, no-dogs allowed New York apartment who comes under the threat of eviction and must decide whether to give Apollo away or a concoct a ruse to keep him as the duo draws closer in grieving Walter together. Despite those conventions, “The Friend” surprises you, with feeling more than narrative twists, like a dog surprised by a porcupine, say, all just a bit pricklier than you might imagine.

Indeed, Walter committing suicide rather than passing away from some terminal disease not only infuses “The Friend” with a slightly darker edge but illustrates and magnifies the mystifying nature of death. Iris’s emotional wound festers throughout “The Friend” and is only healed, in a manner of speaking, via the one meta touch that emphatically works: Iris imagining a conversation between her and Walter over taking his life, illuminating her own reckoning with not knowing him as well as she thought. It’s a fascinating sequence, played not with the heaviness you expect but something closer to buoyancy, two witty friends hashing it out, imagination creating reality, or creating a reality, at least, that she is able to momentarily let herself believe. 

Much has been written about Watts and Bing having cultivated a friendship offscreen in service of their relationship onscreen and you can sense those dissolving walls in Watts’s naturalistic performance, the kind that you know is good because you’re not noticing it. At the same time, Watts is skilled enough to take her character’s scheme of getting Apollo certified as a therapy dog to keep him and her apartment and not overstate the allegorical case that Apollo is her therapy dog. McGehee and Siegel also refuse to anthropomorphize Apollo, never providing subtitles as a window into his thoughts, a la the grieving Jack Russell terrier in “Beginners.” It means the ultimate tension in “The Friend” is between Apollo’s unambiguous physical presence and the more ambiguous nature of his emotional presence, underlined in how Watts strains to have Iris understand what he’s thinking, to make peace with not knowing where he came from. For this kind of movie, it’s an ambivalence as rare as refreshing.