‘The Friend’ Review: Drama About a Dog-and-Human Bond Barks Up a Familiar Tree

Those who live in the Tri-State area—or are masochistic voyeurs of Manhattan real estate—may experience writer-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend more like a home-invasion horror film than a drama. Writer and professor Iris (Naomi Watts) can afford to live in the West Village off of Washington Square Park thanks to inheriting a rent-controlled unit from her father. But that sweet deal comes under threat when she’s forced to assume custodianship of Apollo, a Great Dane belonging to her recently departed mentor, Walter (Billy Murray), as her apartment building has a rule against pets.

Discount some of those localized stakes, though, and this adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s source novel plays more like a standard-issue story about learning to live with grief. Murray is perfect casting for a character like Walter, who only appears in a few scenes. His larger-than-life persona casts a long shadow even in his absence. Iris and the wide array of characters drawn into his web by the force of charisma or career aspirations must learn to move out of his orbit.

That proves especially challenging for Iris when tethered to Apollo’s leash. Her unwitting canine companion acts like an extension of Walter—intrusive, imposing, and yet somehow too irresistible to shake off. The man’s bequeathing of the dog to Iris, one of several non-widowed women designated as “surviving divorced wives,” is but a final action on his part demonstrating both his flattery of and spite toward to those in his immediate circle.

McGehee and Siegel make Iris’s purgatory oddly pleasant as she tries to oversee both the publication of Walter’s correspondences and the adoption of Apollo on top of her professional duties. As it continues, The Friend sands down the messiness of her mourning of her ex-lover into something all too orderly. “Real people seldom behave as predictably as characters in stories,” Iris observes in a voiceover at the outset. The longer the film goes on, the more she loses touch with reality by reacting so schematically to each development.

On paper, Apollo makes for a bit too neat of a literary device. But as embodied by Bing, Apollo demonstrates a clear facility with expressing his emotions over the loss of Walter that escapes Iris. The film might compact all the unwieldiness of anguish into Bing’s towering frame, but the filmmakers manage to coach both subtlety and surprise out of the pooch. Bing also makes for a great scene partner with Watts, who has no trouble playing off this lumbering and languorous creature, whether he’s functioning as Iris’s sounding board or active tormentor.

Hardly a false note is sounded throughout The Friend, but it operates within such a limited emotional range that it drifts into monotonic plainsong. McGehee and Siegel let in a few moments of levity with Bing’s antics, but these never rise above a chuckle when the humor could easily go for belly laughs without compromising the story’s rueful core. The tidiness of The Friend increasingly plays as timidity across the two-hour runtime.

It takes a literal therapy session to get Iris to fully express her conflict, at which point she realizes that the blockers to her happiness have nothing to do with the commitments she feels weighing her down. Rather, Iris must accept that these commitments aren’t a distraction from her life’s work but instead their very essence. It’s a perfectly nice conclusion and lesson to receive. But in the words of Stephen Sondheim—another Manhattan-based wordsmith whose mentorship came with far fewer strings attached than Walter’s—nice is different than good.