Sure, a dog can play dead. But how about deadpan? The magnificent Great Dane at the center of this grief comedy has perfected a kind of expressive expressionlessness. As Apollo, the dog is 180 pounds of ache, adrift when his master Walter (Murray, appearing mostly in flashback) takes his own life. Walter’s best friend Iris (Watts) is lightly bullied into taking in the dog, even though her rent-controlled building in Manhattan forbids it, so she has only days to figure out what to do with Apollo next. That at least puts a ticking clock on an otherwise slack picture about two creatures in pain, trying to connect and carry on in a world without their favorite person.
Filmmaking duo Scott McGehee and David Siegel have previously shepherded (and sometimes radically reimagined) books to screen with The Deep End, Bee Season, and What Maisie Knew. But in adapting Sigrid Nunez’s National Book Award winning novel, they’ve produced a less finely observed and plotted film. Teetering toward made-for-TV in its facile depiction of Walter’s many wives and veering tonally from too broad to totally mawkish (the score wants to arm-wrestle tears out of you), The Friend is all soft edges. A passing reference to Walter and some “misconduct nonsense” narratively sounds promising but it’s dropped instantly as an avenue of exploration. And the voiceover is so overwhelming and overwritten, it eventually becomes white noise. None of this hangs on Watts, who’s wonderful. Quite believable as a literature professor in beret and blazer, lugging her LL Bean tote around the city, she would have been dazzling as a Nora Ephron leading lady. Robbed of that, can we get her in a Nicole Holofcener film instead?
This article appears in April 4 • 2025.
