‘The Friend’ Review: Naomi Watts Inherits a Handful in a Dog Movie That’s Really About Accepting Mortality

By Peter Debruge

According To The variety Before his death, French actor Alain Delon had said that he wished for his dog, Loubo, to be put down when he passed. Delon believed the bond between him and his rescued Belgian Malinois was so strong that the dog would miss him dearly when he died and preferred to spare his pet such pain. (In the end, Delon’s children assured the press that Loubo would be spared.)

How does one explain death to a dog? That question, and several others deeper than we might expect from a “dog movie,” give intellectual heft to “The Friend,” a gentle coping-with-grief drama that provides its audience with a 180-pound emotional support animal in the form of Apollo, a harlequin Great Dane who’s missing his master and headed for the proverbial glue factory unless a bighearted enough human agrees to adopt him. Naomi Watts plays that human in a by-the-numbers crowd-pleaser with a bit more on its mind than your typical canine-centric tearjerker.

It’s plenty tough to explain death to people, most of whom prefer not to think about it — an unfortunate situation with many pet owners, who don’t adequately plan for what will become of their companions when they die. That’s not the case with Walter Meredith (Bill Murray), a widely admired old-school author — the sort who dallied with his students back in the day, before times changed and charges of misconduct cut short his teaching career — who bequeaths the moose-sized pooch to his favorite mentee/onetime fling, Iris (Watts). For co-directors David Siegel and Scott McGehee, landing Murray for what amounts to an extended cameo was quite the coup: The role demands an actor whose presence is felt even when he’s off-screen, and whose charms might spare such a problematic character. Personally, I had a hard time keeping Walter’s exes straight, as this serial womanizer’s funeral is attended by his first, second and third wives — Elaine (Carla Gugino), Tuesday (Constance Wu) and Barbara (Noma Dumezweni), respectively — as well as an adult daughter, Val (Sarah Pidgeon), and several friends, of which Iris is presumably one.

Does the film’s uninspiring title refer to Iris, Walter or the dog? Blame that ambiguity on Sigrid Nunez, who wrote the well-regarded novel that “The Deep End” duo Siegel and McGehee adapted here. Both the book and the film can be taken at face value (as a relatively tame account of having a large, doleful animal foisted upon you), but they can also be read as explorations of mortality, where Apollo symbolizes the psychological burden of losing someone by suicide.

At two hours, “The Friend” seems rather long, and light on incident, to serve simply as an animal-adoption tale, so better to dig in and let it work on an emotional level, where your personal history — of loved ones lost, animals adopted and so on — drives how much you take away from the experience. A friend recently told me that dogs were put on this earth to help humans to grieve, which struck me as a rather self-centered way of looking at it, though it’s true that their lives are shorter than ours, and losing one forces us to look mortality in the face.

Why did Walter think Iris would be the right person to care for Apollo? She lives alone in a tiny rent-controlled apartment on Washington Place where pets are explicitly forbidden. Iris and Walter shared a dark sense of humor, making jokes about suicide (e.g., “The more suicidal people there are, the less suicidal people there are”). But she never expected him to actually go through with it. Now he’s gone, and she’ll never know what he was thinking. That’s the cruelty of suicide: It leaves the survivors with so many mysteries.

Iris reluctantly accepts the responsibility of rehoming Apollo, seeing in this majestic animal — “the king of dogs,” one of her students (Owen Teague) calls it — both a constant reminder of her dead friend and a living creature who now depends on her to survive. Iris’ affable but strict building manager (Felix Solis) makes clear that dogs aren’t allowed in the apartments, and Apollo is far too large to sneak past him in her purse. A friendly neighbor (Ann Dowd) seems supportive, but what must it be like to have such a beast knocking around next door? Complaints are just a matter of time.

I can hardly imagine a more impractical pet for a New York apartment, and a Great Dane is even more intimidating in the streets of Manhattan, which is precisely what makes “The Friend” compelling. There are scenes of Apollo dragging Iris by its leash, and others where he refuses to budge. In an in-joke for movie buffs, “Everybody’s Talkin’” plays over shots of Iris walking Apollo through New York crowds (though this film can’t touch “Midnight Cowboy” in earning the emotional wallop at the end).

Dog lovers will appreciate “The Friend” regardless, even if it all resolves too easily. Before Iris can save Apollo, she must decide that she really wants to keep him — and in doing so, she must accept responsibility for his life … and the fact this 5-year-old animal is now closer to the end than the beginning. “The Friend” functions as a lesson in grief, but also as an exercise in pre-grieving.

If I wasn’t as moved by “The Friend” as others who have seen it, I would attribute that to two things. First, Apollo is played by a canine actor named Bing, who seems incredibly well-trained, which goes against the personality Iris finds unmanageable. And second, everyone in the movie is too doggone polite. When Apollo misbehaves, climbing up and claiming her bed, Iris immediately gives up and gets out the air mattress. It frustrated me that the characters weren’t more frustrated.

To the extent that “The Friend” intends to provide catharsis, it helps if Iris and others express strong emotions. The movie’s therapy scene is a good start, but the very next one, in which Iris confronts the ghost of Walter, is too contived. Of course the character, who is a creatively blocked author herself, would seek a way to write about this experience. But is this really the book Walter hoped his star pupil would produce? Dead or not, friends don’t let friends write junk fiction.