There’s no way to play this part cool: for the entire second half of David Siegel and Scott McGehee’s “The Friend,” this critic was reduced to a blubbering, sobbing, heaving mess, clutching damp paper towels and alternating between choking and laughing. While the filmmaking pair’s latest might sound squarely aimed at Naomi Watts super-fans and intense animal people, what they actually present in “The Friend” isn’t so very niche at all: instead, it’s the sort of witty, wise, and warm character study we seem to be running out of these days. And that’s just when it comes to its standout dog star, the Great Dane (emphasis on great) Bing.
The film opens both before and after the arrival of Apollo, the Great Dane at its center. Through shared voiceover narration, Iris (Naomi Watts) and her mentor Walter (Bill Murray) set the scene, recounting the time that Walter, while on a seemingly everyday run around Brooklyn’s river walk, first encountered an abandoned Apollo. Awestruck by the great beast, the impulsive Walter had no choice. He took him in. Or Apollo took him in. It’s hard to say, really. But bringing someone — anyone — into your life comes with its own questions, and when Walter muses, “What will happen to the dog?,” he’s not just talking about the dog.
But that’s in the past. In the present of “The Friend,” Walter has recently died, leaving both Apollo and Iris, his “best friend,” former student, and one-time lover, to pick up the pieces. That may sound dark, but despite setting “The Friend” in a period of profound grief for both its human and canine leads, Siegel and McGehee’s film (based on Sigrid Nunez’s award-winning novel of the same name) is fleet and funny, the kind of slice-of-life New York film we’re used to getting from the Nicole Holofceners of the world (of which we need more, to be sure). Set just before, during, and after Christmas, the film has a worn-in, lovable feel to it, the kind of feature you want to spend more time nestled inside of. (It’s also not the first time Watts has shared the screen with a remarkable animal star, and we sincerely hope it won’t be the last.)
Iris’ first big, post-Walter death task: his funeral. Walter was beloved, despite being a complicated figure (his memorial service is well-attended by women, we note, including no less than three living wives and his grown daughter, who he met later in life) and rumblings of “misconduct nonsense” that soon emerge to not be so very nonsensical at all. But Iris loved him, and so did all those wives (Carla Gugino, Constance Wu, and Noma Dumezweni) and his only child Val (a lovely Sarah Pidgeon). He’s going to be missed, and he leaves plenty behind. Including Apollo.
Iris already has plenty going on before Dumezweni’s Barbara calls her over to her and Walter’s swanky Brooklyn brownstone with a very, very big ask. She’s got a terrible case of writer’s block — she jokes that she basically set herself up for it, naming the damn novel “Eastern Bloc” and all — but still stays busy teaching her writing classes and hacking away at a book of Walter’s correspondence she’s editing alongside Val. But there’s still so very much missing in Iris’ life even before Walter chose to leave it: no partner, no pets (despite repeated proclamations that she loves animals), a social life mostly confined to her building and workplace, and a charming apartment we later learn belonged to her deceased father (also, it seems, a complicated man).
Audiences will likely know Barbara’s ask before a single frame rolls on the film: can Iris take Apollo? Of course she can’t! And of course she says yes. Moving a giant Great Dane into her tiny Manhattan apartment is enough of a stretch, but there’s another issue: Apollo is depressed. You can see it on his face! (That Bing, the Great Dane that plays Apollo, is a skilled actor is apparent from the start; his performance only gets better.) He takes over Iris’ bed, refuses to eat, and mostly seems engaged with an old T-shirt of Walter’s that Barbara stuffed in a toy bag. The only thing he might mildly enjoy? Being read to, something Iris discovers Walter used to do for the big guy. Despite the speciality of Iris and Apollo’s situation, there’s something wonderfully relatable about all of this. It’s just life, after all.
Apollo’s presence in Iris’ life threatens to upend nearly everything, including the essential elements that have long held it together (work, her apartment, her sense of self), but “The Friend” makes the steady case for Iris, for everyone, to find something greater in that chaos. Like, perhaps, the love of a friend you never knew you needed. What will unfold between the pair isn’t surprising — though audiences may have some fun trying to pick who is really the eponymous friend of the title — but how Iris and Apollo come to their revelations and realizations is satisfying in ways that transcend any plot expectations.
What is the best way to make a friend? To be one. It’s a lesson we need to learn over and over in our lives, and one warmly brought to life in “The Friend.” But what happens after you make that friend, you be that friend? If we’re lucky, it looks a little like the movies, at least this kind.
Grade: B+
“The Friend” premiered at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival and will next screen at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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