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In Manhattan-set drama The Friend, a blocked novelist is landed with an unexpected house guest: a Great Dane named Apollo. No, this is not another of those movies in which an animal plays therapist and emotional redeemer to a human in crisis, as per current Steve Coogan vehicle The Penguin Lessons. Or rather, it is — but on a more sophisticated and ambitious level.
Based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez — whose work also inspired last year’s Pedro Almodóvar film The Room Next Door — The Friend stars Naomi Watts as Iris, whose beloved former teacher, famed author Walter (Bill Murray), has recently killed himself. Pressured by the last and most imperious of Walter’s three wives (Noma Dumezweni, excellent), Iris agrees to take in Walter’s dog. The creature is lugubrious, stubborn, somewhat inscrutable — a sort of quadruped Bill Murray, in fact.
Apollo, played with gangling loftiness by the imposingly jowly Bing, not only takes over Iris’s life and flat — commandeering her bed and leaving her to sleep on the floor — but also proves a distraction from her work, incidentally providing a handy excuse for not tackling her writer’s block. She is exasperated and yet somehow relieved when Apollo chews up her long-dormant work-in-progress: the phrase “The dog ate my homework” has its higher literary applications too.
This is a thoughtful drama about, among other things, the frustrations of attempting to sustain a writing career, especially in a city like New York and especially as a woman who, like Iris, isn’t entirely brimming with confidence. It’s also about the kind of domineering magnetism exercised, even beyond the grave, by male literary lions of the old school.
A certain amount of familiar difficult-dog comedy is involved, but played for gentle irony rather than farce (Apollo is indifferent to music, but sits up attentively to a passage read aloud from the New York Review of Books). And The Friend is impeccably acted, with Murray lending muted, stately occasional support, and Watts very engagingly playing on a spectrum of weary, tender anxiety. But the film works its literary tendencies a touch too far: it is heavy on hyper-articulate characters explaining their emotional pasts to each other, and it takes a full-on self-reflexive turn in the last leg, dramatising Iris’s imagined account of an overdue showdown with Walter.
The writers and directors are American duo Scott McGehee and David Siegel, who started out in 1993 with the boldly conceptual thriller Suture, but since then have explored a somewhat unfashionable vein of upmarket mainstream drama, notably the 2012 Henry James update What Maisie Knew. Largely unsentimental despite its theme, The Friend is the kind of film that people often think of when they call for the return of intelligent, mature movies; but it is also the kind that presents itself more as an onscreen novel than as cinema in the fullest, most fluid sense. It’s a little stiff, a little too earnest and tasteful, that bit too conscious of its own pedigree poise.
★★★☆☆
In UK cinemas from April 25 and US cinemas now
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