How to Make an Elevated Dog Movie
The noble profile of a solemn, aging Great Dane named Apollo dominates Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend, a movie nominally about the difficulties of caring for a pet in New York City. (And which seems like a perfect choice for the New York Film Festival, where it premiered this week.) Dog movies are a regular fixture of the cinematic firmament, but it’s rare for one to so invest itself in its central animal without trying to anthropomorphize it, to enter its mind and give it a voice. Apollo, played by a dog named Bing who may be the best dog actor I’ve ever come across, carries the film without having to be anything other than what he is. We don’t ever really know what’s going through his head, and that’s sort of the point.
The human at the center of this movie is pretty solid too. Naomi Watts, who hasn’t always been well served by her more recent roles, is relatably harried and fragile as Iris, an author and a creative-writing instructor who winds up with Apollo after the sudden death of his owner, her mentor, Walter (Bill Murray). In the film’s opening scene, Walter tells a group of dinner-party guests, Iris among them, about the unlikely circumstance of how he ended up with the dog after seeing the creature quietly sitting alone atop a hill near the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. “He’s there, between two bridges, silhouetted against the limpid sky,” he describes, as Iris gently chastises him for making up the story. (“Limpid is one of your words,” she says, laughing.) Walter says the creature reminded him of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale; Iris responds that the original is a rape fantasy. They argue over the meaning of words and stories because that’s what writers do.
The Friend, adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s National Book Award–winning 2018 novel (which I’m sure I’ll get around to reading one of these days), is something a wine-soaked dinner party might argue over too. Literate, sober, and bathed in Mozart needle drops, it’s a dog movie for book clubs and graduate writing seminars. That sounds like a knock, but it’s not. Delectably ambiguous, the film always feels on the verge of some thematic breakthrough — a crystallized metaphor, a revealing flashback, a tell-tale fictional projection — but it admirably never gets there.
Iris lives in a rent-controlled apartment in a Manhattan building that doesn’t allow dogs, but she takes Apollo because Walter’s widow, Barbara (Noma Dumezweni), insists he wanted it that way — and because Iris has unreconciled feelings for Walter, who is the kind of literary lion about whom ex-wives write memoirs (and who, we learn, lost a teaching job because of “allegations”). Despite a one-night stand many years ago, she can’t count herself among the wives and girlfriends now presumably mourning his loss. No, she was merely his closest friend, the one he entrusted with his collected letters and his big dog. Yet it clearly wasn’t enough. Bits of backstory about Iris’s father suggest there’s more to her attachment to Walter, but the film doesn’t try to psychoanalyze her. Even a late scene with a shrink (played by Spotlight director Tom McCarthy) leaves her with more questions than answers. Caring for a dog reveals to Iris just how much she doesn’t know about herself and others — as if she has suddenly become aware of the translucent but impenetrable curtain that hangs over all living things.
Even as she tries to find someone else to take care of Apollo, Iris slowly starts to connect with the animal. It’s the kind of predictable story development that she and Walter might have warned against in their classes and lectures. (“Beware the inevitable detail,” he was apparently fond of saying.) But McGehee and Siegel represent a curious breed of filmmaker; I would call them “elevated sentimentalists.” They take mainstream subjects that could easily lead to abject treacle, but they let the stories transform into something surprising, something deeper, without entirely giving up on more conventional emotions. Their underrated 2005 oddity Bee Season follows a young spelling-bee champion and the upheaval in her family as she makes her way to the national finals. It has some of the trappings of the kind of heartwarming tale it promises but also becomes a tale of madness and the search for spiritual truth. You can mostly enjoy it as a movie about a little girl in the world of competitive spelling, but you also get to witness Richard Gere becoming obsessed with knowing the mind of God and Juliette Binoche losing her mind. (Don’t let its middling Rotten Tomatoes score fool you — it’s quite nuts, mostly in a good way.)
The Friend functions perfectly well as a dog picture, a movie about a frazzled single woman learning to care for a gentle but unruly animal in the big, bad city. But it truly comes alive in its ability to go deep on what it really means to care for something. By the time Iris starts to wonder about Apollo’s early years and realizes she will never know what he was like as a pup — that so much of the life of this creature to whom she has dedicated herself will forever be a mystery to her — we understand that this is not a movie about people and animals but about the unknowability of all souls.