‘The Friend’ Review: Naomi Watts, Bill Murray and a Big Dog Explore Love and Loss

A balancing act that seems to enjoy feeling as if it’s about to lose its balance, “The Friend” is a lot of different things at once. It’s a dog-and-human bonding movie, which means it’s unavoidably sentimental. It’s a Bill Murray movie, which means it’s funny in a snarky way, but it’s also a character drama in which Murray is an unseen presence most of the time. It’s a movie about grief and a movie about creativity.

And mostly, the new film from writer-directors David Siegel and Scott McGehee (“Montana Story,” “What Maisie Knew”) is all of those things at once, sliding between tones, defaulting to lightness most of the time but always ready to veer in another direction.

The film, which premiered on Friday at the Telluride Film Festival, is full of feints: a little bit of comedy, a hefty helping of loss, a touch of melodrama and a whole lot of dog, adding up to a gently affecting study in loss that benefits greatly from the unaffected charm and grace of Naomi Watts and the monumental presence of a 150-pound canine actor named Bing.  

Murray’s character, a writer and teacher named Walter, is the life of the party for the first few minutes of “The Friend,” entertaining a group of diners with the oft-told story of how he came to own an enormous dog he christened Apollo. But no sooner has the dinner party where he’s the in-house raconteur ended than some of the same people are at a memorial service for Walter, complete with three ex-wives, a daughter who doesn’t belong to any of them and some begrudging toasts to the dear departed:

“To him.”

“To him.” A pause. “God, what an a—hole.”

Walter, it seems, was a lively curmudgeon of sorts, an inveterate womanizer and a teacher who was brought down by “all that misconduct nonsense.” And after spending lots of time talking about suicide – “the more suicidal people there are, the less suicidal people there are” is a favorite line – he has indeed taken his own life.

We experience this largely through the perspective of Iris, a former student who slept with Walter once but somehow managed to become his closest platonic friend in the aftermath. She’s also set her own writing career aside to edit a book of Walter’s letters since, as his publisher points out, “dead Walter is hotter than live Walter.” But her progress has been slow, which may well be a symptom of her not wanting to let him go.

The film is suffused with a sadness that it tries to carry lightly – but then Walter’s final wife, Barbara, begs Iris to temporarily take care of Apollo, Walter’s enormous Great Dane, who is clearly still lamenting the loss of his master. If you think the sadness that suffuses the movie is bound to dissipate once the big dog shows up, forget about it: Shakespeare’s Hamlet may have taken ownership of the nickname “the melancholy Dane,” but after 90 minutes of staring into Apollo’s mournful eyes, few would doubt his claim to the title as well.  

Apollo, it seems, is a handful: He won’t eat, won’t relinquish his spot in the middle of Iris’ bed, won’t respond to the music Iris puts on. The only thing he likes, it seems, is being read to. And while Iris keeps getting despite insistent reminders from her superintendent that dogs are not allowed in the rent-controlled New York City apartment that she cannot afford to lose, her attempts to place the dog elsewhere, whether it’s a rescue home or a friend’s house for the afternoon, are feeble.

Of course, there wouldn’t be a movie if she was successful at dumping the Dane. And of course, Iris and Apollo bond and it’s charming: A walk down the NYC streets to the tune of the “Midnight Cowboy” song “Everybody’s Talkin’” stops just short of having Iris (or Apollo) pound on a cab and say, ‘I’m walkin’ here!”

If you can get past Iris’ often-astounding level of denial, “The Friend” can be a touching little movie – and when she looks to stave off eviction by finding a psychiatrist who will certify Apollo as a service dog, Iris’ search for a scam turns into an eye-opening diagnosis from the shrink played by director Tom McCarthy in an effectively understated cameo.    

The movie that was light and sad gets heavier, messier and maybe even happier, venturing into mildly comic territory when Iris summons up the spirit of Walter for a typically snide conversation from beyond the grave.  Murray spends his on-screen time riffing on his Bill Murray persona, which is effectively entertaining when doled out as sparingly as it is in this movie does. Watts has the heftier job of carrying the story and having the arc that Walter denied himself, and she does it with a lovely ease.   

Does it get sappy? Hell yeah it gets sappy, because there’s a dog in it and because it’s a cinematic staple that people live longer than dogs. But  “The Friend” juggles the happy, the sad and the bittersweet while somehow managing not to lose the lightness that has kept it afloat.