THE FRIEND – Review by Ann Lewinson
Just a few months ago, we had The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar’s film adaptation of Sigrid Nuñez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, and now we’ve got Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend, an adaptation of Nuñez’s 2018 National Book Award winner. In the former, the narrator is dealing with her friend’s assisted suicide. In this one, it’s unassisted, and comes as a shock.
Both are set in a literary Greenwich Village that seems like a mirage from an earlier era, but unlike The Room Next Door‘s desiccated cultural specimens in fabulously appointed lairs stacked with coffee table books from Rizzoli, the world that Iris (Naomi Watts) inhabits feels both lived in and wholly believable. She’s a blocked novelist teaching uninspired creative writing students and living in her late father’s rent-controlled apartment off Washington Square Park. And suddenly, with the suicide of her best friend and mentor, Walter (Bill Murray), she’s saddled with his Great Dane, Apollo. And her building doesn’t allow dogs.
Walter is an author famous enough to have a publishing deal for his letters—while he’s still alive!—and Iris is editing the book, assisted by his illegitimate daughter Val (Sarah Pidgeon, of Broadway’s Stereophonic). That Val’s the only one seems remarkable, considering Walter’s three wives (Carla Gugino, Noma Dumezweni and Constance Wu) and countless affairs with female students. Consequently, like many misbehaving men in the 2010s, he’s been MeToo’d out of a job. (If anything strains credulity it’s this—I mean, Junot Díaz is still teaching.) Was this what led to his suicide? The screenplay leaves the question open, as it should. It’s not concerned with the why, but with Iris’s grief—and an unwelcome houseguest who turns out to be mourning as well.
McGehee and Siegel’s screenplay thoughtfully dramatizes the novel’s interior monologue, and they direct with wit—referencing Midnight Cowboy, Iris walking Apollo down a crowded street is scored to Iggy Pop’s cover of Everybody’s Talkin’ But what you really want to know is how Bill Murray is, because Naomi Watts is reliably outstanding, and how could the guy who started off giving noogies to Gilda Radner be playing a literary lion partial to Samuel Beckett and Thomas Hardy? Well, at this point in his career, Murray can play anyone he wants (even FDR, although I’m trying to forget that one), and he’s exactly right here. Watts and Murray, previously seen together in St. Vincent, don’t get much screen time together, and what they do have is wonderful. But it’s Watts’ movie, and she’s in nearly every frame, Kübler-Rossing through the stages with that magnificent Great Dane, who is played by a dog from Iowa named Bing. And, as my dad used to say, what a punim he has.
“Dogs don’t commit suicide,” says Iris. “They don’t weep, but they can fall to pieces.” Apollo needs Iris, and predictably, Iris realizes she needs Apollo. And mourning leads her back to her creative self, which she’d set aside to edit her mentor’s letters. It might be the old story of a woman setting aside her needs for the men in her life—tellingly, the only male part with more than a few lines is a psychotherapist played by the filmmaker Tom McCarthy. But, as Iris observes, “real people seldom behave as predictably as characters in stories.” The Friend is meta enough to know it’s just a story—but it works, the way stories work, shaping the rough stuff of life into a satisfying whole.
