“A dog is a man’s (Woman’s) best friend.” Old Saying
Having Manhattan isn’t as easy as it was when Woody Allen called it up with a Greenwich Village tracking shot or a lilting jazz background, but writer/directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel have captured it in a modest drama about at middle-aged writer/teacher Iris (Naomi Watts) lamenting the loss of her best pal, author/writer/teacher Walter (Bill Murray).
As she questions why he committed suicide, she also deals with his bequeathing her his magnificent great Dane, Apollo. The lyrical study of grief is a tone set by Murray’s easy-going delivery and her gentle nature. As Murray did in Lost in Translation, the drama has enough subtle melancholy to endear him and her to the audience as it sees ways to deal with loss outside the confines of a funeral.
Although Apollo brings a regal mien and playful attitude to the sometimes-somber moment, it is Iris’s low-key reactions that keep the drama from being mawkish. Yet, she must be active as she fights to keep her rent-controlled apartment for her and Apollo as well as her sanity in the recurring interaction with her thoughts of the deceased Walter.
He was an old-school author, whose dalliances with students like Iris finally caught up with ethics, and he exited academia with students like her the better of for knowing him. But what to do with the dog? Although no substitute for the brilliant Walter, who read regularly to Apollo, Iris learns to fight for herself about her apartment and her need to continue writing without Walter hanging about her.
As in Mark Sutherland’s Abby’s List, the “dogumentary” is often about the owners while the canine support serves as facilitator for self-discovery. As also in Pengin Lessons. Where Steve Coogan’s penguin brings out his humanity, The Friend is about just that—humans becoming human through animals.
The Friend is simple and benign, a luxurious few hours of contemplation about our place in the universe and NYC all at once. It’s not Woody, but it does well enough.