Writer/director duo Scott McGhee and David Siegel have previously brought us films like What Maisie Knew and The Deep End. Their newest film, The Friend, based on the Sigrid Nunez novel of the same name, debuted last year at the Telluride Film Festival, where it enjoyed some moderate acclaim. I missed this one when it opened in wide release, but managed to play catch-up with it this past weekend. And for a long time, The Friend is an assured endeavor that avoids over-sentimentality and the inherent melodrama in its story, but sort of drops the ball on your way out the door. 

The Friend follows Iris (Naomi Watts), a writer in New York whose longtime friend and mentor and onetime lover Walter (Bill Murray) has recently taken his own life. His most recent wife (Noma Dumezweni) informs her that Walter has bequeathed his 150-lb Great Dane named Apollo (Bing) to her. Iris can’t have a dog in her rent-controlled apartment and must figure out what to do with the dog as she processes her own grief.

The Friend has a lot of genuinely sincere and thought-provoking messaging about grief and loss, and what the process of mourning means to those who are left behind. And for a long time, it avoids the obvious routes this story could take. But running at just about two hours, it becomes a bit repetitive on its way toward the finish line, and it kind of beats you over the head with its central metaphor about grief. The dog itself is kind of a metaphor, like here’s this giant thing you have to drag along with you and it doesn’t become any easier over time, but there are moments of grace. The Friend flirts with heavy-handedness but avoids a lot of the trappings you see in these kinds of movies, until it doesn’t. 

Naomi Watts is doing some career-best work here and she has to be, as this film wouldn’t work at all if it weren’t for all she’s bringing to it. However, the way some of my favorite character actors are being short-changed here, is a definite strike against this film. It’s understandable why the Bill Murray part is as small as it is, but we also have actors like Carla Gugino and Ann Dowd and Noma Dumezweni and and Sarah Pidgeon and Constance Wu and Owen Teague and Felix Solis popping up in roles that mean almost nothing and it kind of feels like a waste of all their time to show up for a script that isn’t doing anything for them. But having been filmed in New York City, maybe most of these people were just locally available and had a free weekend to film their roles.

However, one performer here who deserves all the credit and all the accolades in the world is Bing the dog, who’s kind of our co-lead character here. You’ve seen some great cinema dogs if you’ve been watching movies for as long as I have, but it’s rare to see an animal giving such an emotionally rich performance. This dog is a true actor, and I would love to live in a world where he could get his own little doggy Oscar at next year’s ceremony, but I’m not holding my breath. The way this dog can convey more emotion than some human actors needs to be studied. Even if you’re not a dog person (for the record I consider myself to be more equal-opportunity on the dog person/cat person scale, I love both equally), I think it would be pretty impossible not to be impressed and taken with all of Bing’s charms.

I’m not one to include spoilers in a movie review, and typically I would avoid this at all costs, but as an animal lover myself, I would not go to a movie about an animal if I knew it was going to die. So maybe skip this next paragraph if you want to know nothing. There’s even a whole website you can go to now where you can type in a movie title and find out if the pets make it out okay, and I totally get why this is a thing. So I will tell you that Apollo the dog does not die in The Friend, however, in the last ten minutes or so of the film, the fact that he’s getting older and our lead character’s time with him might be running short, is the message we’re left with. We even have a fake-out dog death, which feels extremely manipulative and out of place with the rest of this narrative. However, I looked it up and apparently in Sigrid Nunez’s novel, the dog does die, and they changed it just enough to either be interpreted as a happy ending, or maybe a hallucination the Iris character is having. It’s left just unclear enough to piss off this viewer at the end of a film where I was mostly on its side.

So overall, I found a lot of the emotional terrain The Friend navigates to be thoughtful, genuine and true to life. The way the film captures a portrait of grief without resorting to the most emotionally shallow moments cinema has to offer is something I have to commend. But in the last few scenes, The Friend loses that good will and sent this viewer out in a bit of a bad mood. But overall, I would say this film is worth the viewer’s time, because of some very good performances and some moments that come a little bit close to emotional profundity. If the film had stuck the landing a little better however, we might really have something here.