Presently, I have no interest in reviewing A Minecraft Movie. Maybe when it hits DVD, but not right now. I’m light-years removed from the target audience, it’s nowhere near my taste in comedy, and I’m sure I have nothing of value to say about it.
Anyway, I’m long since exhausted with the state of mainstream cinema these past few months. I wanted to check out another smaller release, as those have been consistently more impressive of late. Too bad I wasn’t so impressed with this one.
The Friend comes to us from the writing/directing team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel. The two have been making movies together since 1993, and they still haven’t made a single movie you’ve heard of. (What Maisie Knew, anyone?)
The premise begins with Walter (Bill Murray), a respected author and professor whose career was brought to a swift end by his own rampant indiscretions with his students and collagues. He has three current/former wives (played by Carla Gugino, Constance Wu, and Noma Dumezweni) and an illegitimate daughter (Val, played by Sarah Pidgeon) with countless girlfriends and affairs in between.
One of those former students/sexual flings was Iris (exec producer Naomi Watts), who maintained a close platonic friendship with Walter for many years. She went on to become an accomplished author/editor/professor in her own right, though her current project has been stuck in writer’s block for a year.
The plot kicks off after Walter kills himself offscreen for unknown reasons (CONTENT WARNING). The upshot is that Iris gets stuck with Walter’s dog, name of Apollo. The kicker is that Apollo is a freaking Great Dane. That would be enough of a handful, but this particular giant dog is visibly aging and lost in mourning for his dead human.
In so many ways, Iris has gotten stuck with a white elephant. Bad enough that she has no idea how to care for this particular dog — nobody does — but she’s more of a cat person and her apartment building has a strict policy against pets. So now Iris has to find a viable home for Apollo or find some way to live with him.
This is typically the part where I say “hilarity ensues”, but that would be especially sarcastic in this particular case. The closest we get to comic relief in this picture is Constance Wu, here playing an unlikeable self-absorbed bitch. Sorry, but Constance Wu is too damn likeable to play a heel.
There is barely any plot to this picture. The closest we get is the ongoing threat of eviction for violating the “no pets” policy, but that barely comes into play until the third act and it’s resolved with virtually zero effort. There’s a distinct impression that the filmmakers only threw in a token effort at conflict or crisis for the sake of qualifying as a narrative.
These filmmakers weren’t really interested in telling a story, so much as they were interested in exploring themes of grief and empathy. There are huge stretches of navel-gazing about how dogs are so emotionally astute, how they feel pain and sorrow just as deeply as humans do, and so on and so forth.
No getting around it, this film is dreadfully slow. Aside from one showstopping scene in the climax — in which Iris works out her feelings by writing herself into a scene with Walter — there’s a terrible lack of energy throughout the proceedings. This is a two-hour movie that could’ve easily cut half an hour.
It’s the actors that save this movie. Naomi Watts is perfectly charming, and her canine costar is suitably charismatic. Bill Murray plays the role like only he could, for the ten minutes he’s on the screen. Sarah Pidgeon and Carla Gugino are both delightful. Felix Solis delivers a sweetly nuanced performance as the apartment custodian simply doing his job.
The script is not worthy of their talents. There’s nothing here in terms of an engaging plot or novel themes.
I have a hard time putting my finger on what exactly this movie got wrong, but then I think about a movie that got it right: Beginners. There was another movie about a main character coping with the death of a father figure, complete with a dog still in mourning for his deceased human! But that movie had the good sense to unfold across two different time periods, so we could see more of Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer interacting with each other. We get a bit of that in The Friend, but not as much and not nearly enough.
Sorry, but it’s harder for the death of Walter to register when we see so little of Walter himself and what his relationships with the other characters were like. It’s tough to sympathize for the loss when we don’t have a good enough sense of how things are different now that he’s gone. Especially since so few of the supporting characters are around long enough to register as anything more than a sounding board for Iris.
The Friend is a movie laser-focused on a woman and her dog. Cute, but it’s not enough. There would be nothing memorable or noteworthy about this movie if it wasn’t for Naomi Watts, and she’s done better work elsewhere.
It’s a long and slow burn that leads to a nicely impressive payoff and then keeps on going for another fifteen minutes of nothing. The payoff isn’t bad by any means, but it isn’t worth the setup. The film is certainly thoughtful, but nowhere near as heartfelt or novel as the filmmakers seem to think it is.
This one is doomed for obscurity along with the rest of the filmmakers’ previous works. I can go as high as a home video recommendation, but you won’t miss anything if you miss out on this one.