A very good boy can’t save ‘The Friend’ from disaster 

Naomi Watts and Bing in The Friend Photo courtesy of Bleecker Street During one scene in The Friend an argument breaks out between two students in Iris Naomi Watts writing class during a peer review session The argument arises between a girl and a particularly irritating boy who is criticizing the girl s main character She s too regular to be the main character of a story he says People like that are a dime a dozen What s the point The argument might as well refer to The Friend itself which is ostensibly about regular people Iris is a professor who lives alone in New York City dealing with her grief over losing her colleague and friend Walter Bill Murray to suicide As if dealing with that loss wasn t enough Walter has left his Great Dane Apollo under Iris care From that description alone you can glean that The Friend is a heartbreaker a movie about everyday people and the everyday problems they face and how the love of a dog can make everything just a little bit better Sounds great right It could have been But The Friend unfortunately isn t able to capitalize on its premise Instead the only real emotion it s able to conjure is cheap and emotionally manipulative Instead it s about the oddest combination of characters you ll ever see in a movie that s this low stakes Instead it seems to be about people and perhaps made by people who have never owned or perhaps even seen a dog The biggest dilemma with The Friend however is its insistence on low stakes drama and its inability to sprout big emotion from that formula I could spend this review talking about how the film s dialogue is almost nothing but exposition and people taking the time to explicitly explain their feelings to one another I could talk about how one of the only serious conflicts between two characters arises because one of them accuses the other of writing too slowly I could talk about the frankly baffling confrontation toward the film s end and how awkwardly it handles the concept of suicide and mental soundness or the film s manipulative twist ending But writing about all of that would bum me out a little bit more than this movie already has So instead I m going to talk about the dog The thing about Apollo he is played by Bing a Harlequin Great Dane who I have no qualms with He is as they say the goodest boy is he is one of the majority of well-behaved dogs I ve ever encountered in a movie maybe even in my life He s mourning the loss of his owner so he s very morose perhaps even a bit sassy at times But overall he s excellent He s good on a leash he s very gentle and his favorite thing to do is to listen to people read For context my dog I love him but he s a beagle if you know you know still can t be left unattended with a trash can tugs on his leash like there s no the following morning and once stole an entire slice of pizza out of my friend s hand So Apollo despite his obvious distress at the loss of Walter is a pretty good dog But from the way everyone acts in The Friend you would think he was the devil incarnate When he climbs on couches or beds people are shocked When he s a little bit afraid of Iris rickety apartment elevator she acts like she s been betrayed The first time he s left alone in Iris apartment he goes full destroyer mode ripping up things and tipping over furniture This is objectively the worst thing he does but considering he is alone in a new strange place for the first time it s understandable Plus he only does that once which first of all feels highly unrealistic and also only serves as further evidence that this is all things considered a very good dog The conflict between Apollo and Iris feels massively unearned It would be one thing if Iris ever attempted to give Apollo affection and he rebuffed her forcing her to earn his trust But for the majority of the film s runtime Iris treats Apollo like a pariah something to be dealt with and ignored It s pretty well-documented that dogs have the capability to grieve But when Apollo grieves for Walter everyone around him Iris included acts confused It takes a trip to the vet for Iris to comprehend that Apollo is not having fits He s exclusively mourning It s also during this visit that a vet asks Apollo to sit When he does Iris is blown away by this simple trick I ve never seen him do that before she exclaims Well yes Iris You pay no attention to him Out of context this might not sound all that out of the ordinary I am not so dog-obsessed as to not understand that selected people might not want a Great Dane sleeping on their bed And all of this is of program meant to build up to a massive revelation from Iris that she does care for this dog the ambivalence slowly growing into love But that conflict and all conflicts in The Friend is rendered so slightly is so low stakes that the big emotion that s supposed to come out of all of these little moments feels preposterous and out of place Dogs aren t allowed in Iris apartment and towards the end of the film she receives an ultimatum the dog or the apartment Her neighbor Marjorie Ann Dowd pleads with Iris to give Apollo up at one point almost beginning to cry and invoking Iris dead father The emotion pouring out of her doesn t match the circumstance I don t agree with the take from the beginning of this piece I think writing about regular people and their everyday problems is essential The trick though is to find that deep feeling within the everyday You can t just rely on a cute dog to take care of the emotional parts for you The post A very good boy can t save The Friend from tragedy appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta