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‘The Friend’ Review: Naomi Watts Inherits a Handful in a Dog Movie That’s Really About Accepting Mortality
It takes a certain kind of person to adopt a Great Dane. That person dies mere minutes into 'The Friend,' leaving Naomi Watts to deal with his poor pooch.
That question, and several others deeper than we might expect from a “dog movie,” give intellectual heft to “ The Friend,” a gentle coping-with-grief drama that provides its audience with a 180-pound emotional support animal in the form of Apollo, a harlequin Great Dane who’s missing his master and headed for the proverbial glue factory unless a bighearted enough human agrees to adopt him. That’s not the case with Walter Meredith (Bill Murray), a widely admired old-school author — the sort who dallied with his students back in the day, before times changed and charges of misconduct cut short his teaching career — who bequeaths the moose-sized pooch to his favorite mentee/onetime fling, Iris (Watts). Personally, I had a hard time keeping Walter’s exes straight, as this serial womanizer’s funeral is attended by his first, second and third wives — Elaine (Carla Gugino), Tuesday (Constance Wu) and Barbara (Noma Dumezweni), respectively — as well as an adult daughter, Val (Sarah Pidgeon), and several friends, of which Iris is presumably one.
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