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How to Make an Elevated Dog Movie
Literate, sober, and bathed in Mozart needle drops, The Friend is a pet film for book clubs and graduate writing seminars.
The noble profile of a solemn, aging Great Dane named Apollo dominates Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend, a movie nominally about the difficulties of caring for a pet in New York City. Naomi Watts, who hasn’t always been well served by her more recent roles, is relatably harried and fragile as Iris, an author and a creative-writing instructor who winds up with Apollo after the sudden death of his owner, her mentor, Walter (Bill Murray). But McGehee and Siegel represent a curious breed of filmmaker; I would call them “elevated sentimentalists.” They take mainstream subjects that could easily lead to abject treacle, but they let the stories transform into something surprising, something deeper, without entirely giving up on more conventional emotions.
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