THE FRIEND is a strange film. What’s strangest is that Scott McGeehee and Davis Siegel, who definitely have experience with the fantastical, didn’t make the film stranger. Their adaptation of the National Book Award for Fiction awarded novel “The Friend” by Sigrid Nunez, who also wrote the book that Pedro Almodóvars THE ROOM NEXT DOOR is based on, turns the literariness into a central motif. Writer Iris (Naomi Watts) is having a writing crisis. Her friend, ex-professor, and ex-lover Walter (Bill Murray) asked her to edit his correspondences with his daughter. The job isn’t going well, and Iris isn’t working on her own writing at all anymore. Then Walter commits suicide and none of his numerous (ex)wives want to take his Great Dane “Apollo.” Apollo lands with Iris, even though she can’t have animals in her little apartment.

The grieving woman and the grieving dog get close and closer, this closeness solves the writing crisis, and Iris writer her poems that tell the tale of the film. While the main thread of the story recounts the practical difficulties Iris encounters in keeping an old, sad Great Dane, narrator Iris processes her experiences into text, which in turn is related to Walter's texts, the work of her students’ in her "Creative Writing" course, and numerous other literary examples. Above all, the question of the relationship between experience and poetry stands out.

THE FRIEND places little value on reading literature. When someone recites a poem (by Thomas Hardy?) at Walter's funeral ceremony, it is immediately faded out, and Iris turns away. It's not reading or the consoling function of art that seems important – that’s something for her pompous acquaintances from the New York art scene – it’s writing. Iris also gives up the editorial work of Walter’s texts because her own writing is more important. Her own anger at Walter plays a part in this, which culminates in a dream-like scene in which dead Walter reappears and reacts to her accusation that he hurt people with his decision, especially Iris, and his request to edit his letters was meant to hinder her from writing her own work.
Everything revolves around Iris’ own experience, Iris’ perspective, there’s no trace of loyalty. When she learned to “love“ the Great Dane, she accuses the cosmos of cheating her out of Apollo's youth. She would’ve loved to have the dog as a puppy and experienced him at his best. The love for the dog and the love for Walter overlap and become a lack that awakens poetry, like dead Sophie in Novalis' "Hymns to the Night." For this to happen, however, Apollo's youth must first be positioned as a lack. The writing is about absence and loss, not about the present.

As a topic for a nearly two-hour film that largely follows the conventional psychological Hollywood drama style, even if individual scenes and the leading narrative voice repeatedly break out of this framework, this is hardly manageable. Iris’ story seems like a narcissistic attempt at therapy. Maybe that’s less due to the novel itself - although the texts spoken by Naomi Watts as the narrator from off-screen are considerably inferior in literary terms to the interwoven quotations – than to the cinematic style. Film, with all of its ghostliness, is an art form of presences, not absences. The classic narrative style attempts to mask the ghostliness of the film, the paradox that the film shows the past as the present. THE FRIEND wants the best of both worlds, the art of absence of literature in the mode of cinematic presence, a film about grief and literature in the mode of a romantic film comedy.

This could work because the Great Dane already has an excessive presence, a kind of literal “elephant in the room.“ But having dead Walter sporadically appear seems like a break in style that only serves to visualize Iris’ words. Literature can imagine a conversation like this, in film you’d need at least one of the “Red Rooms” from Lynch’s “Twin Peaks.” You only encounter absences on the way to the underworld. THE FRIEND is too tame for that, even though Naomi Watts (MULHOLLAND DRIVE) certainly has some experience with Hades. Perhaps I'm completely wrong, though, and THE FRIEND is another twist on the style already employed by auteurs like Olivier Assayas (PERSONAL SHOPPER) or Michaël Hers (LES PASSAGERS DE LA NUIT): films that allow ghosts and the otherworldly to creep into seemingly harmless traditional narratives. In any case, THE FRIEND has a significant twist.

Tom Dorow (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy