ArcaMax

The star of the new movie "The Friend" ... well, not the star, maybe, but the presiding spirit ... is a 150-pound dog, a Great Dane called Apollo (played with effortless expertise by a Great Dane called Bing). Apollo is huge -- much too big to squeeze into the cramped apartment of a New York City writer named Iris (Naomi Watts). If Apollo were to rise up on his hind legs he could easily rest his floppity jowls on top of Iris' head, so no, totally not a good fit for her precious rent-controlled digs in a West Village building that strictly prohibits canine habitation.

Fortunately, the minutiae of dog ownership are not what the movie is about. The movie is about human loss and grief and the ways in which we rise above the bad things life throws at us. In Iris' case, this is the recent suicide of her mentor Walter Meredith (Bill Murray), a retired university writing professor. In her long-ago student days, she and Walter had a one-shot sexual adventure, which Walter quickly quashed; after that, though, they mellowed into best friends. We're not told what impelled Walter to end his life (since he's played by Murray, we can imagine a teeming list of grumps and crotchets that might have done the job). What matters now is what he left behind, which includes three wives -- two of them ex-, one still on duty -- and the aforementioned Apollo, who's now deep in doggy mourning.

Wife number three, a polished book-world lady named Barbara (Noma Dumezweni), informs Iris that her late husband specifically wanted her to take Apollo. This is unwelcome news, because Iris is in the middle of a book project -- editing a volume of Walter's correspondence, actually -- and there's no room in her work schedule for feeding and walking and whatever else you have to do with a dog. But Apollo, while clearly in a sorrowful state, has reluctantly settled into Iris' life and lodging ("There's a pony on your bed," says a visiting neighbor), and as the days stretch by, with Iris indulging his fondness for being read to, she finds her determination to farm the big guy out to an adoptive home diminishing. "It's like I'm the emotional support human," she tells her therapist.

The movie is drawn from a 2018 novel by Sigrid Nunez, and scripted and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel ("What Maisie Knew"), who have kept it blessedly free of the emotional strong-arming you might expect in an orphaned-animal picture. It's also a great New York movie, filled with brownstone buildings and wrought-iron fences and tilt-ups at the towering jumble of downtown architecture. And the cast is exceptional, with Murray playing it straight and the great Tom McCarthy, Ann Dowd and Carla Gugino (as Walter's sadder-but-wiser wife number one) doing subtly unimprovable work. Most radiant of all is Watts, who, in a 34-year film career spent collaborating with directors like David Lynch, David Cronenberg and Michael Haneke, has never been more adroitly harried than she is here.

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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