“Naomi Watts gets a big dog” is the kind of low-stakes, low-concept premise Hollywood needs more of.
Having excelled opposite King Kong himself in Peter Jackson’s eponymous 2005 film, she was in desperate need of being reunited once more with a large male creature with whom she finds a strange, powerful kinship.
Unfortunately, despite the great promise that comes with a plotline that reads “Naomi Watts gets a Great Dane the size of a small pony,” The Friend (Scott McGehee and David Siegel, 2024) is all whine and no bite; a small, sentimental thing more concerned with pleasant literary gestures than the true significance of dog ownership and how adopting a pet can be a powerful way of overcoming grief.
Like in Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) — which is even referenced at one point! — the film is wise not to show the dog right away. When he strutted in, around the 20-minute mark, the audience positively gasped. His huge size, massive schnoz and Dalmatian-like spots are rather breathtaking and grandiose; he deserves the biggest screen possible. Played by first-timer Bing, Apollo already feels like a great cinema dog — so great in fact, so handsome and majestic, so well-acted, almost Messi-like (see Anatomy of a Fall [Justine Triet, 2023], not the Argentine footballer), that it’s all the more frustrating to see how the weak, anodyne script lets him down.
For this is a literary picture. A writer’s picture. Naomi Watts plays Iris. Wearing a little French beret, an oversized jacket and bag, and small leather gloves, she couldn’t look more like someone who teaches creative writing and is currently editing the correspondence of her mentor and one-time lover, Walter (Bill Murray). Her life is upturned, however, when Walter takes his own life. Iris is reluctantly saddled with the Great Dane!
But this beautiful dog is no Beethoven or Marley. He does not routinely behave badly. He may hog the bed and paw at the door, and at one point, he may have messed up the apartment (jury is still out there), but there are no real silly hijinks. The plot mostly evolves around Iris deciding whether or not to keep the dog, especially as her rent-controlled apartment explicitly legislates against pet ownership, as well as the way in which comforting a grieving animal (I can’t reiterate enough, how excellent Bing’s performance is) can be a way of overcoming your own sorrow.
For an actress who often trades in bemusement, as if she wandered into a set and is forced to act out bizarre scenes against her will (to both good and bad results), Naomi Watts dials down on the confusion and dials in on a far more subtle range of emotions. Her physicality as an actress comes to the fore; her relationship with the dog is often quite touching. But this is all undone by a deeply cringeworthy voiceover that acts meaningful but comes across as didactic, spelling out themes that felt much better off unsaid. She should learn to show, not tell. If she teaches that in her writing class.
Enjoy repeated shots of Naomi Watts smiling wistfully as she types into her laptop, evoking the gifs and memes made of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and The City (Darren Star, 1998-2004). But her aphoristic observations lack the wry comedy of Bradshaw’s deeply ironic writing.
Sex and The City comes to mind because this is a big, goofy New York picture; the kind that has, bizarrely, opened the Berlinale twice in the past ten years. It quite literally opens and closes with shots of the Brooklyn Bridge, even at the angle made famous by Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979). There are multiple references to the punctuality (or lack of it) of the L train. And there are the easy-listening covers of Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” from Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969) and jazz standard “Manhattan” (Rodgers and Hart, 1925). All it needed was Naomi Watts to get in an argument with a yellow taxi driver.
The Friend is the very definition of pleasant and well-meaning, rarely going deep on the real emotions surrounding grief, love and the difficulties of overcoming writer’s block. Instead, the schmaltz — quotes from Beckett; excerpts from Walter’s own writing, etc; endless shots of the New York skyline; a reference to It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) — is laid on so thick, you could use it as a spread. It comes as no surprise to see that this is based on the 2018 novel by Sigrid Nunez, whose What Are You Going Through? (2020) was adapted into the even lamer The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar, 2024). I’d still recommend this one over Pedro’s picture, though. This one has a great big dog!
Redmond is the editor-in-chief of Journey Into Cinema.