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In Manhattan's drama FriendA blocked novelist is landed with an unexpected house guest: a large Danish named Apollo. No, this is not another of these films in which an animal plays an emotional therapist and a redeemer to a human in crisis, according to the current vehicle of Steve Coogan Penguin lessons. Or rather, it is – but at a more sophisticated and ambitious level.
Based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez – whose work has also inspired the film Pedro Almodóvar from last year The room next door – the friend Stars Naomi Watts as Iris, including the former beloved professor, a famous Walter author (Bill Murray), recently committed suicide. Pressed by the last and most imperative of the three wives of Walter (Noma Dumezweni, excellent), Iris agrees to take the Walter dog. The creature is dismal, stubborn, somewhat impenetrable – a sort of Bill Murray quadrupé, in fact.
Apollo, played with the high -level gangling by the Jowly Bing imposition, takes not only the life and the apartment of Iris – commanding her bed and letting her sleep on the ground – but also proves a distraction of her work, providing a practical excuse so as not to tackle the block of his writer. She is exasperated and yet in a way relieved when Apollo minces her work by sleeping for a long time: the sentence “The dog has eaten my duties” also has its higher literary applications.
It is a thoughtful drama, among other things, on the frustrations to try to support a writer's career, especially in a city like New York and especially as a woman who, like Iris, not completely overflowing with confidence. It is also the kind of dominating magnetism exercised, even beyond the grave, by male literary lions of the old school.
A certain quantity of familiar comedy with difficult dogs is involved, but played for sweet irony rather than farce (Apollo is indifferent to music, but sits carefully at a passage read aloud from the Revue des Books de New York). And Friend is impeccably acted, Murray lending occasional and majestic occasional support, and Watts playing very engaging on a spectrum of tired and tender anxiety. But the film makes too many literary trends: it is heavy on hyper-articulated characters explaining their emotional pasts to each other, and it takes a complete self-reflexive tour in the last step, dramatizing the imagined story of Iris of a late confrontation with Walter.
Writers and directors are the American duo Scott McGehee and David Siegel, who began in 1993 with the audacious conceptual thriller SutureBut since then, has explored a somewhat old -fashioned vein of traditional high -end drama, including the Henry James 2012 update What Maisie knew. Largely non -sentimental despite its theme, Friend is the kind of film that people often think when they call for the return of smart and mature films; But it is also the genre which presents itself more as a novel on the screen than as the cinema in the most complete fluid sense. It's a bit stiff, a little too serious and good taste, which has a little too aware of its own Pedigree balance.
★★★ ☆☆
In British cinemas of April 25 and American cinemas now
