David Siegel and Scott McGehee are among the most human, the most literate and the most engaging American filmmakers that work today. Their work – Priorities films include “the bee season” and “Montana Story” – often adopts a discreet approach to their subjects (which go from afar). This discretion can look like removal if you don’t pay attention. This does not mean that they do not know the value of a certain type of detachment – one of their recent images, the superb “What Maisie knew”, is a Henry James adaptation.
I do not want to say that they abandon all subtlety and go directly for the tearchard channels by an emotional punch to the solar plexus of your soul with “The Friend”, which they adapted from a novel by Sigrid Nunez. But none of their images has ever presented such a unambiguous male hero, which has provided such a strong rooted interest that Apollo, the dog who finds a very reluctant goalkeeper in the person of Iris, a writer New York besieged played by Naomi Watts.
Iris is learned too many ways. One of his writing students is timidly semi-menaing to show him his erotic fiction. A current project firmly refuses to take the wing. His best friend and mentor, an attractive verbal magician named Walter, has just committed suicide, leaving behind what seems a peloton of ex-wives and lovers. And also leaving behind the aforementioned dog, which for iris reasons cannot quite understand, he bequeathed to him.
Apollo, who played by the superb canine bing artist, seems an unlikely hero at the beginning. The Danes of Danes has more sad eyes than the shit completed by boujoues frowning. He doesn’t want to grow much. Educated by Iris not to climb on his bed, he deplores himself quickly, and his sprawl is such that Iris must take out an aerial mattress and camp on the ground for a little. On the other hand, Apollo is a good listener who has ordered habits. Siegel and McGehee shoot and modify their scenes with an eye that is both clear and very empathetic.
None of them cut the ice with the supervisor of the construction of the iris, but the sections, which informs Iris that the house of apartments has a strict non-dog policy. And it is not as if a big Dane is a dog in which you can sneak and go out in your bag. But as Iris seeks to find an appropriate place or person on which to unload the dog, she finds herself more and more not to want. She has a lot of human friends, but you know how people in the world of writing are. What Apollo offers to IRIS is unconditional. She never seems to have experienced this before, and she has just evaluated her. How could she not?
At the end of the film, Iris presents a means by which to meet with the missing Walter. Their confrontation scene is not only intellectually volatile – how is a discussion of suicide with a person who committed suicide can not be so? – It is also devastating. The work that Watts and Murray does in this sequence are both emotionally raw and high, rigorous with a specificity. These are career stuff.
