“The Friend” gives a voice to those of us hounded by self-obsessed dog parents

Have you ever been inside of a crowded Trader Joe’s and thought, “Man, I wish there were more dogs in here”? Or squeezed yourself past five carts parked in the middle of a grocery aisle to get your hands on the only sensibly priced vanilla extract in town, only to find that the vanilla is being blocked by a poor, overstimulated puppy, whose owner is talking on the phone and looking the other direction? This has become a regular phenomenon for me, a simple city-dweller who just wants to get in and out of a grocery store in a timely fashion. I’m trying to step on the gas, not on someone’s dog. And yet, what should be a relatively simple experience has turned into a weekly game of “Frogger” — or, perhaps, “Dogger” — where civilians are forced to look out for a pooch in their path, lest they incur the wrath of the yuppie elite.

In their new film “The Friend,” directing and writing partners Scott McGehee and David Siegel capture the growing trend of dog owners bringing their pets everywhere they go, seemingly at everyone else’s expense. Based on the 2018 bestselling novel by Sigrid Nunez, the movie follows Iris (Naomi Watts), a writer whose mentor and best friend, Walter (Bill Murray), leaves her his massive Great Dane after his death. The dog, Apollo, is a pickup truck of a hound, and Iris barely has any space for him in her cramped New York City apartment. But Walter’s sudden death by suicide has left everyone in his circle, including Apollo, shocked and grieving. So, in the blurry wake of her friend’s passing, Iris agrees to take the dog in.

Naomi Watts and Bing in “The Friend” (Courtesy of Bleecker Street)There’s just one big problem (well, bigger than the dog himself): Iris’ building does not allow dogs under any circumstances. That stipulation isn’t uncommon among New York apartment buildings like the fancy Manhattan co-op Iris lives in, but that doesn’t make it any less inconvenient for her. As she balances grieving, caring for Apollo and trying to find him a proper home as her building’s management breathes down her neck, Iris suddenly turns into the kind of dog-owning menace to society that she used to deride. Iris soon learns that caring for a dog like Apollo means living her life differently, one that deprioritizes her ego in service of the dog she elected to house. 

But not every dog owner cares to learn this invaluable lesson. Too many use their pets as an excuse for bad human behavior, like animal accessories that grant a free pass for owners to terrorize service workers while gaining Instagram followers. And while “The Friend” is a decent film — a heartwarming but narratively slight story of the similar ways humans and dogs grieve — it’s even more effective as a cautionary tale for new dog owners. Finally, a movie that isn’t afraid to stick its neck out to reveal there is a very fine line between being a dog owner and a certified a**hole. 

Iris’ particular type of high-maintenance, dog-owning white woman is a familiar sight, and not just because I meet them and their pets on the grocery store frontlines every week. Before becoming a writer, I was a New York City dog walker, pounding the pavement Monday through Friday to pay the bills. Years of that turned into a year-long stint at the front desk of a dog training facility in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. If dog walking was like getting a peek into the habits of pet owners, interacting with everyone from new puppy parents to longtime dog lovers at the training center was like moving up the aisles to get a front-row seat to their deepest, most exhausting neuroses. 

As the premier certified dog training company in the area, we could charge a pretty penny for our services. (And seeing the good that gentle, positive reinforcement training does for a dog firsthand justified every penny our clients spent.) But that money also meant my days were spent taking care of dog owners like they were helpless animals themselves. We were a small, independent business in a high-priced neighborhood, and a fair share of our clients understood that money afforded them a certain amount of cachet.

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Dog training facilities like ours have very specific rules and regulations to ensure the health and safety of everyone who enters the space, whether they have two legs or four. But to a vast percentage of our clients, those guidelines were mere suggestions. Owners would arrive half an hour early to three-hour-long drop-off programs in the middle of the day, insisting that we take their dogs early. If I tried to explain to them that it was impossible — that we cannot keep random dogs with us in the office or potentially endanger them by throwing them in with another group already using our training space — I was the bad guy. “This isn’t a daycare facility,” I’d repeat time and time again. But, hey, maybe it was difficult for them to hear me with one hand holding a phone to their ear and the other waving a leash in my face, waiting for me to take it from them.

Naomi Watts and Bill Murray in “The Friend” (Courtesy of Bleecker Street)In “The Friend,” these sorts of interactions are captured with a knowing wink. When Apollo comes to live with Iris, she’s in the middle of sorting through Walter’s expansive unpublished writing for a posthumous novel. She’s already harried by trying to accomplish this enormous task while grieving at the same time, and a dog the size of a PT Cruiser isn’t helping that stress one bit. The tension follows Iris and Apollo no matter where they are. When they go out to an appointment at her publisher, Iris doesn’t realize that the building doesn’t allow dogs and quickly becomes the desk manager’s worst nightmare. At home, Iris tries to dodge Hektor (Felix Solis), her building’s super, who is handing down word from management that she needs to get rid of Apollo or risk eviction. 

One can surmise that Hektor — a non-white, working-class super at this Manhattan building — has much more to lose than Iris does if he’s let go by the management company for not following their instructions. Iris is sympathetic to that reality but feels helpless. No shelter or sanctuary in the tri-state area has room, and though Apollo presents a swath of new challenges in her life, she feels awful about the thought of separating from him. They are, after all, enduring the same grief over the same person. Maybe instead of fighting against the obstacles and making Apollo everyone else’s problem, Iris can rise to the occasion of having this dog in her life. Maybe there’s something that they can learn together. 

I have far more sympathy for anyone in a predicament similar to Iris’ than I do for anyone who adopts a dog without doing the proper preparation beforehand, which should include a whole lot of planning, not just for the dog but for the owner too. And I don’t just mean planning in terms of general pet care, I’m talking about planning how to be a pet owner who doesn’t impose their decision on the lives of everyone else in the world. Where is an appropriate place to bring the dog? (Not a grocery store.) What’s the right way to walk a dog? (Try to keep them on one side of you, and keep an eye behind you and in front of you to keep the sidewalk clear for others.) Do you live in an apartment building or close quarters with your neighbors? (For the love of God, be prepared to hire a trainer to help with the barking.) 

For Iris, Apollo really is a surprise, one that upends her whole life. Most other dog owners — and I say “owners” and not “dog humans” or “dog parents” because I firmly believe coddling people with made-up terminology directly results in the very bad behavior we’re discussing  — chose that life. And like having a human child, that choice shouldn’t come lightly. 

Naomi Watts and Bing in “The Friend” (Courtesy of Bleecker Street)After a few months of devoted service at the front desk of the dog training business, I lost count of how many owners inquired about how to get their dog certified as a service or emotional support animal. Granted, we had a few clients who had real, provable needs for this kind of certification; people who, like Iris, experienced a grave loss or were visibly encumbered by issues outside of their control. Often, these clients came to me guilt-stricken from asking about the certification at all, feeling horrible about even the possibility of being seen as someone who would abuse a system meant for people who genuinely need it. Others, who just wanted an infallible excuse to tote their animals alongside them to bars and cafes, had no such shame. And it was always easy to spot a bad actor. When I’d explain to them the somewhat extensive process of attaining the certification, they’d scoff and say, “Never mind,” or even have the gall to ask if there was a way to incentivize the certification with money. These experiences were a disconcerting look at just how mushy the brain becomes when money is the answer to all of your problems. 

Remarkably, when Iris realizes that an emotional support certification would bar her building from evicting her, “The Friend” carefully avoids making Iris into one of these Upper West Side clowns. Not only is Apollo a good dog — he doesn’t pee in the lobby or bark in the slightest — but Iris comes to understand that reconciling her grief with her love for Walter would be impossible without Apollo. This loss is seismic, far more grave than she initially let herself believe. And for what it’s worth, Watts hits every single note perfectly, bringing real depth and nuance to a character who could easily come off like one of those knucklehead yuppies that wants the material certification to do a rosé-soaked bar crawl with their dog. It’s difficult to imagine another actor hitting that very specific tone, caught between heartache and hassle, but Watts has always been capable of finding the humanity in characters who, without her, would be little more than flat sketches of real people.

I won’t spoil much more of “The Friend” for you because I think it’s a worthwhile throwback to slow-moving dramas from the mid-2000s, one that has the potential to sneak up on you depending on your relationship with animals. For me, the film reminded me of my beloved childhood yellow lab, and how growing up to work with other people and their dogs gave me a stark understanding that not everyone sees their pet as a family member. To some, dogs are an accessory or a status symbol, or worse: an Instagram algorithm booster. My years in the animal care industry were a sociological study that gave me a peek at our culture’s real monsters. These people would push you in front of a moving vehicle if it meant they could capture their dog bathed in the perfect lighting for the Instagram account written in their dog’s “voice.” It’s just convenient that none of the captions on those photos ever include the dogs saying, “Please, don’t take me to Trader Joe’s at 5:30 p.m.”