The opening scene of Our friend, a tender indie tearjumper built from the blueprint of a heartbreaking true story, finds a man and woman on the brink of a difficult conversation. It’s time for Nicole (Dakota Johnson) and Matt (Casey Affleck) to talk to their kids. Nicole, we’ll learn soon, is sick, and while it’ll be another hour for the movie to reveal the specific nature of what they’ll reveal, it’s clear the discussion isn’t going to be easy. They have at least one helpful instruction from the doctors: avoid euphemisms. Give it directly to them. Because there should be no misunderstandings about what is to come. They have to face reality and together.
This has a certain irony in media res prologue – one that will be clear to anyone who has read the source material, Matthew Teague’s “The Friend: Love Is Not A Big Enough Word.” In his award-winning essay, published in Esquire In 2015, the journalist recounts the time he spent caring for his wife after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, as well as how his best friend, Dane Faucheux, moved in to help during this impossible melting pot for the family. It’s an unwaveringly honest memoir, candidly cataloging every ugly detail – medically and psychologically – to the point where a truly faithful adaptation would be more disturbing than any horror movie released last year. Our friend is not that movie. It’s sweet and involved and sometimes even moving, but also, in its selective dramatization, a lot easier. That is to say, it approaches the story itself quite euphemistically, treating the audience with children’s gloves by debunking the most unpleasant truths of the family’s experience.
Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, who pulled fewer punches in her documentary Blackfish, Our friend not so much deviates from Teague’s account, but gives it a new form and a certain seriocomic Indiewood shine. As the title suggests, the focus is partly on Dane (Jason Segel), a close college friend of the couple who offers to come and stay in their Alabama home for a few days after Nicole’s diagnosis – an arrangement that will last indefinitely. As those days went by for weeks and then months and then over a year, Dane basically stopped his life in New Orleans (if not outright deserted) to help take care of their two daughters, Molly (Isabella Kai) and Evangeline (Violet McGraw). The script, by Brad Ingelsby, introduces a flashback structure, abandoning contemporary scenes of hospital visits and deteriorating conditions to fill out the history of a friendship on the way to a medical crisis.
In his essay, Teague makes little effort to crack or explain Dane’s sacrifice: among other things, it’s an awe-inspiring, grateful tribute to his friend’s selfless urges to just be there through the whole gauntlet of heartbreak and horror. Separated from a purely first-person perspective, Our friend tensions to understand it doesn’t always find it: you can admire its dramatic theories – the vague suggestion that Dane’s endless support stemmed in part from a desire to give more meaning to his own life, low in romantic or professional ‘success’ – while you play that Segel more sacred than human. The flashbacks provide a background story but not much extra dimension.
G / O Media can receive a commission
Segel, of course, has spent much of his career exploring the vagaries of male bonding, from the goofy-sweet Apatovian bromance of I love you man to the tantalizing quasi-friendship of The end of the tour. That may come as no surprise Our friend strikes at centering the relationship between Dane and Matt, finding conflict at its root (the false alarm of romantic competition) and its margins. Affleck is also in his wheelhouse: four years after his stellar Oscar-winning performance of crystallized guilt and grief in Manchester by the sea, he plays another man dazed by unfathomable hardships. (His voice, which ranges from whispers to murmurs, is ideally suited to characters who are almost suffocated by their feelings.)
Yet Our friend keeps us on the outside of that pain and never offers the kind of window into Teague’s heart and mind that his writing might be intrinsic. Is this a case of a story perfected in its original form – a personal essay cast imperfectly in the cinema? The film does best when it is most specific, zooming in on the staggering inevitability of well-meaning friends disappearing when the going gets tough or moments of accidental tragedy, like Matt noting what braiding is in anticipation of having to for him to do. daughter. Other times, Cowperthwaite’s approach suggests an elegant yada yada: Rather than delving into the nitty-gritty, the film often flutters through a vaguely Malickian montage of bucket list excursions and haunted hugs.
You start to wonder if the achronological structure is just a way of putting off everything awkwardly cluttered in Teague’s essay, as a difficult conversation it tries to avoid. “We don’t tell each other the truth about dying,” the author writes at the beginning of his article. It’s grotesque. It’s unworthy. “But Our friend almost every time spares us the gory details and scraps a story whose power came heavily from a willingness to be horribly truthful about what cancer can do to the body. Cowperthwaite hardly seems willing to even expose Johnson, who never really loses her movie star blood, even when her character – the most underdeveloped of the movie trio – becomes unrecognizable to those in her life. Bee At one point, Nicole starts wearing a wig around the house to entertain visitors, doing a good health feat rather than showing someone the reality of her condition. It’s an equally good metaphor for the road Our friend softens its own strokes.