The opening scene of Our friend, a tender independent tear-jerker built on the plane of a truly wacky story, finds a husband and wife on the precipice of a difficult conversation. It’s time for Nicole (Dakota Johnson) and Matt (Casey Affleck) to talk to their children. Nicole, we’ll find out soon, is sick, and while it will be an hour before the film reveals the specific character of what they’ll reveal, it’s clear that the discussion won’t be easy. At least they have a useful instruction from doctors: avoid euphemisms. Give it to them directly. Because there should be no misunderstanding about what is to come. They have to face reality together.
There is a certain irony in this to the media prologue, which will be clear to anyone who has read the source material, Matthew Thegue, “The Friend: Love is not a sufficient word.” In his award-winning essay, published in Esquire in 2015, the journalist explains the time he spent caring for his wife after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and also how her best friend, Dane Faucheux, settled in to help during this impossible crucible for her. family. It is an inexorably honest memory, which sincerely catalogs all the ugly details — medical and psychological — to the point that a truly faithful adaptation would be more annoying than any other horror film released last year. Our friend it’s not this movie. It is sweet and attractive and, from time to time, touching, but also, in its selective dramatization, very easier. That is, he approaches the story itself in a euphemistic way, handling the audience with children’s gloves by eliciting the most unpleasant truths from the family experience.
Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, who punched less in her documentary Blackfish, Our friend it does not deviate so much from Teague’s account as from providing it with a new form and a certain Indiewood seriocomic brilliance. As the title suggests, the focus is in part on Dane (Jason Segel), a close friend of the college couple who offers to come to her home in Alabama a few days after Nicole’s diagnosis, a deal that became indefinite. , as those days were bleeding in weeks and then months and then more than a year, Dane basically took a break (not to say he was totally giving up) his life in New Orleans to help take care of his two daughters, Molly (Isabella Kai) and Evangeline (Violet McGraw). The screenplay, by Brad Ingelsby, introduces a flashback structure, which distances current scenes from hospital visits and worsens the conditions for filling the story of a friendship en route to a medical crisis.
In his essay, Teague makes few attempts to break or explain Dane’s sacrifice: among other things, it’s a grateful and frightened tribute to his friend’s selfless insistence on being there through all the glove of pain and horror. Divorced from a purely first-person perspective, Our friend the tensions for understanding it are not always there: one can admire his dramatic theories — the faint suggestion that Dane’s endless support came in part from a desire to give more meaning to his own life, with little romantic “success” or professional, while still feeling that Segel plays more saint than man. Flashbacks offer a background story, but not a big one.
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Segel, of course, has devoted much of his career to exploring the vagaries of the male bond, from the bad and bad Apatovian bromance of I love you man to the almost thorny friendship of The end of the tour. Maybe it’s not a surprise Our friend he takes the plunge when he focuses on the relationship between Dane and Matt, finding conflicts in their origins (the false alarm of romantic competition) and in their margins. Affleck, too, is at the helm: four years after his tremendous Oscar-winning performance of guilt and pain crystallized in Manchester by the sea, plays another man asleep from unfathomable hardships. (Her voice, ranging from whispering to whispering, adapts uniquely to characters almost stifled by her feelings.)
However Our friend it keeps us on the outside of this pain, never offering the kind of window into Teague’s heart and mind that his writings could intrinsically. This is a case of a story perfected in its original format: a personal essay modeled imperfectly in cinema? The film comes out best when specified, focusing on the dismay of the inevitable dismay of well-meaning friends who disappear when life gets tough or in moments of casual tragedy, like Matt taking note of what the braid is in forecast to have a daughter. Other times, Cowperthwaite’s approach suggests an elegant yada yada: instead of making us fall into the skin, the film often revolts a vaguely Malickian montage of excursions to the list of distressed cubes and hugs.
One begins to wonder if the acronological structure is just a way of postponing everything that is uncomfortable in Teague’s essay, like a hard conversation trying to avoid. “We don’t tell ourselves the truth about dying,” the author writes at the beginning of his article. “It’s grotesque. It’s unworthy. ”But Our friend it saves us the bloody details at almost every step, clearing a story whose power comes, in large part, from its willingness to be exhaustively truthful about what cancer can do to the body. Cowperthwaite barely seems willing to fall in love with Johnson, who never loses his movie star, even when his character, the most underdeveloped of the film’s trio, becomes unrecognizable to those in his life. A at one point, Nicole starts wearing a wig around the house to entertain visitors, doing a healthy performance instead of letting anyone see the reality of her condition. It’s as good a metaphor as any for the road Our friend it softens its own blows.