Mark Reviews Movies: OUR FRIEND

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 21, 2021

There's a list of phrases the father shouldn't use when he has to tell his daughters that their mother is going to die. He shouldn't offer sentiments that she's going to sleep or on a trip or away for a while. She is going to die. That's it. That's the end. It must be said, so that the children have no false impressions or ideas of what's about to happen.

Screenwriter Brad Ingelsby begins Our Friend with this scene, between Matt (Casey Affleck) and his dying wife Nicole (Dakota Johnson), as the couple realizes the time has come to tell their daughters the truth—without any reservations, euphemisms, or of even the most innocent form of falsehood. At first, we're spared the actual moment when the father tells his two children that their mother is dying, but as Ingelsby and director Gabriela Cowperthwaite's film progresses, with the same form of blunt honesty that defines its opening scene, we know and dread that the scene will arrive again. The cries and sobs, echoing out through the bedroom window, will be closer, more personal, and much more painful when that happens.

This film, based on Matt Teague's autobiographical article "The Friend," doesn't spare us such moments, because it knows to do so would be dishonest. It would be dishonest to the experiences of the real Teague, his wife, his children, the friend of the title, and anyone who has lived through such suffering.

Many stories about dying and death paint a rosy or even romantic view of that terrible process. This one does, to a certain degree, in the way it moves back-and-forth in time—back to periods when these characters didn't know what was to come, and forward to the daily, painful routine of a loved one's worsening physical and mental condition. There comes a point in this story, though, when there is no going back. There is only moving forward toward the inevitable. That sense of honesty is what resonates most here.

To explain how Ingelsby's screenplay operates is both fairly simple and a little confounding. In one section, Matt, Nicole, and their best friend Dane (Jason Segel) are living under the same roof with the couple's daughters Molly (Isabella Kai) and Evie (Violet McGraw). Nicole has been diagnosed with cancer by this point, and quickly, her health deteriorates. Chemotherapy hasn't worked. The cancer has spread through her abdomen—like someone shook a paintbrush, the doctor tells Matt. It is now a terminal case.

Dane has been living there for an unknown amount of time, helping with chores and watching the girls and doing whatever he can to maintain a sense of some normalcy in the house. In the other story's other section, taking place over a course of years before the diagnosis and intercut with the present-day section, Ingelsby shows how these three became so close, albeit not without some drama and complications. Matt and Dane, for example, became friends after getting over the fact that Dane had asked out Nicole, unaware she was married.

The point of these past scenes, one supposes, is both to explain this central friendship—how it came to be and how it developed—and to provide some respite from the pain that keeps escalating in the film's other section. The flashbacks do accomplish both of those goals, at least.

We see the happiness and troubles of this marriage (the latter having to do with Matt's career covering foreign conflicts and a late revelation about infidelity). We learn that Dane is a bit of slacker, both professionally and romantically, and also a bit of a lost soul, looking for some deep but safe connection. Undoubtedly, there's security in Matt and especially Nicole, who supports and encourages him without question.

There's a level of understanding for these relationships that's mostly important for the crux of this story—how and why Dane ended up living with Matt and Nicole. On the detrimental side of these scenes, though, they do end up distracting and slightly distancing us from the cold reality of what's to come for this real and makeshift family. Ingelsby and Cowperthwaite give equal weight, in terms of time and impact, to the flashbacks and the present-day scenes, but only the latter feel as if they deserve it.

When the film does focus on the routines of living with an ill loved one and the air of crushing doom that comes with that reality, it is at its best and most affecting. The performances aren't the key to that feeling, but they certainly help.

Affleck plays Matt as a man of contemplative silence and quietly mounting anger. Johnson provides a sense of physical and mental decay (especially in the later scenes, when the disease changes her entire personality) that we don't always see in movies about this subject. Segel's performance is both the most compassionate—the rarest of people, giving selflessly of his time, patience, and effort—and most enigmatic—the reason he's drawn to these people instead of finding a life of his own. It's a deeply tender and melancholy piece of acting.

The bluntness of what comes as Nicole becomes sicker, though, is the film's primary strength. Our Friend is truthful about what disease does to people living with it and near it. The film doesn't try to make us feel better about what's happening (Cherry Jones, in a short but significant appearance, plays a hospice nurse, who arrives to offer cold facts delivered with warm kindness). At a certain point, there is no going back, only forward toward the awful truth.

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