Opening scene of Our friend, a tender indie tearjerker built from the plane of a true 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 will find out soon, she is ill and, although it will be another hour before the film reveals the specific nature of what they will reveal, it is clear that the discussion will not be easy. At least they have a useful instruction from doctors: Avoid euphemisms. Give them justice. Because there should be no misunderstanding about what’s next. They have to face reality directly and together.
There is a certain irony in this regard in the media res prologue – one that will be clear to anyone who has read the source material, “Friend: Love is not a big enough word,” by Matthew Teague. In his award – winning essay, published in ASK In 2015, the journalist recounts the time he spent caring for his wife after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer and also how his best friend, Dane Faucheux, moved in to help during this impossible crucible. for the family. It is a sincere memory, which sincerely catalogs every ugly detail – medical and psychological – to the point where a truly faithful adaptation would be more annoying than any horror film released last year. Our friend it’s not that movie. It is sweet and engaging and occasionally even moving, but also, in its selective dramatization, very much Easier. Which means he approaches the story itself quite euphemistically, treating the audience with children’s gloves while avoiding the most unpleasant truths in the family experience.
Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, who shot fewer shots in her documentary Blackfish, Our friend it doesn’t deviate so much from Teague’s account that it gives it a new shape and a certain seriocomic Indieood luster. As the title suggests, the focus is in part on Dane (Jason Segel), a close college of the couple who offers to come home to Alabama a few days after Nicole’s diagnosis – an arrangement that became indefinite as those days bled. In a few weeks and then months and then more than a year, Dane practically interrupts (if not abandons) his life in New Orleans to help care for their two daughters, Molly (Isabella Kai) and Evangeline (Violet McGraw). . The screenplay, written by Brad Ingelsby, introduces a flashback structure, moving away from the current scenes of hospital visits and worsening conditions to complete the story of a friendship on the way to a medical crisis.
In his essay, Teague makes few attempts to break or explain Dane’s sacrifice: Among other things, it is a horrible, grateful homage to his friend’s altruistic insistence on being alone, through the whole glove of pain and horror. Divorced from a pure first-person perspective, Our friend strains for understanding do not always find: one can admire his dramatic theories – the faint suggestion that Dane’s endless support comes in part from a desire to give more meaning to his own life, with a romantic or professional “success” – while still he feels that Segel plays more holy than man. Flashbacks give the story behind, but not too much size.
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Segel spent, of course, a large part of his career exploring the whims of the connection between men, from the Apatovian joke I love you, man to the more poignant quasi-friendship of End of tour. Maybe it’s not a surprise Our friend he takes his step when he centers the relationship between Dane and Matt, finding the conflict at its origins (the false alarm of romantic competition) and at its edges. Affleck is also at the helm: four years after his extraordinary Oscar-winning show of guilt and pain crystallized in Manchester By The Sea, plays another man numb from incomprehensible difficulties. (His voice, which ranges from whispering to muttering, is uniquely suited to characters almost suffocated by their feelings.)
Yet Our friend he keeps us outside that pain, never offering the kind of window into Teague’s heart and mind that his writing might intrinsically. Is this a case of a story perfected in its original format – a personal essay modeled imperfectly in cinema? The film does its best when it is most specific, heading for the inevitable dismay of the disappearance of well-meaning friends when the evolution becomes harsh or moments of accidental tragedy, such as Matt taking note of what is woven in anticipation that he has to do this for his daughter. At other times, Cowperthwaite’s approach suggests an elegant yada yada: rather than absorbing us in our feet, the film often flutters through a vaguely Malickian montage of bucket-list trips and anxious hugs.
We begin to wonder if the acronological structure is just a way to postpone everything that is uncomfortably disordered in Teague’s essay, as a harsh conversation that he tries to avoid. “We do not tell each other the truth about death,” the author writes at the beginning of his article. “It’s grotesque. It is unworthy. ” But Our friend it saves us from the bloody details at almost every step, clearing up a story whose power comes, in large part, from its willingness to be extremely honest about what cancer can do to the body. Cowperthwaite barely seems willing to even disappoint Johnson, who never really loses the glow of a movie star, even when her character – the most underdeveloped in the film’s trio – becomes unrecognizable to those in her life. to At one point, Nicole begins to wear a wig around the house to entertain visitors, performing in good health, rather than letting someone see the reality of her condition. It’s as good a metaphor as anything else Our friend it softens its own blows.