Gabriela Cowperthwaite (2019)
Terminal illness screen dramas tend not to be unflinching about the physical reality of the condition propelling their story. ‘The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word’, an autobiographical piece by Matthew Teague published in Esquire magazine in 2015, describes the two years between his wife Nicole’s cancer diagnosis and her death, at the age of thirty-six. The memoir is physically (and emotionally) unflinching. It’s named for Matthew’s long-time best mate, Dane Faucheux, who, in December 2013, decided to put his own life, in New Orleans, on hold and moved into the Teagues’ home, in Fairview, Alabama, to help Matthew care for Nicole and the couple’s two young daughters. Dane stayed for the next fourteen months. Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s film tries hard to do justice to the Esquire article. The result succeeds in plenty of ways, without ever being free of tension between its uncompromising source material and the type of movie that Our Friend is, to some extent, bound to be.
The struggle and good taste involved in this project are evident even in the title. A shamelessly commercial enterprise might have opted instead for the seven words after the colon in Teague’s original. When Cowperthwaite’s adaptation, with a screenplay by Brad Ingelsby, premiered at the Toronto festival in September 2019, it was simply The Friend; at some point between then and its North American theatrical release in January 2021, The became Our. If the film-makers were thereby trying to inject more appealing human warmth into the title – this is a $10m-budget picture after all – it was a tentative effort. The promotional poster – with Nicole (Dakota Johnson) and Matt (Casey Affleck) in a loving embrace, Dane (Jason Segel) right beside them, all three smiling gently – has a similar quality.
More substantially, the film’s construction gives priority to exploring the main characters and their relationships, rather than showcasing the twists and turns of Nicole’s decline. Our Friend begins with her and Matt deciding it’s time for their daughters, Molly (Isabella Kai) and Evie (Violet McGraw), to be told that the cancer they already know their mother has, will soon end her life. From there, the narrative shifts back and forward in time – to the couple’s early days together and encounters with Dane, to more recent history. About two-thirds through (the film runs just over two hours), there’s a reprise of part of the opening sequence. The action then moves ahead to Nicole’s end, and the immediate aftermath of her death. For as long as she’s alive, each episode is dated on the screen as so many days/months/years before or after her diagnosis, so the story is easy to follow. The structure also yields more sustained variety of mood than a strictly linear progress would allow.
For a minority of critics, relieving the grimness in this way is just what’s wrong with Our Friend. ‘”The Friend” is not an inspirational essay, and how dare they turn it into that kind of movie?’ asks Peter Debruge in Variety. Although this misrepresents the film, the question does point up the yawning difference between Our Friend‘s and Teague’s article’s views of death: Debruge describes the former as a ‘dishonest, sanitized no-help-to-anyone TV-movie version of death’. The prevalence of this kind of account, he claims, was what ‘inspired Teague to set the record straight in the first place’. Cowperthwaite’s version certainly is sanitised in the sense of removing most of the wrenching graphic detail of Nicole’s illness that’s a big part of what makes ‘The Friend’ an extraordinary piece of writing. The film consequently tones down too how the effects on her body and mind of the cancer and drugs taken to combat it, affected a husband’s feelings about his wife. Even so, Our Friend (whose executive producers include Matthew Teague) can’t fairly be described as emotionally squeamish.
I don’t know how much Brad Ingelsby has added in terms of the principals’ lives outside the Teagues’ deathbound house. The real Matthew obviously is a journalist; did his preoccupation with work and the time he spent on overseas assignments, as the film suggests, jeopardise his marriage until Nicole’s illness brought him home? Was she really a musical theatre performer who had a fling with her director (Jason Bayle)? Teague’s memoir notes simply that Dane, by moving in with his friends, ‘had given up a management position and a girlfriend back in New Orleans’. In the film, he has a crappy job in retail and his move to Alabama leads to a break-up with his girlfriend (Marielle Scott). He also has ambitions to be a stand-up but no talent for it.
On paper, these inventions – if that’s what they are – smack of dramatic conventionality, even padding, but that’s not how they come across as you watch the film. An early scene in a Middle Eastern hotel, where Matt resists the female colleague who’s making a play for him, comes to mean more when he reacts, rather self-righteously, to the discovery of Nicole’s brief affair (though his derisive bafflement as to what she saw in the theatre director is reasonable enough). Giving Dane a largely unfulfilling life in New Orleans throws a different light on his motives for moving in with the Teagues. This doesn’t detract from the heroism of what he does for all four of them. It does make Dane more than simply self-sacrificing.
As always, Casey Affleck is unafraid to show his character’s less likeable aspects – and the actor’s integrity in doing this makes you root for the man he’s playing. Affleck also shows fine imagination, especially when Matt tells their daughters that Nicole is dying, and at the very end of the film. Jason Segel’s abundant wit and good humour are unfailingly anchored in the credible, nuanced personality that he creates. The exchanges between Dane and Matt are reliably penetrating and sometimes funny – so too scenes between Matt and Nicole. Dakota Johnson is doubly affected by the adjustments Cowperthwaite and Ingelsby have made. Matthew Teague is unsparing to the bitter end, describing the sound of his wife’s last breaths as ‘like someone slowly dragging a cello bow across her vocal cords. I realized then that the last honest person to describe death may be whoever came up with “croaking”.’ The film’s Nicole, like many screen cancer victims before her, dies fragrantly and peacefully. Besides, once the physical horrors are excised, the story is largely about the friendship of the two men so that Johnson’s role, compared with theirs, seems underwritten. Even so, she gives a committed and compelling performance. There’s an invigorating cameo from Cherry Jones as an end-of-life carer. Isabella Kai does very well as the Teagues’ elder daughter.
The film wobbles in the closing stages. There’s a surfeit of sweetly melancholy music as Nicole approaches death, even allowing that some of this is part of a flashback to a stage show in which she was the star. Shortly after she dies, Dane goes into a decline and shuts himself away in his room; it feels wrong that he revives the moment he discovers the piece Matt has been writing is a paean to him as much as a tribute to Nicole. Our Friend recovers in its final moments, though, in the contained emotions of the men’s farewell to each other, as Dane returns to New Orleans and Matt embarks on life as an entirely lone parent.
Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s background is in documentaries. This is only her second dramatic feature and she does a good job. She’s true to the dichotomy that Matthew Teague points up between the public and private aspects of death in affluent modern western society – bucket-list social life versus isolation behind closed doors. Brad Ingelsby’s dialogue is consistently strong. Scene by scene, the film impresses, even as you realise its limitations. Because it has plenty of mawkish predecessors, you may feel, when tears come to your eyes (as they did a few times to mine), that the movie is par for the course. But Our Friend is not that.
1 July 2021
