Literary adaptation is a tricky, unpredictable thing, and not because of the default wisdom “The book is always better,” which isn’t even true. Faithfulness is hardly a cardinal virtue—in dealing with an entirely different medium, sometimes significant changes end up better honoring the gist of the original material. Two of my favorites books-to-film, The French Lieutenant’s Woman and the David Cronenberg Spider, make drastic alterations from the written page precisely in order to work in a visual form. And as someone who’s both seen Bela Tarr’s seven-hour Satantango and read its experimental-novel source (in which each chapter is a solid block of prose sans paragraph breaks), I can tell you, yes, some things got left out even at that length.
Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 National Book Award winner The Friend is the sort of thing that would not seem a good candidate for filming, and certainly not a necessary one—what would it have to gain? It’s a very meta literary work, a writer writing about fictive writers and the act of writing itself (as well as writer’s block). The ingeniousness of her achievement is that in creating something so inside-baseball, she nonetheless managed to make an endearingly relatable, comic, ultimately somewhat poignant narrative. The new movie by Scott McGehee and David Siegel inevitably has to strip away some of the tome’s more intellectual qualities. But it’s surprising just how well the result turns out, largely reduced to its outline of a person whose coping with grief is complicated—then ultimately consoled—by the awkward “gift” of one very large dog.
Iris (Naomi Watts) is a middle-aged New Yorker in a rent controlled apartment who writes novels and short stories, but probably lives mostly off teaching writing courses to college students. They (well, particularly Owen Teague as bratty Carter) can be annoying. But Iris is good at neutral mediation, even when those students’ critiques of each others’ work grows petty, and at suppressing the eye rolls so much green prose must trigger. She’s also working on editing a volume of correspondence with the daughter (Sarah Pidgeon’s Val) of her mentor-slash-best friend Walter (Bill Murray). He was a famous literary lion who just recently died in a wholly unexpected suicide, leaving behind a very messy back catalog of ex-wives, kids, mistresses, whatnot. Plus Iris, who is furious and disconsolate over his abandonment—they were a couple in almost every sense but the romantic one, two people who relished each other’s company and wholly understood each other. Or so she thought.
It is discombobulating enough to deal with that loss, while also having to negotiate between the surviving parts of Walter’s life that he kept carefully compartmentalized—a frosty widow (Constance Wu), a prior spouse Iris stayed friends with (Carla Gugino), children somehow nobody knew about, etc. It gets considerably more awkward when Iris is informed he intended her to “inherit” Apollo, a stray he found and adopted one day. Apollo is a 150-pound Great Dane. He would not be a natural fit for her one-bedroom apartment even if her building allowed dogs, which it does not. She takes him in anyway, as a temporary measure that stretches on long enough to risk eviction. Their relationship is strained, particularly as he immediately commandeers her bed. But doleful, soulful Apollo—who, it turns out, likes nothing more than to be read aloud to—turns out to provide an extension of Walter’s companionship. Maybe even an improvement.
The co-directors have done literary adaptations before, including Bee Season and an updated What Maisie Knew. The Friend is probably the best of the lot, perhaps among their films in general. It’s not a spectacular breakout but rather an intelligently meticulous mix of low-key, detailed, character-based storytelling, and perfect casting. Watts is usually such an unshowy actress, her excellence tends to be taken for granted. God knows there’s only so many decent leading roles for women past whichever “certain age” you could name (she’s 56), which means of late she’s too often been stuck doing good work in features with little else to recommend them.
It’s a relief to see her in a movie that serves her rather than making her lift it into the realm of “watchable.” She’s instantly believable as someone who lives in a world of books, and is conspicuously not pining for Prince or Princess Charming to come along. Her life of the mind is satisfying enough, thank you very much. And Murray is inspired casting, since we can all too easily imagine just how entertaining, maddening, and self-centered Walter is—those qualities are embedded in this performer’s familiar persona.
There’s also a wee frisson from the fact that 41 years ago Murray used his newfound big-screen stardom to realize a pet project, starring in (and co-adapting) a film version of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. For a brief moment before De Palma’s Bonfire of the Vanities and then Demi Moore’s Scarlet Letter, it set the standard for disastrous literary translations, with Murray’s presence itself the single biggest misstep. Here, he plays exactly the sort of person who would look back on such youthful folly with bemused, slightly perverse pride, like a battle scar. The Friend opens Fri/4 at theaters throughout the Bay Area, including SF’s Opera Plaza and Metreon.
Other films arriving this weekend run a gamut from the innocuous to the in-ya-face:
A Nice Indian Boy
“Nice” is the operative word for this feature from director Roshan Sethi, which recycles tropes from both gay romcoms and the Big Fat Greek Wedding type centered on cute ethic culture-clashing. Naveen (comedian Karan Soni from the Deadpool movies) is an adorable, funny but shy guy, a doctor whose Indian American family tolerates his sexual identity so long as it’s an apparently unacted-upon abstraction.
When he inevitably meets a bona fide Mr. Right (Jonathan Groff), of course all hell breaks loose, rattling his parents (Zarna Garg, Harish Patel) and triggering a surprisingly hostile response from his sister (Sunita Mani). Adapted by Eric Randall from Madhuri Shekar’s stage play, this is slick, well-cast, lively, and touching at times—but also incredibly formulaic. It’s bookended by two “big fat Indian weddings,” and of course ends with the characters all doing a mock Bollywood production number. There’s nary a surprise here, but then that is not what romcom audiences are generally looking for. Boy opens Thu/3 at SF’s AMC Kabuki 8, then Fri/4 at the Opera Plaza Cinemas.
Walks on the Wilder Side: ‘Parvulos,’ ‘Misericordia,’ ‘Freaky Tales’
On the other hand, three new movies from around the globe—and our own backyard—do their best to be as unpredictable as possible, with enterprising if uneven results.
As tired as zombiedom has become on both the big and small screen, that concept gets revivified a bit in Mexican genre specialist Isaac Ezban’s latest, Parvulos: Children of the Apocalypse. For a while you may not even guess it’s headed in that direction, as three underage brothers (Felix Farid Escalante, Leonardo Cervantes, Mateo Ortega) in a forested area practice survivalist living, their parents apparently dead. A virus has wiped out most of humanity, though these kids are too young to recall much else—or to practice societal norms they never knew or have forgotten. Their home life is like Lord of the Flies trying to be My Three Sons.
But they are not entirely alone, and this mix of black comedy, gore, action, and poignancy finds them both consoled and threatened by others who’ve endured… more or less. Shot in desaturated colors, Ezban’s episodic narrative can feel self-consciously arbitrary. Yet in the end, it has real substance as well as idiosyncratic style, and will stick with you in ways horror-adjacent movies seldom do. It opens Fri/4 at Bay Area theaters including SF’s AMC Metreon.
Another adventurous writer-director, France’s Alain Guiraudie, made a splash 12 years ago with Stranger by the Lake, an exacting Hitchcockian thriller placing a serial killer on a gay beach. His new Misericordia is a somewhat overlapping exercise in suspense involving another morally questionable gay protagonist. 30-something baker Jeremie (Felix Kysyl) has returned after a long absence to the village he was raised in, ostensibly to attend an older neighbor’s funeral. But he stays on, exploiting the hospitality of the widow (Catherine Frot) even as he gets hostility from her son (Jean-Baptiste Durand) and others.
Unlike the killer in Stranger, Jeremie seems a sociopath of the hapless rather than malevolent sort—he commits violence only when his blundering fibs get him absolutely cornered. This twisty, ironical narrative didn’t impress me as much as it has some others, the characters’ irrational, under-motivated behavior making them somewhat less than engaging. But Misericordia is still offbeat and eventful enough to be worth a look. It opens Fri/4 at SF’s Roxie Theater.
The filmmaking duo of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have arguably done their best work (Half Nelson, Sugar) in a dramatic mode of strict realism, but they keep going out on new limbs—now following up the big-budget Captain Marvel with the very Pulp Fiction-y episodic lark of Freaky Tales. Set in a “hella wild” Oakland and Berkeley of 1987, it strings together several interlocking stories. First, Gilman Street peace punks decide to fight back against marauding Nazi skinheads; then two young female rappers (Normani, Dominique Thorne) get their big break when called up to battle on a club stage with Too Short. Pedro Pascal plays a man with a very pregnant wife whose day goes from good to “nothing left to live for.” Finally, Golden State Warriors star Sleepy Floyd (played by Jay Ellis) gets his house in the hills robbed while he’s on the court—but the thieves will live to regret it. Oh: There’s also something going on involving “cosmic green stuff” in the sky.
Fleck is an Oakland native, and the film is full of affection for retro local culture. But its forced joie de vivre doesn’t recycle genre cliches with the wit or style required. There are a lot of big swings—sudden leaps into animation, for instance, or martial-arts mayhem—that are welcome in theory but just aren’t particularly well executed. And though I sometimes wish Tarantino would put a cork in it, god knows this movie could have used some of his flair for dialogue. Freaky Tales tries so hard to provide a good time, I just wished that effort were less conspicuous than its reward. It opens in Bay Area theaters Fri/4.
