I thought it would be impossible to make a bad film about a dog but the production team for The Friend has managed to pull it off. As a film critic with respect to this film I seem to be an outlier. I was seduced into going to see it by its glowing reviews and its theme of a writer who reluctantly accepts a bequest of a dog. Others had also been similarly seduced. When my wife and I arrived at our favourite picture theatre, The Regal at Graceville which has been showing films since before I was born, there were only two seats left which we quickly secured.

I knew that the film was set in New York and looked forward with pleasurable anticipation to some good screen shots of that enticing city. Early in the film, a scene-setting signature New York yellow cab passed in the background. I reflected upon how many films I had seen that were set in New York and in which yellow cabs featured. Those few seconds of the passage of the cab were the high point of the film although I concede that it was nice to see beautifully maintained brownstones, the Hudson River and its bridges, and some of the boulevards of the city although all of that has been done before, perhaps best in recent times by Woody Allen.

It is no spoiler to say that the film is about the bonding of a dog with its new owner. Films about dogs usually have one of only two endings, the dog survives and bonds with its new owner or the dog dies and the owner mourns the dog. In Red Dog, an Australian film, the best ever made about a dog, far better than any of the Lassie franchise, the dog dies.

It is something of a cliché repeated in the film by the veterinary consultant in it that there are no bad dogs. This dog, named Apollo is a Great Dane of relatively low canine intelligence and even less personality. My dog Bella, half blue heeler and half indeterminate, a rescue dog that cost me $400, one of the best investments I have ever made, has more charm, intelligence, and personality in her left forepaw than Apollo.

The performance of Naomi Watts, the star of the film, has been much praised. I thought her performance no more than adequate but that may have been because the role she has is of a self-centred academic who teaches English literature and creative writing at an unnamed university which some theatregoers will no doubt recognise. She is an author herself but is suffering from writer’s block. The dog which she has been given belonged to a successful writer, a character played by Bill Murray in the film, who was for a time her mentor and lover and subsequently a long-term friend. He has had many friends and lovers and all of them revere him without recrimination. They assemble for a memorial, not of course in a church, and subsequently on a boat on the Hudson to dispose of his ashes. He has committed suicide but the reason why he did is not made clear.

Murray’s role in flashbacks are for the most part fleeting and undemanding, probably only for a million dollars or so at his paygrade.

It seemed to this filmgoer that it would have been difficult to find a more precious set of characters than those who inhabit this film. One senses immediately that the lives of all of them are egocentric and comfortable ones in which they strictly observe the rules of political correctness. I thought the most genuine and attractive of the characters and the best actor was the caretaker or janitor, as the case may be, of the building in which Naomi Watts has a small, elegant and obsessively tidy apartment.

The action in the film takes place during the festive season, or should I say during the season of the Christian festival although there is not the slightest hint of that in this secular film except for one sighting of a red-robed and white-bearded Santa Claus and a party at which the guests wear paper hats and little illuminated beads.

Of course in these days of climate crisis there is no suggestion of any snow on the sidewalks.

Now I have been in New York a number of times in December. On every such visit I have encountered more than one Santa Claus in the streets and the department stores, enchantingly decorated Christmas trees and a great deal of snow. Indeed New York is famous for it.

The snowfalls upon that city had been made famous by the best American impressionists such as Childe Hassam and William Merritt Chase and their followers, and in more recent times Guy Wiggins and the school of artists he too spawned. It is almost as difficult to make a bad film about Christmas as it is about a dog. Even Bad Santa (Billy Bob Thornton) was a very funny and good film.

I would mark The Friend a clear failure as a Christmas film. Full marks should however be given to the costume designer for Naomi Watts’ expensive wardrobe and the set designer for her perfectly organised apartment.