Digital Review - Our Friend (2019)

His name has hit the heights in the past few weeks. Brad Ingelsby. Not that he was an unknown, with scripts for Finding The Way Back all bearing his name. But it’s streaming series, Mare Of Easttown, that’s catapulted him into the stratosphere, a gritty tale of small town murder and family intrigue topped by a stand out turn from Kate Winslet. So it’s something of a surprise to see one of his earlier works slip almost unnoticed onto Amazon Prime this week.

Our Friend did the festival circuit in 2019 but, like so many others, was held back by the pandemic. Based on an article in Esquire magazine by journalist Matthew Teague, it tells how his family’s life is turned upside down when his wife is diagnosed with cancer and how their best friend puts his life on hold to help them. Teague (Casey Affleck) is already a successful journalist: he and Nicole (Dakota Johnson) seem to have life sorted out, including two young daughters, but her diagnosis places increasing pressures on the family, leading to Dane’s (Jason Segel) offer to stay with them and help out.

In this sadly familiar scenario but taken from a different perspective, director Gabriela Cowperthwaite doesn’t set out to gloss over the details of Nicole’s illness and its effect on her family but, although it’s genuinely affecting, this isn’t their story. It belongs to the person of the title, Dane, the easy-going, likeable friend looking for a focus and who, despite putting his own life on one side to care for all of them, always remains something of an outsider. That’s no criticism: as a friend, no matter how close, he’s one step removed from the moments only the family can share, leaving him at a discreet distance but close enough to hear what’s happening. And when the inevitable happens, we don’t just witness the family’s grief. His takes another form, shutting himself away in his room for several weeks, with food left at his door while the family starts on the road of getting itself back together.

Cowperthwaite and Ingelsby reflect the story’s original format in the film’s structure, dividing it into chapters, all dated according to whether they’re pre or post diagnosis – and with the occasional typing correction in the captions. It’s a non-linear approach, but one sufficiently signposted to make sense and scenes set years apart become increasingly connected. A tale of self-sacrifice such as this constantly runs the risk of toppling over into sentiment and mawkishness, but the director and writer constantly hold it back from that precipice and are helped by a career best performance from Segel, developing the loveable loser who made his name over a decade ago into a rounded character with comion and humour which counterbalances the undercurrent of sadness that regularly rises to the surface. How soon you get that prickly feeling in your eyes is down to you – it took this writer about half an hour! – but it will come because, for all its restraint when it comes to sentiment, Our Friend is also an unashamed tear jerker.

A friend can be many things, from somebody little more than a ing acquaintance to a platonic partner or unofficial sibling and anything in between. Dane is at the top end of the scale and is the kind of friend we’d all wish for in a crisis, but who is wise enough to know that there are some places even the very best of friends cannot go. He is, as Nicole comments early on, “special”. And, while the film isn’t quite in the same league, it’s affecting, thoughtful and has strong performances. Its arrival certainly deserves more noise.