COMIC DRAMA; 2hr 3min
STARRING: Naomi Watts, Bill Murray, Bing
Greatest Dane: Bing and Watts
If death is life’s closing mystery, suicide is its ultimate, unanswerable riddle. Unless you’ve been there you can’t possibly understand, and once you have there’s no coming back to distill your experience into words. So when writer Iris (Watts) learns in Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s unstudied adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel that her best friend and mentor, Walter (the reliably crinkled Murray), has killed himself, she and Walter’s other nearest and dearest are left to tangle with their grief.
Iris is also tangling with — and tugging at — Walter’s equally unexpected legacy of the 150-pound Harlequin Great Dane (Bing as Apollo) he specifically wanted her to take in, despite the fact that dogs of any size, let alone this humongous one, are a no-no in her New York City shoebox apartment. The two get off to a predictably rocky start, Iris not being especially a dog person and a depressed Apollo preoccupied with mourning his lost human. But the relationship they forge proves transformative for them both, its prickly contours softening into a consoling and loving bond.
Walter and Apollo aside, this is largely a femme-centric show, what with the philandering Walter’s three wives (Noma Dumezweni and Carla Gugino are the exes; Constance Wu is the official widow) and a grown daughter (Sarah Pidgeon) from a former fling. They’re as sharp-witted as you’d expect self-respecting New Yorkers to be, while a graceful Watts is easy to believe in as a woman shaken from the containment of her comfort zone into a fresh awareness of her feelings. She takes effortless control of every emotive beat. But with his doleful eyes, exclamatory ears and that big guy’s loping gait, her stately scene partner ambles off with the starring role.
