The line between dog owner and menace

Have you ever been inside of a crowded Trader Joe’s and thought, “Man, I wish there were more dogs in here”? Or squeezed yourself past five carts parked in the middle of a grocery aisle to get your hands on the only sensibly priced vanilla extract in town, only to find that the vanilla is being blocked by a poor, overstimulated puppy, whose owner is talking on the phone and looking the other direction? This has become a regular phenomenon for me, a simple city-dweller who just wants to get in and out of a grocery store in a timely fashion. I’m trying to step on the gas, not on someone’s dog. And yet, what should be a relatively simple experience has turned into a weekly game of “Frogger” — or, perhaps, “Dogger” — where civilians are forced to look out for a pooch in their path, lest they incur the wrath of the yuppie elite.

In their new film “The Friend,” directing and writing partners Scott McGehee and David Siegel capture the growing trend of dog owners bringing their pets everywhere they go, seemingly at everyone else’s expense. Based on the 2018 bestselling novel by Sigrid Nunez, the movie follows Iris (Naomi Watts), a writer whose mentor and best friend, Walter (Bill Murray), leaves her his massive Great Dane after his death. The dog, Apollo, is a pickup truck of a hound, and Iris barely has any space for him in her cramped New York City apartment. But Walter’s sudden death by suicide has left everyone in his circle, including Apollo, shocked and grieving. So, in the blurry wake of her friend’s passing, Iris agrees to take the dog in.