Our Friend opens with a scene in which parents Matt (Casey Affleck) and Nicole (Dakota Johnson) discuss how they’re going to tell their two young daughters that Nicole’s cancer is terminal, and things do not get more upbeat from there. Based on Matthew Teague’s 2015 Esquire article about his wife’s struggle with cancer and the help the couple received from their close friend Dane Faucheux (Jason Segel), Our Friend turns a personal, visceral account of death and compassion into a garden-variety weepie, often sidelining the unique aspects of the story in favor of familiar maudlin sentiment.
After that opening scene, Our Friend flashes back 13 years to early in Matt and Nicole’s marriage, and the screenplay by Brad Ingelsby switches haphazardly among time periods for the entire movie, disrupting the character arcs and making it difficult to maintain emotional investment. After seeing Matt and Nicole face one of the most difficult moments of their lives, it’s tough to get invested in Matt’s petty office drama or the couple’s early awkward interactions with Dane. We’ve already seen that Matt will become a successful writer and Dane will be closer to the couple than a family member, so there’s no dramatic weight to the extensive scenes that take place before Nicole’s diagnosis.
That diagnosis serves as a sort of linchpin for the story, with on-screen titles referencing time periods as “year of diagnosis” or “one year since diagnosis,” creating a weird sense of suspense for the characters who are often unaware of the horrific tragedy they’re about to be facing. It’s a crass and manipulative technique that adds nothing to the story, which has more than enough tear-jerking potential already. At one point, the onscreen numbers for the date start to appear more slowly, as if director Gabriela Cowperthwaite is toying with the audience over whether the next segment will feature cancer or not.
The jumbled chronology is just one way that Our Friend obscures the most interesting aspect of its story, which is not the familiar terminal-illness storyline but rather the unique arc for Dane, who endures constant criticism from friends, family and colleagues for his lack of direction in life. Dane meets Matt and Nicole when he’s working on the stage crew for a local theater company in New Orleans where Nicole performs, and he has vague notions of becoming a stand-up comedian, although the closest he gets is a performance in the Teagues’ living room.
Dane isn’t frustrated because he has thwarted ambitions, though; he’s frustrated and depressed because of the expectations placed on him by other people, that he should want more than his undemanding job as a retail manager and his small apartment. He finds meaning in his friendship with Matt and Nicole, and when Nicole’s illness gets serious, Dane doesn’t hesitate to uproot his New Orleans life and move to small-town Alabama, where the Teagues have relocated to be closer to Nicole’s family. Dane experiences renewed purpose in taking care of his friends’ kids and helping Matt with Nicole’s medical needs, and yet he’s derided by outside observers as a lazy guy who’s crashing in their spare room.
Segel takes the spotlight in a sequence that follows Dane on a solo hiking trip, where he meets a German traveler (Game of Thrones’ Gwendoline Christie) who senses his inner turmoil, but otherwise he isn’t really the central character. Our Friend spends more time on Matt and Nicole’s underdeveloped marital problems and Matt’s career trajectory than it does on Dane’s unconventional approach to life. It’s easy to move an audience with a woman dying of cancer, and the filmmakers rely on those guaranteed sentiments over more complex themes.
“I’m so ugly now,” Nicole says to Matt as her illness progresses, but of course she always looks like gorgeous movie star Dakota Johnson, just with slightly more pronounced bags under her eyes. Toward the end, Nicole appears a bit gaunter, and Johnson wrings some tragedy out of Nicole’s mental decline in her final days, but overall this is a standard-issue portrayal of a cancer victim, and there’s little sense of Nicole as a person beyond her illness. Cowperthwaite briefly shows Nicole onstage, but for a movie that spends so much time looking back to the characters’ pre-cancer lives, Our Friend fails to fully develop their personalities. The characters (including the two kids) also never seem to age across the decade-plus timeline, which makes it even harder to keep track of the chronology.
Instead, Our Friend uses the time jumps for cheap fakeouts, like showing Matt declining the sexual advances of a colleague only to later drop in a casual reference to “the affair,” and then circle back to reveal that it was actually Nicole who was unfaithful, not Matt. There’s no value to holding back on these details, other than stringing the audience along for maximum tragic effect.
In one scene early in Our Friend (but late in the story), Dane arrives at the Teague house to discover that the family dog is sick, so he takes the animal to the vet to find out what’s wrong. He calls Matt, who’s in a hospital waiting room, to inform him that the dog has cancer and needs to be put down. When Dane asks Matt how he’s going to tell the kids about the dog, Matt responds, “I just want to separate Nicole’s cancer from the dog’s cancer.” The real Teagues’ real dog really had cancer, but the way that Our Friend strategically piles on those moments of emotional devastation demonstrates how far from that grounded reality the movie is.
Starring Casey Affleck, Dakota Johnson, Jason Segel, Violet McGraw and Isabella Kai Rice, Our Friend opens Friday, Jan. 22 in select theaters and on VOD.