Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Our Friend’ on VOD, an Uneven Cancer Drama Buoyed by its Excellent Cast

VOD movie Our Friend has the type of stacked cast that all but guarantees a movie of at least moderate watchability. Casey Affleck (Oscar winner), Dakota Johnson (underrated; fire up the Suspiria remake and A Bigger Splash, and don’t hold Fifty Shades against her) and Jason Segel (also underrated; watch him play David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour if you need proof) anchor this drama based on journalist Matthew Teague’s Esquire article about how his closest friend dropped everything and moved in to help him deal with his wife’s illness and death. Now let’s see if the thespian powers of these three render the movie more than just another cancer weepie.

OUR FRIEND: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s 2013. Matt Teague (Affleck) stares blankly. Nicole Teague (Johnson) is in bed, her bald head wrapped in a scarf. It’s time to tell the girls, she says. He fetches their two young daughters, Molly and Evie, from the front porch, where they’re goofing around with Dane (Segel). Dane stays behind and in the stillness we hear weeping and wailing from inside. Now it’s 13 years previous. Matt is a youngish newspaper reporter in New Orleans who gets a call at his desk from a New York Times editor — except it’s not really a New York Times editor, just a co-worker pranking him from the other side of the office. Nicole is a theater actress, and during a rehearsal, she and Dane talk about music; he gives her a mix CD and they banter about how it’s crazy that he doesn’t “get” Led Zeppelin. He asked her out once but felt silly about it later after she told him she was married. Nicole introduces Matt to Dane over beers at the bar one night, and Dane apologizes for his unwitting advance. It’s a little awkward, but Dane seems like a good, sincere dude. Matt fields a phone call, and this time it’s actually the New York Times. He looks wobbly as he shares the news. “He’s a fainter!” Nicole exclaims as Dane catches him.

Now it’s 2012. “Year of diagnosis,” reads the subtitle. Dane manages a sporting goods store and has a serious girlfriend in New Orleans. Matt and Nicole are raising two kids in Alabama. Matt slumps in a hospital waiting room. Dane tosses his bags in the car, drives in, enters a cluttered house, relieves the babysitter, cleans up the dog’s foul leavings. Matt calls Dane: please take the dog to the vet. He does. The vet says it’s time. Dane calls Matt. He has to handle it, so Dane handles it. He holds the sad little bulldog in its final moments. He returns to the house, does laundry, washes the dishes, tidies some of the mess, flops on the couch to sleep. The next day, he brings the girls to the hospital to see their mom. Dane tells Matt he can stay for a while to help out. He has some vacation days he can use. Matt accepts the offer. He needs his best friend right now. Dane is also Nicole’s best friend, and is like a beloved uncle to the kids. Maybe that wasn’t 2012? Maybe it was later than that? I guess that seems about right upon piecing things together, if it was late 2012.

Anyway, now it’s 2008, “four years before the diagnosis,” says the subtitle, helping us do math and keep track. Matt’s on assignment in Pakistan. He video-conferences with Nicole. He breaks the news that his next gig is in Syria, and she’s not happy. He’s never home. She feels like a single mother. Later, Matt turns down an invite to a woman’s hotel room. Now it’s some years after that again, because it’s a time when Nicole is sick. It’s a scene set after Dane’s offer to stay, which we realize when we watch a scene in which his girlfriend, visiting Alabama, interrogates him as to why he needs to leave his own life behind to help Matt and Nicole. What about your job? Aren’t Nicole’s parents nearby? It’s complicated; it’s always complicated. Welp — so much for that relationship. That very night, Dane’s awakened by a ruckus. Nicole’s in severe pain. Matt rushes her out the door. Dane jets upstairs to be with the girls. This is why he needs to be there. Doctors operate. It’s terminal. Chemo is pointless. They don’t tell the girls yet. Nicole shares her bucket list with Dane and Matt, and starts writing letters to her daughters to open at various milestones in their lives, milestones she won’t see. We hear Led Zeppelin on the soundtrack. Dane is still there. The next sequence takes place in 2010, but the movie will jump forward again, because the end of the movie is the story’s heartbreaking inevitability. And Dane will still be there.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This is sort of middle-aged Me and Earl and the Dying Girl crossed with Threesome but with earnest emotions instead of schtupping, crossed with any number of cancer dramas (Ordinary Love being the best I’ve seen recently).

Performance Worth Watching: Although somewhat rote by weepie-melodrama standards, the film is elevated by Johnson, Affleck and Segel’s exemplary acting, and picking one is a close shave. But by virtue of having a stronger, more complex character to work with, Segel’s quietly suggestive performance stands out.

Memorable Dialogue: You maybe haven’t lived until you’ve heard Dakota Johnson exclaim, “Oh, dang-a-lang!” when something goes wrong.

Sex and Skin: None. The mostly chaste Affleck/Johnson shower scene must’ve taken place post-coitus, and if the coitus actually happened and was in the movie, it probably wouldn’t have occurred in the scene immediately prior to the shower scene, because that’s the kind of herky-jerky movie this is.

Our Take: This perfectly fine film is the story of an unconventional loving triangle offering a different angle on a familiar story — but then it’s hacked up for barbecue when it would work perfectly fine as a pig roast. It’s as if the film doesn’t trust us to be interested in the compelling friendship dynamic existing among these three people, or the rock-solid performances of its three principals, the latter of which draws us back in whenever the needlessly jumpy narrative forces us to reorient ourselves in a different time and place. And here’s where I feel the need to assert that linear narratives are just fine! Really! Not everything has to be Citizen Kane or Pulp Fiction or Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession!

But that’s not quite a dealbreaker. Our Friend is salvaged by its emotionally authentic characters, the most poignant being Dane, who’s far from the rudderless go-nowhere punchline of a human being we see so frequently in other movies. Others run him down behind his back for working a crappy retail job and being unable to hold down a relationship, and Matt and Nicole weakly defend him, because nobody seems to know why he’s that way. The film’s most powerful stuff has nothing to do with cancer and the unavoidable wrenched hearts and broken families that populate such arcs, but rather, Segel’s nonverbal communique addressing Dane’s depression and lack of a sense of self. The best sequence is when he has a sort of panic attack — that happened before he moved into Matt and Nicole’s house indefinitely; I took notes, thankfully — and bolts upright from a family gathering. The next day, he hops in the car for a solo hiking excursion somewhere in the Southwest, where he has not a spiritual or romantic encounter with a woman (played by Gwendoline Christie), but a grounding, necessary one.

So it’s a movie about connection and, of course, friendship. Dane is a man who seems to be missing the type of purpose most of us assign to ourselves via jobs or families, you know, things that would prevent us from wholeheartedly committing our lives and selves to easing the difficulties of others, no matter if they’re our closest friends. It’s an odd existence, almost tangential to Matt and Nicole’s lives; he’s not part of the family, but he is part of the family, finding truth in the cliche that family is who we want or make it to be, and shouldn’t be defined so rigidly. Dane’s relationship to the Teagues isn’t easy to put in words, but who says we even have to? He’s an extraordinary person who maybe finds a missing piece of himself in his selflessness (a postscript title card suggests as much). It’s not a perfect life, but neither is it a life without purpose.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Our Friend isn’t without significant flaws, but it has enough poignancy to keep us invested in its emotional drama.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream Our Friend