Introducing a New Genre: The Post-Covid Movie

Concurrent film adaptations of novels by Sigrid Nunez (not a household name outside of New York City literati) point to a coincidence: The Friend, starring Bill Murray and Naomi Watts, and The Room Next Door, which stars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, share thematic similarities and announce an odd genre, the Post-Covid Movie, at last.

Neither film mentions the pandemic, but both show how a circle of moneyed, urban sophisticates represses feelings about death and anxiety. Both films began production this time last year and their subsequent release — though in reverse order — suggest a declaration of post-Biden relief. Film culture is free to address emotions that were blocked. Each movie deals with personal loss, a tragedy that its upper-middle-class characters were forced to endure without acknowledging — the essence of Democrat-ruled tyranny.

Iris Harris (Watts) mourns her writing professor and erstwhile lover, Walter Douglas (Bill Murray). Devotion makes her an emotional widow, pitied by members of her literary set, especially when the actual widow, haughty black British Barbara (Noma Dumezweni) burdens her with Walter’s dog, an enormous black-and-white-spotted Great Dane named Apollo. (“The king of dogs,” she is told.) Through caring for Apollo, Iris recalls her relationship with Walter, contemplating his suicide and the meaning of death.

The Room Next Door shares the same theme, allowing director Pedro Almodóvar to address Covid-era tragedy, much as directing team Scott McGehee and David Siegel do in The Friend. The Room Next Door is Almodóvar’s first American-set, English-language feature, an international reach consonant with the global effects of the pandemic, but it flummoxed Almodóvar’s wit, stifling his usual homosexual insouciance. Moore and Swinton’s non-erotic friendship seems to hide something deeper — perhaps a suppressed political conflict due to Almódovar’s leftist conformity. That’s the kinship these filmmakers find with ultra bourgeois Nunez, a habitué of Susan Sontag’s salon; Nunez’s 2011 memoir Sempre Susan can be felt in these grief-inflected stories. A certain snootiness explains why Moore and Swinton never achieve the existential human-to-animal grace of Art Carney in Harry & Tonto or Diane Keaton in Darling Companion.

Almodóvar’s failure — the film’s frustration — derives from changing Nunez’s conceit; her novel was originally titled What You’re Going Through, yet Almodóvar failed to update and tackle Covid-era distress.

But The Friend (also set in New York, like The Room Next Door) stays truer to its Nunez source and has a more credible, cosmopolitan restlessness. Iris and her cohorts in the Manhattan/New York University milieu embody how the liberal class suffer Walter’s passing. The gap left by his absence matches how their fellow citizens also endured Covid-lockdown depression.

The Friend’s obvious metaphor gets its feeling from the unnamed specter of universal bereavement — notable in how McGehee and Siegel capture New Yorkness, as in Nicole Holofcener’s best films (Please Give, Can You Ever Forgive Me?), and as Spaniard Almodóvar could not. Beneath its woman-and-dog-in-the-city storyline is subtext about middle-class white liberal masochism. Iris’s self-abasement, found in Nunez’s ironic vision, is something new for Millennial movies. Iris recollects chiding Walter’s speech: “‘Limpid’ is one of your words.” A Thomas Hardy poem, recited when Walter’s ashes are tossed in the East River, levels everyone’s pride. And Walter’s first wife, Elaine (Carla Gugino), shares her misgivings with Iris: “Men and their language. When they seduce, they all sound the same.”

Because the Covid-19 experience has been ignored by most filmmakers, The Friend fills a hole in contemporary movie experience. The societal collapse and private breakdown evident in the way Iris staves off psychotherapy — as if merely experiencing writer’s block — are revealed in the way she puts up with Apollo’s imposition. The dog represents her longing for Walter, and that delusion gets clarified in the last half hour when Bill Murray returns to the story through Iris’s imagination. It takes McGehee and Siegel forever to get to this moment of wit and recrimination — visualizing an interior monologue in Iris’s head — but Murray saves it, bringing his combination of calm, candor, and levity. Watts displays compelling mixed emotions — Iris’s exhaustion, uncertainty, and concern for others.

When Iris finally breaks through her writer’s block and cites the children’s pet books that teach human compassion, The Friend evokes pop culture’s finest pandemic metaphors: The AIDS crisis personified by Alan Bates’s reluctant dog lover in We Think the World of You and Pet Shop Boys’ love lament “I Want a Dog.” Someday, the Post-Covid Movie might include some honest, muckraking political documentaries, but The Friend’s correction of The Room Next Door brings the honesty for now.