Bonds greater than love
Casey Affleck gets real in inspirational ‘Our Friend’
“Our Friend” is an affecting true story about an Alabama family coping with their mother’s terminal illness and the friend who stepped up, moved in and helped everyone get through it.
Dakota Johnson is Nicole Teague, destined to die at 34 from ovarian cancer. Casey Affleck is her war-reporting husband Matthew Teague, whose May 2015 Esquire article “The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word” won a National Magazine Award and is the basis for the movie.
And Jason Segel is the lowkey Dane Faucheux, who moved from his New Orleans home and job to move in with the Teagues and help with their two young daughters.
“What attracted me about the project was the people involved,” Affleck, 45, said in a post-screening virtual discussion. “I met and loved (director Gabriela Cowperthwaite) right off the bat. I wanted to work with Jason before and didn’t get the part. I’ve seen Dakota on a run in big movies and small movies and wanted to see what she’s about.
“As for the material itself, I read the script first and loved everything it had to say. Eventually when I read the article, the spirit of the whole endeavor felt right to me.
“If I could stand behind the message of it, it becomes more important to me. Then I met Teague and,” he joked, “I regretted the decision.”
For Teague, to see his life and family resurrected in a film was startling. “I never thought about that,” he said. “I just wanted to tell the truth.”
He was on set for the filming in Fairhope, Ala., where it all happened. “I was there as much as I could be, probably more than I should have been. It was emotional — and that’s when I knew how fine the work people were doing was. Watching Dakota, Jason and Casey do their thing transported me from where I was standing on the set back to my own story.
“One thing I was so grateful for: Casey didn’t try to sound like me” — Teague has a softly Southern inflected accent — “or walk like me. He centered on the emotional center of the story, which is the way I wanted it to go.”
For Teague, the pandemic has made the film newly relevant. “What I’ve been thinking about it is, it’s a story of hanging on and who you hang on with and the hope of something joyful on the other side.
“More people can understand that now after the year we’ve had. Lost work, lost loved ones. My hope is if they watch this movie, they’ll feel a little less alone about getting through.”