Friendship at heart of new Jason Segel movie
“Our Friend” is an illness movie, but it comes at its subject from an unusual angle.
It’s based on a real-life story, and this grounding in real experience takes the movie in a direction that isn’t phony or romantic or exploitative, like most illness movies. Instead, it’s recognizably human and odd.
It’s told in a nonlinear way, so that there’s no mystery made of the ultimate fate of the sick person. As “Our Friend” starts, Dakota Johnson, as Nicole Teague (who died in 2014), is calling her young daughters into her sickroom to tell them that she is going to die. From there, the movie zigzags through time, showing Nicole and her husband, Matthew (Casey Affleck), over the course of more than a decade, and exploring their deepening friendship with their mutual friend, Dane (Jason Segel).
Gradually, but soon enough, we realize that “Our Friend” isn’t really about the illness or the marriage or the family, though those elements are there. It’s about the friendship and, specifically, it’s about the friend.
“Our Friend” is based on a long article, written by Matthew Teague, which appeared in Esquire a year after Nicole’s death. The movie follows the facts as revealed in the article, but leaves out the details of Nicole’s illness, which were so horrific and
graphic that they would have overshadowed everything else in the film. The movie also subtly alters the personality of Dane, turning him into a somewhat hapless, luckless character.
This change might seem peculiar to those who know the real-life Dane Faucheux, but from the standpoint of the movie, it introduces a quality of mystery about the character. Here is this guy who is not doing well professionally or romantically, who seems aimless and melancholy, but who turns out to have enormous reserves of tact and generosity. He turns out to be the closest thing you will ever find to a saint.
Segel doesn’t play the character as a saint, fortunately, or as a holy fool. He just plays a depressed guy whose struggles with himself have not made him selfish but rather have tuned him in to the pain of others. His Dane is so without ego that, whenever someone is nasty to him, he doesn’t register the insult. He just sees through the aggression and understands the unhappiness that motivates it.
As such, “Our Friend” is both a tribute to a friend and to those rare people who are too humble to realize their own wisdom.
There’s an interesting moment in “Our Friend,” in which Dane tries to give Matthew advice. Matthew, a journalist, is about to take a foreign correspondent gig, and Dane advises him to stay home and spend more time with his family. Matthew, who is ambitious and functional in the usual way, more or less tells Dane, “Who are you to give me career advice when you don’t even have a career?” But soon you realize that Dane is so outside of the world and his own ego that he can see everything that’s going on.
The actors are good because they do unexpected things. Affleck plays Matthew as prickly and burdened, even before his wife’s diagnosis, and Dakota Johnson doesn’t play Nicole as some glorious life force but as an average 34-year-old woman dealt the worst hand imaginable.
Like the prodigal son, they don’t deserve a friend like Dane — not because they’re so terrible, but because nobody deserves a friend like Dane. He is the gift of grace that comes out of nowhere.