A woman loses her friend to suicide and inherits his dog, by his wish. The dog is a Great Dane, the size of a pony, who grieves for its companion, the woman’s friend, steadfastly. It has none of the embarrassment that people can sometimes feel about their own grief, its depth and insistence, its noisiness. The dog lies on the woman’s bed, taking up space, and though the metaphor is obvious – a big grief, a big animal – it isn’t only a metaphor. Apollo, for such is his name, is real enough, and dog enough, to cause a mess.

Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend (2018) is one of the defter entries in a contemporary catalogue of essayistic novels that blur the boundaries between fiction and memoir. (Rachel Cusk is the most prominent exponent of the style.) The unnamed narrator of Nunez’s novel is, like Nunez, a writer and a teacher of writing. The dead friend, also unnamed, was a writer, too: a gentleman of the old school, womanising and self-centred. The Friend is a novel about writers and writing, specifically about writers’ failures to write, and their failures to live. To be a writer is itself a kind of failure, a retreat from life to the removal of the page. In the novel, the mechanics of adopting a grieving dog – which include the threat of eviction from a pet-unfriendly, rent-controlled New York apartment – are merely a strand in a braid of philosophical enquiries, quotations, and sly comment on the novel-in-progress that has become the novel we are reading.

In this adaptation, the emphasis is reversed, so that Apollo and his keeping becomes a thin plot. Nunez’s narrator, now named Iris, is played by Naomi Watts. Apollo is played by a Great Dane named Bing. It is hard to pick which of the two is a more sincere performance, but I would probably give it to Bing, whose regal head and particoloured gaze (one eye is brown one is blue) convey a ceaseless sadness. His black spots add clownishness to dignity like pepper adds flavour to the dish; no spotted dog can understand how droll it really looks.

Bill Murray as Walter and Naomi Watts as Iris in The Friend (courtesy of Maslow Entertainment)

A line from the novel, spoken by Iris in voiceover, forms the refrain of the film: ‘What will happen to the dog?’ Weighing in on the question is Iris’s well-meaning neighbour, Marjorie (Ann Dowd), her building’s superintendent, Hektor (Felix Solis), and her dead friend Walter’s ex-wives, his colleagues, and his adult daughter. Mostly they agree that Iris should surrender Apollo so she does not lose her rent-controlled apartment, while Hektor is required to do his job, which means passing on warnings of increasing severity to Iris from the landlord. A side plot, not in the novel, involves Iris co-editing a book of Walter’s correspondence with his daughter, Val (Sarah Pidgeon), which at least allows for one good joke at the expense of publishers and their ambulance-chasing rapaciousness. Death can be a lucrative career move.

Walter is played mostly in flashback by – who else? – Bill Murray, whose bloodhound face is a gift for playing rogues and roués. I say ‘mostly’ because the film’s best scene is a hypothetical in which Walter meets with Iris to debate their respective motivations – his in killing himself, hers in writing about it. If Walter had the right to decide to end his life, does Iris have a right to use that life and death in her fiction? (I’d say yes, but I’m a writer.) ‘Can you make me Italian?’ Walter asks, of his novelised self. ‘Everybody wants to be Italian,’ Iris laughs, making him English, instead. This scene is the closest the film gets to the inquisitive and lightly ironic tone of Nunez’s book, and it also dramatises that thing the bereaved dream of: a final meeting with the dead, to ask why – why did you leave me?

A film adaptation of a book should be judged on its own merits, and unfortunately for co-directors and screenwriters Scott McGehee and David Siegel, their film is mediocre: watchable, yet totally forgettable. It opens with a shot of the East River foreshore and never rises, visually, above these New York clichés. Here is Washington Square Park prettily lit in the winter; here is the subway, here is the gleaming midtown skyline. Perhaps only Nora Ephron could get away with these choices, but, then again, her comic scripts were properly lively; her New York films thrived on unexpected dialogue played out against postcard scenery.

Here we get the scenery, but none of the vividness of character needed to make The Friend succeed the way its makers might have hoped for. The hypothetical scene with Iris and Walter holds out the tantalising promise of another, more intelligent film, one willing to investigate the artifice of filmmaking itself, and of literature. The string-laden score by Jay Wadley and Trevor Gureckis is sentimental; the whole film is sentimental. Dog saves woman, and woman saves dog, and the two of them stride off into the sunset.

The Friend (Maslow Entertainment) is released nationally on July 31.