One of those films where someone gets cancer and slowly dies, Our Friend (available to rent at the cost of a pre-pandemic movie ticket from digital streamers like Cineplex or YouTube) sounds like just the sort of thing most of us don’t need right now. Surprisingly, though, I think it might be just the thing.
Why? Because whether many of us have really taken the time to realize it or not, we have all lost a lot.
If you are anything like me, an overriding portion of your energies in the last year or so has been dedicated not to grief but to readjusting.
People have died. Others have lost their jobs. Whole industries and ways of life have wound to a stop. Yet for the majority, I suspect, the most keenly felt burden of these days has been the many small changes which in aggregate amount to something huge, profoundly irksome, even bone-wearying.
To make matters worse, precisely because of the nature of the situation, a freighter load of these adjustments, little agonies, and extra efforts has happened in isolation, without the customary condolences and encouragements of companionship.
(Reconnecting with a friend around New Year’s, I suddenly realized that apart from once or twice I had not physically left Langley Township since March.)
For many of us – individually and collectively – the small eternity of the last little while has really been mostly about survival.
And one of the hidden costs of simply surviving is too often forgetting to feel.
Our Friend picks up in an analogous situation. Based upon real persons, Matt Teague (Casey Affleck) learns of his wife Nicole’s (Dakota Johnson) terminal diagnosis and becomes consumed by the efforts required first to combat and then ameliorate the illness.
As the once vibrant actress and social butterfly descends into pallor, weakness, and some of the more difficult to deal with consequences of chronic pain, Matt and Nicole find themselves increasingly isolated as former friends begin to drift away from the discomfort.
One friend, though, Dane (Jason Segel), drops everything and stays. This is that story.
But it is also in many ways our story, or at least we might hope.
On one hand, it is a story of loneliness and heartbreak and grappling with the unskirtable prospect of an incomprehensible, world-altering loss. Yet in, with, and through all of this, it is also the story of the life-preserving character of a faithful friendship.
This might sound mawkish to you, as it might have to me before watching it.
But one thing the film helped me to realize – and indeed to feel – is the tenderizing power of gentleness amidst grief.
It is the simple humour on display, the simple forgiveness, the simple sticking around despite every obvious reason to go that amounts to something so powerful.
Like the many little touches of love it depicts – simple and increasingly undeserved – Our Friend delivers with a kind of aggregate greatness of little things done in great love.
It may not be flashy and may not be the kind of thing most of us, so busy surviving, think we want. But it just might be the thing we need.