In 'The Friend,' a Great Dane is a great movie star

Bing the dog is the best part of a cluttered New York drama

Just two great actors out for a stroll in New York City. (Bleecker Street)

“The Friend” is like if “Marley & Me” was a short story in the New Yorker. The story of a New York woman whose life (and rent-controlled apartment) are upended by a gigantic dog seems like it would be fodder for a zany family comedy.

Instead, the film from Scott McGehee and David Siegel, based on the novel by Sigrid Nunez, is a meditation on grieving. The big dog serves as a metaphor for the painful emotions that can overwhelm us, especially if we don’t deal with them.

First and foremost, the dog is fantastic in this movie. A 150-pound black-and-white Great Dane with one blue eye and one brown eye, Apollo (played by an Iowa dog named Bing) has genuine star power.

Instead of trying to seem ingratiating and adorable, he seems sort of aloof and melancholy, and like all great movie stars immediately commands attention in a scene. Unfortunately, “The Friend” also has humans, a lot of humans, that aren’t nearly as compelling as Apollo.

The heart of the story is that Iris (Naomi Watts), a creative writer professor, unexpectedly inherits Apollo when her mentor, an acclaimed Norman Mailer-esque novelist named Walter (Bill Murray), takes his own life.

Apollo seems just as uneasy around Iris as she does around him, although she learns that he loves to be read to, a vestige of his old bond with Walter. As Iris tries to make room for this new creature in her life, human and dog work through their grief together. Both of them are always looking towards the door, expecting Walter to walk in, but eventually have to accept that he’s not coming home, and turn to each other.

The film takes a while to zero in on this relationship, because the first half of “The Friend” is cluttered with other extraneous characters, including Walter’s three ex-wives, his daughter, his agent, and other assorted friends and co-workers. I get the sense that this was an attempt to bring as much as Nunez’s novel onto the screen as possible, but most of the characters seem hastily-conceived, their motives opaque, their presence distracting.

“The Friend” settles in in the third act, particularly in a wrenching scene where Iris imagines a conversation with Walter and gets to express the emotions she’s bottled up inside. Murray, incidentally, is hardly in the movie despite his face prominently on the poster, but he does really fine, understated work when he appears. He and the dog do bring the same sort of energy to the screen.

McGehee and Siegel have made some really strong, character-driven movies before (“Montana Story,” “What Maisie Knew”) which feel grounded in real emotion and tentative connections between people. “The Friend,” I think, gets away from them a little, cluttering the screen with subplots about the New York publishing world and the backstories of supporting characters we hardly know.

They should have followed my advice for what to do when you feel overwhelmed at a crowded party: Go hang out with the dog.

“The Friend” opens Friday in theaters. In Madison, it will play at AMC Fitchburg 18 and Marcus Palace.