Aarcflick

 It takes a special kind of person to adopt a Great Dane. That person dies early in "The Friend," leaving Naomi Watts to care for her poor dog in a short adaptation of Sigrid Núñez's novel. Before his death, French actor Alain Delon had expressed his wish that his dog, Loubo, be euthanized upon his passing. Delon believed the bond between him and his rescued Belgian Malinois was so strong that the dog would miss him terribly when he died, and he preferred to spare him that pain. (In the end, Delon's children assured the press that Loubo would be saved.) How do you explain death to a dog? That question, and several others deeper than one might expect from a dog movie, lend intellectual weight to "The Friend," a gentle grief drama that offers its audience an 180-pound emotional support animal: Apollo, a harlequin Great Dane who misses his master and is headed to the proverbial glue factory unless a generous enough human agrees to adopt him. Naomi Watts plays t...