It takes a certain kind of person to adopt a Great Dane. That person dies early in The Friend, leaving Naomi Watts to deal with his poor pooch in a sleek film adaptation of Sigrid Nunez's novel.

Before his death, French actor Alain Delon had said that he wanted his dog, Loubo, to be put to sleep when he died. Delon believed that the bond between him and his rescued Belgian Malinois was so strong that the dog would miss him terribly when he died, and he wanted to spare his pet that pain. (Delon's children eventually assured the press that Loubo would be spared.)

How do you explain death to a dog? That question, and a few others that go deeper than we might expect from a “dog movie,” lend intellectual heft to “The Friend,” a gentle drama about coping with grief that provides audiences with a 180-pound emotional support animal in the form of Apollo, a harlequin Great Dane who misses his owner and is headed for the proverbial glue factory unless a generous enough human agrees to adopt him. Naomi Watts plays that human in a typical crowd-pleaser with a little more on its mind than the typical dog-centric tearjerker.

It’s hard enough explaining death to people, most of whom would rather not think about it — an unfortunate situation for many pet owners, who fail to properly plan for what will happen to their companions when they die. Not so for Walter Meredith (Bill Murray), a widely admired old-school author — the kind who used to flirt with his students, before times changed and allegations of misconduct cut his teaching career short — who bequeaths the elk-sized pooch to his favorite student/one-time fling, Iris (Watts).