director/screenwriter
Neil LaBute
producers
Steve Golin
Jason Patric
cinematographer
Nancy Schreiber
music
Apocalyptica
editor
Joel Plotch
cast
Ben Stiller (Jerry)
Catherine Keener (Terri)
Aaron Eckhart (Barry)
Amy Brenneman (Mary)
Natassja Kinski (Cheri)
Jason Patric (Cary)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 100m
u.s.
release: 8/21/98
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other neil
labute films
reviewed on this website:
- in
the company of men
- nurse betty
- possession
- the shape of things
- the wicker man (2006)
|
The
characters in Neil LaBute's universe aren't quite like us --
they're abstract -- yet in some ways they're more like us than
we like to admit. LaBute doesn't stylize his characters so much
that we can stand at a comfortable distance from them, and that
bothered a lot of people who saw his debut, In
the Company of Men. Those people called LaBute's vision
cold and hollow, as if they experienced his work as a personal
slap at them. That says more about the critic than about the
work.
LaBute's second film, Your Friends & Neighbors, won't
win him any converts (the way Quentin Tarantino's Pulp
Fiction managed to charm some viewers who'd hated Reservoir Dogs), but for those
who appreciated Company, it's a keeper. As always, LaBute
points his microscope at a microcosm of sexual politics, except
here he has twice the number of people -- three men, three women
-- and many more opportunities for those painfully funny (or
just painful) LaBute moments in which characters are explicitly
candid without really saying anything. And in LaBute's world
it hardly matters if nobody really says anything, because nobody
really listens, either.
In an unnamed Anycity (the film has no exterior shots), two couples
-- the married Barry and Mary (Aaron Eckhart and Amy Brenneman),
the cohabitating Jerry and Terri (Ben Stiller and Catherine Keener)
-- fumble in their respective beds. The women grit their teeth
and endure the strained lovemaking of their insecure men, who
see sex as a way of measuring up. "Is it me?" the men
keep asking. "Yes, it's you" seems the proper answer,
though LaBute only has one woman say that in a nonsexual context.
Rounding out this sextet (or bad-sextet) are Cheri (Natassja
Kinski), a friendly lesbian, and Cary (Jason Patric), an unfriendly
womanizer.
LaBute doesn't tell stories, exactly; he sets up his people and
lets them knock each other down, and Your Friends & Neighbors
has a looser structure than the rigorous In the Company of
Men, which marched to its grim conclusion like a man to the
gallows. Those who hissed Aaron Eckhart's Chad in Company
will be amused to see him here, pudgy and with an ugly mustache,
playing someone closer to Chad's stooge Howard. Any film in which
Eckhart plays the most sympathetic character is full of surprises,
not the least of which is Jason Patric, shaking himself awake
to give a rancid, scowling performance -- a mesmerizing portrait
of misogyny that makes Chad look like Alan Alda. The actors are
fine across the board, but the stand-out is Catherine Keener,
whose Terri is snappish and blunt but also the movie's voice
of reason, forever pleading for silence -- an end to the constant
banal babble.
LaBute likes symbolic names. In Company he had Chad the
cad, Howard the coward, and Christine the pristine; here everyone
has rhyming names. These people have nothing in common, and no
poetry in their lives, besides their names. Yet they sleep with
each other, or hang out together, out of convenience. LaBute
doesn't tell us how any of them met; they stand for the busy
drones in any city who latch onto people just to be "social."
The Ben Stiller character, a drama professor, keeps talking about
"fate"; that's what people say to justify bad relationships.
We're just hollow bodies, LaBute is saying, going through the
motions of love and friendship to avoid being alone -- which
produces a more piercing loneliness: the awareness that your
friends and neighbors, and even lovers, don't really know you
and never really will. |