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BY KIM MORGAN
Your Friends
& Neighbors |
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Why don't you come up and sleaze me sometime?A film that opens with four sex scenes should be a turn-on, right? Not when the director is Neil LaBute. The writer and director of In the Company of Men, the most scathing exposition of male cruelty ever put to celluloid, sickens with sex in his newest picture, Your Friends & Neighbors, and he sickens right away. In the first scene, the face and chest of a good-looking man (Jason Patric) fill the frame. Sweating and thrusting, he is obviously having sex, but we never see his partner. Later it turns out that he was recording himself; he enjoys listening to his sexual technique while working out at the gym. Scene two: A pretentious, garrulous drama professor is whimsically simulating coitus with one of his pretty students as part of a lecture. "Art," he tells the class, "is always about sex." Scene three: The same professor, now coupling in earnest, is talking so much that his partner implores, "Is there any chance you're gonna shut the fuck up?" Scene four: A dumpy, red-faced yuppie is discussing his inability to please his wife sexually. In a flash of perverse pride, he proclaims, "Nobody makes me come the way I do." It's humorous and disturbing, but true to LaBute's style, it's decidedly unsexy. Behind every unfulfilled man, he suggests, is an equally unfulfilled woman, and from such ingredients healthy relationships are unlikely to be made. Your Friends & Neighbors dissects, dismembers and desecrates cherished ideas about love and sex. The film maintains a humorously grim outlook on the potential for pairing. Each of its couples, in echoes of Tolstoy, is emotionally and sexually dysfunctional in its own way. Terri (Catherine Keener) and Jerry (Ben Stiller), hip and unmarried, not only distrust one another's fidelity, but have incompatible sex styles to boot; "I have to hold my breath and make love like we're in a nursing home," Jerry complains. Husband and wife Barry (Aaron Eckhart) and Mary (Amy Brenneman) make futile attempts at sexual connection, but Barry is impotent, and Mary is having an affair with Jerry. Finally there is a pair of swinging singles--Cary (Patric), a sociopathic misogynist, and Cheri (Natassja Kinski), a bisexual lust object in love with Terri. Though it may sound overly confusing or hopelessly like Melrose Place, it's assuredly neither. Expertly written, perfectly acted and tersely paced, Your Friends is a black comedy that stings with a resonance many won't want to acknowledge. In the Company of Men was widely condemned by critics and public alike; not everyone has a taste for LaBute. Part David Mamet, part frat-boy date rapist, part social critic, LaBute will undoubtedly earn further opprobrium through his new film as an offensive, mean-spirited, misogynistic purveyor of cruelty. But in the best tradition of black comedy, LaBute makes us laugh at others' expense, but not without thinking about it. In chuckling over the viscous smarts of both men and--in this film--women, we are unearthing, and perhaps learning, more about our own perceptions than we would while crying over high drama. Working like an expectorant, the filmmaker loosens the unrealistic ideals and delusional rationalizations that clog up our heads like so much phlegm. And he doesn't moralize, he simply shows; we have to figure out the rest. Through demystification via the sledgehammer, LaBute manages to be surprising without being gratuitous, and his cruelties have a point. More playwright than filmmaker, he creates worlds of biting reality through allegorical extremes. In Your Friends, this is achieved through three hyper-representations of the modern male. Patric represents the alpha-male with a taste for the "revenge fuck," a man who yells at a woman for getting her period. His most memorable sexual experience is a high-school gang rape of a boy named Jimmy ("We were making love," he recalls, "like we were in the Mediterranean"). Eckhart (in a radical change from his chiseled Chad in In The Company of Men) is the paunchy, pathetic romantic who got married and now can't get it up. At the grocery store, picking up the sundries of daily life, he says to his wife, "I just think we need to do it more often and not make it special." He's a predictable, dorky cuckold. Stiller strikes closer to the average guy, but he's also an extreme. The confused product of PC politics at war with aggressive male biology, he is the sensitive, New Age hypocrite. He imagines himself a romantic, so he cheats with his friend's wife and thinks he's doing it for love; in reality, he's just sick of his girlfriend's smart mouth. It's cringe-worthy but worth watching. Painful, hilarious and immensely perceptive, Your Friends & Neighbors is a strangely satisfying experience. It won't make you want to get married or have sex any time soon, but it achieves what cinema rarely does: It makes thinking entertainment.
originally published August 26, 1998 |
