Movies
Your Friends and Neighbors
Neil LaBute's encore to In the Company of Men is not as infuriating, though provoking nevertheless. Provoking of calmer discussion, that is, in place of fury. This response would be entirely appropriate, since the principal subject under consideration is the inability of men and women to communicate. (Not just man to woman, but man to man and woman to woman as well.) And the more particular subject of copulation, Subject A in the lexicon of Preston Sturges, is one that nearly everyone can take an interest in, however different their ideas may be on how openly and publicly they care to discuss it. Aaron Eckhart, performing a kind of penance for his Machiavellian villainy in the earlier LaBute film, and putting on an extra forty pounds and an overgrown mustache as part of his self-abasement, gets to be the schlub this time, the unsatisfying and unsatisfied husband ("Nobody makes me come the way I do") of Amy Brenneman: all that hair and still not happy. Jason Patric, too good-looking for his own good, takes over the duties of Total Asshole, a repressed homosexual who vents his hostilities on a merry-go-round of willing women. (Vivid vignette: talking on the phone in his Ob-Gyn office, he idly tosses a styrofoam fetus into the air in tight football spirals, then punts it across the room upon hanging up.) But Ben Stiller has the juiciest, and funniest, role, the Drama Department bearded egghead whose verbal urges are forever getting in a tangle with his physical urges. The budget is up from LaBute's first film, but the emotional temperature is, if anything, down several degrees. The atmosphere is antiseptic, the point of view unsympathetically clinical, the diagnosis misanthropic (the chiselled and planed portraits by the contemporary painter Alex Katz behind the credits -- cigar-store Indians of urban Angst -- do not mislead us), and the viewer's best defense against despair is the visibility of the puppet strings. Catherine Keener, Nastassja Kinski. 1998.
Reader Rating:
MPAA Rating: R