That last sentence is the kicker. Imagine it, if you will, attached to the back of Dante's Inferno. It makes me wish I had the nerve to sue distributor Gramercy for fraudulent advertising. I know that any jury in America forced to watch the movie would make me rich in compensatory damages.
Your Friends & Neighbors seems to be a movie that wants to show you the true nature of a certain type of people; the soullessness, isolation and capacity for psychic violence possessed by the white middle-class. However, since Your Friends & Neighbors crafts characters barely within striking distance of reality, it comes nowhere close to succeeding. Your Friends & Neighbors may actually reassure the very type of people that Neil LaBute wishes to shake up. No self-absorbed asshole is going to recognize themselves in any of the characters on screen.
For example, there's Catherine Keener as Terri, who in the midst of
having sex with her husband Jerry (oh, yes), says, "Is there any chance
you could shut the fuck up?" I haven't been married, but I bet that
there are situations one person could say this to another during sex, particularly
if one person has drunk so much they have no inhibitions left and are in
their most reptilian, thoughtless state. Hey, okay, maybe.
But not only does Keener's character go on to not act drunk, her character
goes on and on about how she wants her partner to be quiet. In fact,
later in the movie, after she's bedded down Natassja Kinski's Cheri, she
compliments the sex by saying, "You were very good. Very...quiet."
Other similar scenes give you the idea that Keener's character is obsessive
about the other character being silent which, frankly, is absurd.
I can certainly see LaBute once having lunch with a woman friend who told
him that she can't come if the other person is making any noise, and him
seeing this as a grand metaphor for how sex, an act that is supposed to
bring people together, can be an act of isolation. But LaBute's lack
of subtlety takes this idea to the point that Keener's Terri comes off
as a thwarted necrophiliac. Now goodness knows there are thwarted
necrophiliacs in this society, but not enough, I suspect, to use them as
a convincing
argument about the lonely isolation at the heart of the middle class.
The apex of LaBute's invention is Cary, played by Jason Patric (also a
produceron the film). Cary is a literally incredible creation, an
angry, swaggering chunk of brutality
brimming with self-righteousness and contempt behind a handsome demeanor.
This seems to be the sort of thing that LaBute excels at--Cary seems a
close cousin to Chad, Aaron Eckhart's character in LaBute's previous movie,
In the Company of Men. But whereas Chad had enough of a relation
to real life to cause chills, Cary is a doctor that goes into a screaming
rage when a woman he's brought over to fuck has her period on his sheets.
The scene is sharply written enough that I could almost, almost, almost
buy it...if the character was not a doctor. I've had friends and
roommates that were nurses, med school students, and actual residents and
there is no way, no matter how vaginaphobic, that an actual doctor is going
to freak out over blood on his sheets. It just has no basis in reality
at all. Which if you're trying to make a point about modern society
is not a good thing.
LaBute's attacks are so easy, so cheap and so obvious, yet delivered
with such extreme commitment and talent, I would almost believe that Your
Friends & Neighbors is actually a parody of the type of serious drama
that castigates the middle class for their soullessness, isolation and
capacity for psychic violence. (And I'm not one to play the parody
card very often.) This would explain why I kept laughing toward
the end when, really, almost all of the characters end up in their own
various hells. As with In the Company of Men, the bad are rewarded
and the good are stripped of illusions about themselves, a view of life
that most people who think of themselves as good surely torture themselves
with when they're gripped
with despair. But Your Friends & Neighbors is the work of
an artist so far afield it remains comically unconvincing. If LaBute
can throw all of his powers into either something more personal or more
whimsical, he might have something. But if he continues down this
path, he'll be mighty unwatchable mighty soon, and accomplish little nothing
more than confusing some
impressionable college students.
All material on these pages is © 2000 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution, all other rights are reserved.