YOUR FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Gramercy Pictures/ Polygram Filmed Entertainment Director: Neil LaBute Writer: Neil LaBute Cast: Amy Brenneman, Aaron Eckhart, Catherine Keener, Nastassja Kinski, Jason Patric, Ben Stiller
Ever since the first Flintstone clubbed his buddy on the head over a woman some 2 million years ago, the world has been plagued by power politics. In the 1990s, we're more civilized. We use words instead of clubs. Our willingness to do damage to our fellows on the job over our business status was wonderfully interpreted by Neil LaBute in last year's "In the Company of Men," a picture which aroused many in the audience to want to throw clubs and stones at the screen. "In the Company of Men" featured a struggle between two co- workers, drinking buddies in fact, over possession of a high- status position in an office. Now, office politics takes a back seat to bedroom management in LaBute's "Your Friends & Neighbors," a movie which implicitly asks, "Wouldn't you love to spy on the folks next door with a hidden video camera?" LaBute appears to say that you're not so likely recognize the bland, hale-fellow sports you greet every day like the folks in "The Truman Show," but are more likely to discover that their everyday demeanor is just a pleasant act--as it is to the players in that Peter Weir film.
As with "In the Company of Men," LaBute's latest effort comes across not so much like a filmed play: that would be deadly. Rather, it's the sort of tale to which the stage could do equal justice. Whereas "Company" featured three players, "Friends" juxtaposes six people, three of each gender, and sets them off on a sexual roundelay exposing their intense needs, their vulnerabilities, their willingness to betray even best friends to satisfy their cravings. Freud was right: libido is everything. Just observe the opening scene, featuring college theater instructor Jerry (Ben Stiller) re-enacting a sexy Elizabethan scene with a student to the appreciative eyes of his adoring students. "What do these characters want?" he asks the class after thrusting up his partner's frilly skirt. "Sex." Life follows art which follows life in Neil LaBute's remarkable script which he directs sharply, satirically, humorously. "Friends and Neighbors" has a looser structure than its predecessor, as the six-member cast frenetically switch alliances. But LaBute's edginess is present virtually at every moment.
The six friends and neighbors are: Cary (Jason Patric), who works out with his pals Jerry (Ben Stiller) and Barry (Aaron Eckhart); Cheri (Nastassja Kinski), who meets the others while serving as an artist's assistant in a posh gallery; Mary (Amy Brenneman), who is unhappily married to Barry; and Terri (Catherine Keener), who is unhappily living with Jerry. Though the six frequently interact, they are quite different from one another in temperament. Terri is hard-shelled and cynical; Cary is intensely hostile to the women he beds and is fond of making tapes of his sexual banter; Mary is a gentle soul constantly at the verge of weeping; Jerry is talkative and analytical to a fault; Cheri is arty and desperate for a significant relationship with someone of either gender; and Barry has the appearance of a jock gone to seed--plump, mustachioed and bewildered. (Aaron Eckhart, who plays this last character, turned in a dynamite performance as the hostile and manipulative Chad in LaBute's previous work. For this role he gained quite a bit of weight, bleached his hair, and comes across as a wholly different personality.)
While no one on the street would begin to guess the neuroses that plague each one, the movie hones in on the unrequited needs that drive all to unstable frenzy. Jerry, for example, is looked up to by his students, a dynamic and highly competent teacher. But he has unbridled chutzpah. Soon after breaking bread with his live-in woman, his best friend Barry and Barry's wife Mary, he corners Mary to ask her whether he can call her. Breaking the taboo against an intimate relationship with your best friend's wife, he rationalizes: "You're married to Ben...OK he got there first...It's not a big deal." Mary is shocked but accepts. She does not yet know that Jerry is despised by his mistress for--among other things--talking incessantly during sex. Seeking a partner who does not talk while in bed, Jerry's wife winds up with Cheri, Barry remains unable to perform appropriately with Mary, and Cary, not satisfied with his one-night stands, comes on in an extraordinarily hostile and shocking way to Terri.
As the film comes to a close, Jerry is involved in a dress rehearsal of a play by William Wycherley, presumably that Seventeenth-Century playwright's "The Country Wife." Wycherley's London is inhabited exclusively by hookers, flirts, cuckolds and seducers, with one character, Horner, feigning impotence in order to have a go at women without their husbands' suspecting the worst. Neil LaBute indicates that we have not progressed one iota from Wycherley's vision. With his latest film, slickly and slyly acted by a company of men and women, he proves himself a writer-director with his fingers on the contemporary--and timeless-urban pulse.
Rated R. Running time: 100 minutes. (C) Harvey Karten 1998
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