Susan Granger's review of "YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS" (Gramercy Pictures)
Neil LaBute's caustic, dark comedy about sexual politics is a follow-up to "In the Company of Men" and similar in its edgy, tough-talking bitterness and emphasis on emotional isolation. Rather than the singles scene, this time he attacks marital relations, focusing - like a voyeur - on two upper middle-class couples. Ben Stiller plays an analytical, pretentious college drama professor with the disturbing habit of talking continually during sex. Catherine Keener is his cynical, live-in girl-friend. "Love," she says succinctly, "is a disease." His buddy, Aaron Eckhart, suffers from sexual dysfunction, leaving Amy Brenneman, as his gentle, dissatisfied wife, with perpetual tears in her eyes. The guys work out at the gym with Jason Patric, a calculating misogynist who enjoys humiliating the women in his life and tape-recording raunchy sexual banter while he's exercising. And Nastassja Kinski meets the other five characters in her job as an assistant in an gallery; clearly, she's desperate for a significant relationship wherever she can find it. Basically, this is a nasty, sexually explicit social commentary about selfish, egocentric, abrasive losers who love to verbalize about the awful choices they make that wreck their lives. The steam-room scene in which the men brag about the best sex they ever had is one of the most appalling I've seen on the screen. Obviously, what Neil LaBute is trying to communicate is that these hateful on-screen people are not larger-than-life; instead, they're similar to the excruciatingly vulnerable people we all meet every day, at home and at work. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Your Friends and Neighbors" is a slow-moving, often disturbing, bleak 5. Hey, if these folks were real, I'd be outta the neighborhood.
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