Film Review: Your Friends and Neighbors

The Joylessness Of Sex

Over it’s brilliant opening credits, Your Friends And Neighbors reveals it’s intent and subject matter immediately and perfectly. Behind some staid Alex Katz paintings of highbrow cocktail party-attending professionals wearing pastel-colored suits plays Metellica’s Enter Sandman performed by a group using only four cellos. The piece’s classical nuance is, almost subliminally, subverted and made slightly disturbing by its underlying anarchy. Eventually, after we see how awful most of the cast treats each other, all is made clear: no amount of civility and usage of 35 cent words can ever hide souls as black as these. Yes friends, we’re back in writer/director Neil LaBute’s dark forest and even those who’ve already squirmed their way through his In The Company Of Men haven’t seen anything nearly as nihilistic, as condemning of our modern human condition as Your Friends And Neighbors (this movie, which contains no violence and almost no nudity, was originally given an NC-17 rating by the MPAA. On appeal, it was reduced to an R). And just as its title suggests, these monsters may only be a hair’s breadth away.

The film jokingly lists its six characters’ names in the final credits as Mary, Barry, Terri, Jerry, Cheri and Cary but no one in the film ever calls anyone by name (they don’t have nearly enough respect for each other to go to the bother). This nameless name-calling also lends the screenplay some hard-earned authenticity. It’s jarring to find yourself halfway through a film and still only able to identify the characters by description but it also sounds incredibly natural, it sounds real. Think of the last person you talked to. How many times did you have to say their name out loud? You didn’t because that’s only a theatrical device, a “helper” for the slower people in the audience.

One last clever gimmick employed in this film is that no one other than its six characters has any speaking roles whatsoever. No waiter ever asks for their order, no doorman offers a “Good day,” and no stranger ever approaches them asking for the time. These characters exist in a vacuum of their own discord. The input and opinions -- hell, the very existence of the entire outer world, is moot to them as they only believe that their gripes, their problems, their selves is the only thing that matters.

In a nutshell, the film is a simple sexual roundelay between six people, four of which are in a relationship. Aaron Eckhart (please Mr. LaBute, continue to cast this great actor in all of your films) and Amy Brenneman are married but they’re troubled by some unspoken tensions, some powerful undertow that keeps pulling them further and further apart. We know some things need fixing when Eckhart admits to a coworker fairly early on that he’d rather masturbate than have sex with another human. Reminds me of that old Woody Allen line “Don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love,” but his admission clearly indicates either a loss or fear of intimacy.

Ben Stiller and Catherine Keener are lovers but seem to be disgusted by each other from their very first scene. And that they’re having sex in that first scene while openly displaying those feelings doesn’t bode well for their future. Frustrated in that relationship, Stiller initiates an affair with Brenneman but when their first rendezvous doesn’t turn out to be the joyous experience they both expected, tensions are ratcheted even higher and malicious endeavors are increased. Just halfway through the film, these people’s selfish and hateful attitudes are pulled so tight we almost fear that their intense inner anger could, when combined, tear the very planet apart.

Nastassja Kinski is the somewhat innocent outsider unlucky enough to get herself involved with this group. A gallery employee with the misfortune of meeting each of these art-loving psychopaths as they each separately peruse her museum supplies this film with one of its few honest laughs. Each character, looking at the same exact painting, asks her if it’s crooked and she continually tells them No, that’s the way it’s supposed to be presented. Again, these four characters are so self-involved that their first inclination is that it’s the world that’s out of whack, not them.

In a class by himself is actor Jason Patric, who also produced this film. His character, a single friend of the others working in some capacity in the medical field, is so predatory, so vicious, that he seems completely able to sustain himself on only the misery and fear he causes in others. The fact that his victims are mostly of the opposite sex (but not always) makes him even more disturbing than Eckhart’s Chad in In The Company Of Men. In that film, LaBute’s first, Chad set out to destroy “only” one single woman as payback for all the wrongs he imagined females have perpetrated on men. But in this film, Patric is a vampire who seems to see the whole world as his for the taking. In one of the most chilling, most disgusting scenes I’ve seen in my 40 years, the three men sit in a steam room and tell each other of the best sex they ever had. That Patric’s story revolves around a homosexual rape and, even worse, obviously feels no remorse about it at all is something I wish I could remove from my memory. Forget all the monster movies you’ve ever seen, LaBute seems to be saying, the truest evil in this world can’t be found under the bed or in a closet in the dark but by simply asking someone if they’re free tonight; dealing with the opposite sex, and sex itself, makes monsters of us all.

This deadly intelligent and articulate film isn’t all perfect. Unlike In The Company’s double twist at the end, Your Friends And Neighbors doesn’t seem to know where to land at its conclusion. With no complicated or surprising plot machinations to mull over, one walks away from it dazed and weary. While there’s no fake happy ending, there’s no comeuppance for any of the characters, either. One assumes they’ll just go on as they have until they eventually implode from their own misbehavior. Aside from wanting to take a shower, I didn’t know quite what to do with myself after seeing it; it disturbed me that much.

Brilliant, but only for viewers with iron stomachs.

3.5*'s out of 4 (Very Good)