|
|
No Easy Pieces: Neil LaBute's sexual healing
L.A. Weekly - August 21-27, 1998
By Manohla Dargis
When did American movies get so sexless? In movie after
movie, it's the same: a man, a woman, discreet lighting, no
bad angles; as with happy endings, orgasms are inevitable.
For the most part, you'd have to go back to the '70s to find a
scene in which two adults hump without the gauzed-over
niceties; if it's a gay movie, you'd have to retreat to the '80s.
The irony is that while modern movies tend to be willfully
tame, the sex scenes function the same way that the money
shot functions in porn: as the payoff for everything that's come
before, our reward for all the foreplay chatter. Sex scenes
these days are a time-out not just for the characters but the
audience: a chance to take a break from the story and check
out the jiggle factor of the leading lady's tits, or to snicker at
some aging idol's mortified rear end. As soon as the plot revs
up again, though, sex gets banished from the narrative. It says
more than we probably care to know that about the only time
sex gets integrated into the plot of a movie is when it's
pathological, as with a Paul Verhoeven thriller or a slasher
picture, films in which sex isn't just rough, but lethal.
No one gets killed in Neil LaBute's Your Friends &
Neighbors, though there are plenty of lethal passions in
evidence from the very first scene, in which actor Jason
Patric, drenched in sweat, pantomimes sex alone in his bed. A
beautiful hater and dedicated sack artist, Patric's character,
Cary - who, like all the characters in the movie, is named only
in the credits - has committed himself to perfecting his
bedroom technique, primarily to wreak havoc on women. (He
doesn't just tape his pillow talk for playback, he clocks it with
a stopwatch.) Although the character has the dead eyes of a
killer, his technique seems to have worked, even if we have to
take his word for it. LaBute never shows Cary literally
screwing - we see him shrieking at some blond huddled in his
bathroom and, later, delivering curious comfort to another
partner - but the writer-director does let the character talk his
dirty, mean talk, mainly to himself and the two friends with
whom he occasionally socializes: Barry, a hapless married
man played by Aaron Eckhart, and Jerry, a college theater
professor in a salt-and-pepper goatee, played by Ben Stiller.
Barry has just moved into a house with his wife, Mary, played
by Amy Brenneman, while Jerry lives with Catherine Keener's
advertising copywriter, Terri, a fierce, restless woman of the
kind that doesn't often make it into American movies without
an ice pick in hand. Rounding out the group is Nastassja
Kinski as Cheri (LaBute no doubt thinks giving the characters
rhyming names is cute, but it's the kind of gimmick that
underscores a penchant for cleverness over meaning), a
gallery worker who enters the group by way of an affair. But
before she's wedged into the film, what gets the story going is
Jerry's sudden, unsolicited come-on to Mary in her own living
room while their unsuspecting partners are in the kitchen
getting dessert and coffee ready. Coordinated in a giggled
hush, that proposal is the first equation in a calculus of desire
in which lovers are added, subtracted, multiplied and divided,
relationships begun and ended. And while there's nothing
particularly remarkable about the various intersecting subplots
and character motivations - familiar, really, from any number
of daytime soaps - what is remarkable is the absolute cool
with which LaBute charts his story. Like Patric's character,
the director has the soul of an assassin.
Your Friends & Neighbors is the first American movie in
memory where sex isn't just a dividend, something, say, to
prop up a sagging plot, or sales in the foreign market. It
actually has something to do with the rest of everyday life.
The film itself isn't remotely sexy, but it is filled with sex - sex
talk, sex sweat, sex cruelty. The characters aren't always
fucking (usually they're not), but when they're out of bed
they're either obsessing over the sex they did have or most
often didn't. The men function as uneasy allies in what can
only superficially be called a war of the sexes - there's too
much equal-opportunity malevolence to qualify for war -
while the women tend to react to the men defensively, and be
more sentimentally realized. Although it's hard to gauge where
LaBute stands, he's not entirely liberated from cliche: He
saves his nastiest, zingiest lines for the men and the more
cryptic emotions for the women. Some of this has to do with
the casting. While Eckhart and Brenneman are both tagged as
losers, she brings a depth to her pathos - and a glint of malice
- that he never summons. Keener and Patric play parallel
types, his and hers predators, but while he remains
one-dimensional, a sexed-up Terminator, she could have
stepped out of a Mary Gaitskill story. All angles, with a hard,
sneery mouth, Keener is terrific as the film's designated
snatch, a woman who steps on a man's sentences and asserts
fucking is fucking, not sharing and caring. It's a great role
made greater by an actor who never loses sight of her
character's humanity.
If only the same could be said for LaBute. Your Friends &
Neighbors is a huge leap forward for the director, whose first
film was In the Company of Men, but it's disappointing nearly
as often as it's enlivening. LaBute has a background in theater
(he's written a number of plays), and he hasn't grasped that
certain theatrical devices - quasi-Brechtian hooks,
exaggerated types who play large rather than intimate - don't
necessarily translate when blown up for screen. Patric's Cary,
who wears a white lab coat and does something unspecific
and slightly menacing in a medical office, is the most extreme
character in the film, but he's also the least recognizably
human, an upmarket variation on the misogynist Eckhart
played in LaBute's debut. A minor cause celebre when it was
released last year, In the Company of Men, a film about two
corporate types who seduce a woman to break her heart,
inflamed critical attention for its writing and audacity. Despite
the crypto-Mamet rhythms of its dialogue, the movie is
crudely made and groaningly obvious; it panders to a liberal
audience who want their sexual politics delivered without the
benefit of dialectics.
Your Friends & Neighbors isn't a triumph of dialectical
thinking, but it does offer up a world-view that is infinitely
more complex than either LaBute's first film or much of
current American cinema: No one is nice in the movie, no one
justifies her acts of unkindness with psychology or by
dredging through her childhood, no one is redeemed or
redeemable, no one is saved. Things happen, including
unhappiness. That may not sound like much - and certainly it
isn't enough for LaBute to finish his movie - but these days,
it's as close to radical, genuinely personal filmmaking as most
of our directors dare to get. To an extent, his refusal to
acquiesce to a commercial imperative such as the sure-fire
happy ending (Hollywood's version of the multiple orgasm) is
what makes the film seem like such a throwback. Your
Friends & Neighbors outwardly recalls movies such as Five
Easy Pieces and Bad Timing in its depiction of male
self-loathing, but in some ways it scans emotionally closer to
Sam Peckinpah's sordid freak-out, Straw Dogs. (Women's
lib made for some fascinating male anxiety.) LaBute's not as
talented as Peckinpah - he has the visual equivalent of a tin
ear - but he has a similar way of getting under your skin. I
can't remember another recent movie that I liked so
uncomfortably.
Not that LaBute doesn't have a ways to go. He's still learning
what to do with the camera (the cinematographer here is
Nancy Schreiber, who livens up LaBute's self-consciously
mannered choreography), and he has a belief in his own
cleverness that could prove debilitating. Mainly, though, he
could use some gentleness. LaBute's cruelty can be very, very
funny, but too often it's a sour kind of funny. Mean is easy;
compassion is tougher. LaBute is one of the most exciting
young American writer-directors we have - he's the smart Hal
Hartley - and while he doesn't have Hartley's intuitive visual
sense, when his characters speak they're doing more than
rattling the bars in the filmmaker's prison house of language.
They're investing life in their words, and in their reason for
being. When they're not - as in a scene in which the nicest
character in the movie mocks her lover's impotence - you can
feel LaBute losing faith. He sells out his characters too easily,
and grubs for the audience's attention with jokes that simply
shock instead of waking us. He'd rather make us wince than
feel or think, which is why the film's end, a cockeyed coda,
isn't just ridiculous, it's a cop-out. Up till then, though, Your
Friends & Neighbors is the most interesting game in town,
and one of the best American movies you'll see all year.
Copyright © 1998 L.A. Weekly. All rights reserved.
|
