Shaun de Waal American movie of the week
Playwright Neil LaBute’s first film, In the Company of Men (never released theatrically in South Africa, but now on video) is a nasty tale of twisted games- playing. It is driven by the character of an amoral man seeking revenge on womanhood in general, and picking on one vulnerable woman to do it.
LaBute’s second movie, Your Friends and Neighbours, is nearly as nasty – you will laugh even as you wince – and the amoral male pops up again, this time in the form of Jason Patric’s coolly manipulative womaniser. LaBute seems to see this figure as the epitome of modern masculinity, a masculinity of egotistical oneupmanship in which sex is a form of scorched-earth warfare.
Set against this portrait of rapacious manhood (co-producer Patric plays it brilliantly, with an almost psychotic calm) are two other men: Ben Stiller’s drama teacher, who may aspire to Patric’s cruel- Casanova status, and Aaron Eckhart’s hopeless husband, in some ways his opposite.
Between them and the equally troubled women in their lives – Amy Brenneman, Catherine Keener and Nastassja Kinski – they generate a sufficiently tangled web of sexual complications to justify one character’s comment that having relationships is clearly a kind of sickness.
It is instructive to compare LaBute’s world to that of Woody Allen, the old master of such dramatic territory. Allen’s tone is usually wry; LaBute is pitiless. Where Allen has a carefully and stylishly realised New York, LaBute has the generic American metropolis – which we barely see, so much of the film being in claustrophobic close-up.
And where Allen’s characters are hyper- self-aware and articulate to the point of garrulity, LaBute’s people seem barely able to finish a single sentence. Perhaps that has something to do with their inability to conduct happy relationships.