Neil LaBute is an American playwright/writer/ director who burst on to the movie scene in 1997 with In the Company of Men, a tale of misogynistic manipulation that left many with a sour taste (as it was meant to do). His follow-up a year later, Your Friends and Neighbours, expanded the palette, giving us thoroughgoing misanthropy instead of mere putative misogyny. Like a Woody Allen with all the wit but much less heart, LaBute eviscerated his characters, pinning down their inner darkness and putting it on riveting display for the rest of us. Never has a sex scene been so coolly unerotic or so uncomfortably amusing; never has the confession of a lying, womanising bastard been so sympathetic.
Whether such hard-edged depictions of human nature and relationships are to your taste or not, it is undeniable that LaBute was a distinctive new voice. It is seldom that, right from the start, a filmmaker is so confidently himself or herself. No low-brow hack work to get started, no half-baked introductory projects — just bam! LaBute is here.
But things went a bit avocado-shaped after that. It was as though LaBute did his apprenticeship after he’d made his masterpiece. He followed Your Friends and Neighbours with Nurse Betty, based on someone else’s script, and altogether lighter and funnier. It was a sweet, fun movie, no doubt about it, and though off-beat it lacked the LaBute touch. Where was the man nicknamed LaBrute? And his next project, the adaptation of AS Byatt’s novel Possession, went off in another direction altogether — that of the literary mystery-cum-love-story. It left many dissatisfied.
His new movie, The Shape of Things, seems like a deliberate attempt to find his own voice once more. Trouble is, it doesn’t feel like the next step beyond Your Friends and Neighbours — it feels like something LaBute could have worked up before In the Company of Men. Based on a play he mounted last year, The Shape of Things reshuffles his familiar themes, except this time he’s out to prove that women can be as manipulative as men.
Paul Rudd is Adam, a young man without much style or grace; he starts acquiring those qualities only after he has met and fallen in love with funky, iconoclastic artist Evelyn (Rachel Weisz). I can’t tell you any more without giving the plot away; that’s how little plot there is, in fact. In many ways, LaBute could have gone much further — the title refers to penises, for instance, and one expected more in the way of a barbed investigation of masculinity and male/ female interactions, but LaBute doesn’t take the opportunity.
The movie is very talky (showing its theatrical ancestry), and the interplay is sometimes rather flat, which has something to do with the movie’s very plain cinematography. That would be a good thing if it allowed us to concentrate on the characters and what they are saying or doing, but often what they are saying or doing isn’t interesting enough in itself.
The Shape of Things is undeniably interesting, even if it is a curious failure rather than an outright success. It heats up considerably towards its end, but by then audiences may have stopped caring. LaBute has rediscovered his bite, which is doubtless a good thing — we need more filmmakers willing to explore the darkness within. We just need more in the way of narrative reasons to go there.