They're All Doing The Nasty

THE MOST DETESTABLE character in Neil LaBute's Your Friends and Neighbors is a misogynistic lothario played by Jason Patric. He's first seen tape-recording his own simulated sex act, rehearsing the amorous lines he'll use on his next victim. Later he launches into a vicious tirade against one of his (unseen) conquests, who has fouled his designer sheets with her menstrual blood. (On top of his woman-hating, he's anal retentive.) Worse still, he proudly tells his best friend (Aaron Eckhart) how he punished a woman who dumped him by sending her a note on hospital stationery informing her she was HIV-positive. "The bitch deserved it," he smugly explains.

As anyone who saw LaBute's incendiary first feature, "In the Company of Men," knows, this writer-director has a gift for creating loathsome leading men. Chad, the character Eckhart played in that film, was a white-collar sadist who took delight in humiliating both a deaf woman and a corporate rival. "Your Friends and Neighbors" is clearly the work of the same, misanthropically inclined observer. This time his focus is on the sexual relations between men and women. There are six unnamed characters, three men and three women, all of whom are engaged in either inflicting or enduring misery.

Ben Stiller, who plays a drama teacher, announces to his class while rehearsing a Restoration comedy: "It's all about f---ing." LaBute, who would like us to think he is writing a black neo-Restoration comedy for the '90s, clearly agrees. All the characters are introduced in bed, having a bad time. Stiller's razor-edged girlfriend (Catherine Keener) calls an abrupt halt to their coitus to complain about his incessant talking. The hapless Eckhart prefers masturbation to sex with his sweet, masochistic wife (Amy Brenneman), which makes her perk up when the wormy Stiller, her husband's friend, suggests they have an affair. Keener, meanwhile, takes Nastassja Kinski as a lover: what begins happily soon turns as sour as all the other affairs.

The nastiness of "In the Company of Men" felt new, shocking, revelatory. The nastiness of "Your Friends and Neighbors" feels old, mechanical, jejune. Too many writers have mined this scorched turf before--from Strindberg to savage early Edward Albee dramas to Wallace Shawn raging-id plays like "Marie and Bruce." LaBute isn't uncovering any shocking new truths about the human condition. A half hour into "Your Friends and Neighbors," you know everything you need to know about these characters. Dramatically, they've got nowhere to go--LaBute has closed the case against them from the get-go. Too many scenes--such as Patric's unlikely monologue about "the best lay he ever had"--feel as if they're just there for effect.

LaBute can turn an amusingly nasty phrase, but his deliberately theatrical direction makes this all-indoors movie more static than it needs to be. What keeps you in your seat is the acting. Keener, crisply and coolly playing against type, commands the screen. Brenneman says more with her eyes and her body than her sad, needy character says aloud. Patric is the only performer who seems to be trying too hard. Instead of playing against this guy's callousness, he underlines it. Why, you wonder, would anybody spend five minutes with this jerk? A hefty Eckhart is almost unrecognizable as the pathetic cuckold. Stiller, playing a dishonest weasel, is squirmily funny. But coming on the heels of "There's Something About Mary," the movie makes one think he's a glutton for punishment. Made up and shot to look creepy, Stiller gets as much abuse from LaBute as he did from the Farrelly brothers--though here the humiliations are more moral than physical. A couple more roles like these and he'll qualify for a Purple Heart.

© 1998