Won't You Be My Neighbor

by Scotch

The six principal characters in writer-director Neil Labute's new film Your Friends & Neighbors are, for all intents and purposes, nameless. Nowhere in the film do any of them call each other by name. In fact, the only place their names are actually shown is in the end credits -- and their names all rhyme, like they're just afterthoughts, thrown in as a formality just for the technical need to list characters' names in the end credits. The names aren't necessary to tell this particular story.

Of those six characters, three are male (played by Ben Stiller, Aaron Eckhart, and Jason Patric), three are female (played by Catherine Keener, Amy Brenneman, and Nastassja Kinski), four of them are couples (Stiller and Keener, Eckhart and Brenneman), three of them cheat on their respective S.O.'s (Stiller with Brenneman, Keener with Kinski), one of them is a chilling, cruel misogynist (Patric), and all of them are terribly self-absorbed in their own special ways. They all meet one another, but the six of them are never together all at once. Their relationships are joyless, as are their escapist adulteries and one-nighters. They are all friends, but what exactly they see in each other is unclear. They visit the same places over and over again: a bookstore, a restaurant, a museum, a sauna, a hotel room, an art gallery, a supermarket. The city they inhabit is nameless. The characters could be anyone, anywhere, as the scenarios and the film's title imply.

Couple #1, Stiller and Keener: he's a drama professor, she's a tampon-box copy-writer; he's insulted because she repeatedly tells him to shut up with his excessive, impassioned love-talk while they're having sex; she's perpetually annoyed by his need to hear himself speak, in and out of bed, especially since he never really has anything to say.

Couple #2, Eckhart and Brenneman: he's a corporate stooge of unspecified type, she's apparently a sexual self-help writer; he's a flabby, insecure, ineffectual wimp who prefers his own hand as a sexual partner when he's even able to get it up; she's visibly mortified at the thought of having sex with her husband and reticent to even talk with anyone about the act, wincing at Keener's cavalier use of the word "fuck."

Kinski: she's a noncommittally friendly artist's assistant at a local gallery who encounters each of the other five characters on separate occasions, each of them looking at the same painting, each saying the same thing, yet each seeing the painting differently.

Patric: he's a shark-eyed, jut-jawed, simmering portrait of pure masculine evil, seeing women as worthless objects only occasionally worthy of submitting to his brutal sexual domination. He's essentially the next-generation version of the callous over-the-top woman-hater Chad (played by Aaron Eckhart, in a total 180 from his role in the new film) from Labute's 1997 film In the Company of Men; yet in a head-shaking display of twisted irony, Patric is a gynecologist -- there's a hilarious scene in which he sits in his white lab coat and talks perfunctorily on the phone with a colleague, all the while idly tossing around a plastic model of a fetus like it's a Nerf football.

Labute introduces the members of the aforementioned two couples having dinner together, the four of them already on emotional territory all too familiar to even the best of us: in the ugly thick of creeping dissatisfaction with how their long-term relationships are turning out. Stiller and Keener are both ardently sick of one another, and the film's destructive dynamic slips into motion when they cheat on each other independently: Stiller with Brenneman, Keener with Kinski. The Stiller/Brenneman affair is a disaster of impotence and awkwardness. The Keener/Kinski affair turns ugly once Keener begins ignoring the clingy and vulnerable Kinski. Meanwhile, Patric goads Eckhart into seeing Stiller as a pansy and Keener as a dyke. Eckhart agonizes over his inadequacy, Brenneman folds further into herself, Stiller can't shut up, Keener gets more indifferent to those around her. The characters cannot stop talking about themselves. The proverbial cracks in the relationships begin to show. Unspoken lines in the friendships get drawn. The affairs are found out. Confrontations of all shape and flavor ensue. Enter jealousy, vindictiveness, outrage, further dysfunction, and metric tons of staggering insecurity. Et cetera.

It should be at least marginally obvious at this point that the film does not end sunnily, and that none of the characters could be said to have been redeemed or justified in any way once the end credits hit. Male and female stereotypes -- as well as their exceptions -- are all portrayed negatively. They are just awful to one another.

Near the beginning of the film, in what seems like a somewhat heavy-handed cinematic moment, Stiller stands on the stage in his lecture hall, addressing his class of drama students, informing them that for all the eloquence and expressiveness of the classic dramatic literature they're reading, what the characters really want is (spoken with the unmistakable tone of a college professor who wants to look cool or academically cutting-edge by unabashedly saying a loud bad word in front of his students pretty much for sheer shock value) to fuck. Labute broadcasts that idea right from the beginning, setting the stage for the sexual politics of the rest of the film -- except that that idea is misleading, for it becomes rapidly apparent that although all six main characters talk a lot about sex, it's not really what they want, except in the sex act's capacity to fulfill their own selfish needs. And the sex is anything but fulfilling. The sex scenes, while relatively explicit, are cold or emotionless or pathetic or violent; anything but passionate or pleasurable. It's what drives the characters apart, emotionally estranging them. They all see it differently. Sex is where these characters are the most distant.

When the characters talk about sex, their conversations seem less like deliberate screenplay character-revealing tactics and more like the forced glibness of self-conscious curiosity. There are repeated situations in which the men ask each other and the women ask each other about the best sex they've had -- the sort of conspicuous dialogue setup one would expect in your garden-variety When Harry Met Sally-type romantic comedy, but instead of being funny and titillating, the responses are unpleasant, false, or hyperbolically disturbing: e.g., Patric gets a drawn-out, shocking monologue in which he describes in brutal detail how the best lay he's had was when he helped gang-rape a male student while in high school. (Which makes his previous anecdote about how he recently fucked an adversarial female colleague as a bit of professional revenge really pale by comparison.)

Even when the sex-talk is amusing, there's a hint of poignance behind the words and reactions. While shopping at the supermarket, Eckhart tries to frankly discuss with Brenneman how they can rejuvenate their sadly quiescent sex life -- he feebly suggests that she think of him as one big penis and herself as one big vagina, and when she stalks out of the frame, he complains that the advice is straight from the self-help book she wrote. During pillow talk, the neurotic Kinski asks Keener what part of the sex she liked best, and Keener responds flatly: I liked the silence.

A quick theoretical: If Your Friends & Neighbors, instead of being a motion picture, took the form of a long short story or a literary novel (assuming the characters' namelessness was circumvented via McInerney-esque literary gimmickry), one gets the feeling that it would consist of page after endless page of densely pedantic inner agonizings and emotional ponderances of its six main characters, containing their stilted dialogue and banal spoken musings and misanthropic averments and the occasional unsatisfying outburst or argument, etc., but the majority of this character-oriented story's narrative action would remain internal, as the characters' respective self-consciousnesses churned ahead at full speed for some conversationally omniscient narrator to meticulously recount, and the characters' sexual dysfunctions and emotional solipsism and communicative inabilities would be laid out in harrowingly prolix detail as they interacted and talked and argued and fucked. However, what with the cinematic medium obviously being what it is, the kind of visible internal turmoil necessary to tell a cracking good story of realistic post-everything people with sexual dysfunctions and emotional solipsism and communicative inabilities just isn't possible on the big screen, barring any kind of tacky reverb-laced voice-overs of their thoughts. So all that's left in a filmic telling of the story is the external stuff, and those pickings are slim. But because the external is all we have to go on out here in the world, the gaps themselves speak volumes.

Labute's excruciating cynicism is a bit unevenly executed and artificial in spots -- the characters' deliberate repetition of theme-establishing dialogue gets contrived after a while; Kinski's character is woefully underdeveloped, even considering that the whole cast consists of underdeveloped personalities; Patric's character seems a little too caricaturishly monstrous, although admittedly he's the film's most intriguing character and actually kind of deserves more screen time -- since the film has no moral center to speak of, Patric's unhinged blackheartedness at least provides some reverse orientation. But by and large, Labute films his characters rather impartially, often relying on a removed, eavesdropping, strictly observational perspective; at other points he goes for the conventional immersion close-ups, as though by association we're part of this nameless cache of screwed-up individuals. On the one hand, we can feel quite rightly that the characters' flaws are their own condemnations, and that we're at least fortunate for not being that messed-up. But on the other hand, there's a hint of identification in the recognition that the characters' egregious self-absorption complexes grow right out of the kind of painful self-consciousness that our entire modern culture seems to suffer from, and the characters' crippling sexual/emotional selfishness taps gently on what we the audience all have the potential to turn into if we retreat too far into ourselves. Labute may be the newest purveyor of the amorality play, and he may lovingly wring the worst out of each of the characters in their own distinct fashions, and he may reward his audience with new and exciting varieties of self-loathing, but to mistake his cynicism for some sort of finger-wagging social defeatism is to get depressed for the wrong reason entirely.