Your Friends & Neighbors

Your Friends & Neighbors

D: Neil LaBute (1998); with Jason Patric, Ben Stiller, Amy Brenneman, Aaron Eckhart, Catherine Keener, Nastassja Kinski. The title sounds harmless enough, but couples beware! Director LaBute presents a chilling yet humorous deconstruction of intimacy, compassion, and trust between spouses and friends. It also presents one of the most shocking rape scenes in a film (which, ironically, is never shown, only discussed among the male characters). At the film's onset, we peek into the bedrooms of five people. Cary (Patric) is a rabid narcissist who uses sex as a revenge tool. Barry (Eckhart) and Mary (Brenneman) are spouses coping with Barry's oafish horniness and Mary's need for tenderness. Finally, Jerry (Stiller) and Terri (Keener) are live-in lovers whose sex lives are battered by the former's improvised intercourse ramblings and the latter's self-serving attitude. All are associates and colleagues but not particularly close to one another. That is, until the frustrated Jerry attempts to seduce Mary, while Terri discovers satisfaction through an affair with another woman, Cheri (Kinski). From here, the stage is set as the characters obsessively dwell on carnal pleasures, confide in each other regarding such matters, and try to figure out what's going wrong under the sheets. Cary, however, doesn't think he has a problem. "Is it me? I think not," he says to a squeamish lover. A sexual Ahab, he uses his penis as a conquering tool. Patric's performance is eerie and not entirely without a comic touch. The rest of the cast is also commendable, but the real prize goes to LaBute's tense script. Obviously picking up where he left off in the equally dim In the Company of Men, LaBute preys on the audience's sensitivities with a clever blend of shock value and realism. The effect is absorbing although a bit anticlimactic. Where films like Cameron Crowe's Singles displayed the lighter side of adult relationships, LaBute's film delves into much darker waters. Unfortunately, for some, these areas may be entirely too familiar.