‘Friends & Neighbors’: Bleakness & Humiliation

The milk of human kindness does not flow through Neil LaBute’s films. Taking the baleful futility of personal relationships as a theme, his is rather a cinema of humiliation, embarrassment and misery, the celluloid equivalent of a ‘round-the-clock news station that offers all jerks, all the time.

Writer-director LaBute’s remarkably sour and cynical view of human nature couldn’t be better suited to gather plaudits in the times we live in. His debut film, the neo-provocative “In the Company of Men,” won awards at Sundance and elsewhere for its story of a deaf woman callously seduced by two friends.

His new work, “Your Friends & Neighbors,” is more of the same. Set among a group of six young professionals in an unnamed city, it once again confuses a kind of juvenile titillation with insight and treats the ability to make audiences squirm as a pinnacle of film art.

Typically, it’s the worst of LaBute’s characters we encounter first, devil-in-the-flesh Cary (Jason Patric). A frigid and emotionless misogynist, he’s discovered trying out potential sex talk while masturbating and tape-recording his efforts for later study. “If I was a chick,” he muses to himself, pleased at the result, “I’d believe this.”

Though Cary is unattached, his two closest friends are involved with women, and, given LaBute’s thesis that relationships consist of varying degrees of agony, hostility and pretense, it’s not surprising that they’re not happy with their situations.

Jerry (Ben Stiller), a college professor, likes to talk during sex, something that drives his partner Terri (Catherine Keener) over the edge. “Let’s just do it, I don’t need the narration,” she curtly insists, and that’s about the nicest thing you’ll hear her say. This couple specializes in verbally flaying each other, trading cutting remarks as if they were baseball cards.

As miserable as everyone else, Barry (“Company of Men’s” Aaron Eckhart) and Mary (Amy Brenneman) are more lost than malicious, vacuous people whose attempts at connection are feeble and doomed. Given that they’re not quite as pompous, self-involved and insensitive as the other characters, they’re ripe to become hapless victims of their more rapacious cohorts.

It’s Jerry who gets things going, deciding out of habit to attempt to seduce Mary, the wife of his friend. When Terri gets a hint of this, she starts to look appreciatively at Cheri (Nastassja Kinski), an art gallery employee she happens to run into. Bad as everyone’s relationships start out, it’s a given with LaBute that things are going to get worse, much worse, and that’s what transpires here.

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Though LaBute treats characters like an inquiring entomologist, using several distancing techniques and examining his specimens at arm’s length whenever possible, he does have a flair for writing very playable dialogue. Naturally, it’s the darkest characters, Terri and Cary, who have the most glib lines, and actor Patric (one of the film’s co-producers) gives the most compelling performance, complete with a monologue on male rape that almost got the film an NC-17 rating.

Part of the reason LaBute’s work causes a stir is that that dialogue, raunchier and racier than the norm, offers minor-league thrills on the order of overhearing something private on an airplane or in a restaurant. But LaBute’s delight in showing what’s behind the facades people are prone to put up comes off as little more than the tittle-tattle of a naughty boy delighted to have caught the grown-ups in compromising situations.

It’s not that the kind of bad behavior, especially male, this film revels in doesn’t exist. It’s that merely presenting the worst view of life in a concentrated form is not by definition compelling or involving--it has to be made that way. The more things are merely presented, the harder it is to say what aspect of the situation is supposed to interest us.

Despite what the modern sensibility dictates, being completely and unalterably bleak about human motivations and relationships is not any wiser, smarter or more realistic than being totally Pollyannaish. Though they are poles apart in every other respect, “Your Friends & Neighbors,” that veneer of hipness notwithstanding, doesn’t say anything more profound or insightful about the human condition than “The Sound of Music.”

* MPAA rating: R, for graphic sexual dialogue, strong sexuality and language. Times guidelines: scenes of sexual activity and extremely graphic talk about sex and rape.

‘Your Friends & Neighbors’

Amy Brenneman: Mary

Aaron Eckhart: Barry

Catherine Keener: Terri

Nastassja Kinski: Cheri

Jason Patric: Cary

Ben Stiller: Jerry

A PolyGram Filmed Entertainment presentation of a Propaganda Films/Fleece production, released by Gramercy Pictures. Director Neil LaBute. Producers Jason Patric, Steve Golin. Executive producers Stephen Pevner, Alix Madigan-Yorkin. Screenplay by Neil LaBute. Cinematographer Nancy Schreiber. Editor Joel Plotch. Costumes April Napier. Production design Charles Breen. Set decorator Jeffrey Kushon. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

* Playing in selected theaters.