Your Friends and Neighbors

Matters of Love and Hate

THE writer - director Neil LaBute, whose In the Company of Men was admired by many and despised by me, has come up with his second effort, Your Friends & Neighbors. The former, which won awards at Sundance (always a bad sign) and from the New York Film Critics Circle, concerned a compact between two men to avenge themselves on women by seducing and destroying a sweet, blind office worker. It was the kind of movie only a fundamentally unpleasant person could have concocted; it shed no light and plumbed, except in quality, no depth.

Your Friends & Neighbors, which does not have the home-movie look of its predecessor, is otherwise an equally nasty piece of work, to whose cheapness even the characters' rhyming names attest. Barry, Cary, and Jerry are best friends. Barry is married to Mary; Jerry is living with Terri; Cary screws, or tries to, everything in skirts. They live in an anonymous city, have (except for Jerry, a drama prof, and Cary, a gynecologist) unspecified jobs, and exist only as pawns for LaBute's mean-spirited games.

There is also a young woman, Cheri, some sort of art-gallery assistant. At one time or another, all the other characters come and stare at a photograph, not shown to us, in the gallery. Accosted by Cheri, they each conduct the identical dialogue with her, often pointing toward seduction. But an affair develops only with Terri. Why?

Because Jerry talks a lot during sex, which infuriates Terri. An excellent reason for her to turn lesbian, you'll agree. What further encourages her in that direction is the discovery that Jerry and Mary had a go at it -- unsuccessfully, but she doesn't know that. Barry is more or less impotent, and Jerry had scribbled a sexual overture to Mary in a lent volume of Camus, which Mary couldn't resist and Terri later stumbled onto. Mary breaks with both Jerry and Barry, and gets involved with Cary, a brute whose advances only Cheri, a lesbian, can withstand.

But Cheri is having problems with Terri because Cheri, also, talks too much, wanting to know which part of her lovemaking Terri enjoys most, something Terri doesn't wish to go into, especially not in the supermarket aisle where their heated altercation takes place. Other painful scenes erupt in a hotel room successively occupied by Jerry with Mary, and Mary with Barry -- don't ask me to explain. Just about everyone beds everyone else, but always with dismal results, attesting to LaBute's high moral purpose.

As if this weren't enough, nearly everyone speaks in incomplete sentences, particularly Jerry, the professor, who is to blithering what Michael Jordan is to basketball. Terri is more coherent but almost always unpleasant, and Cary speaks only about sex, loathsomely. The sexual roundelay may derive -- remotely -- from Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen, but LaBute's drivel is light years away from Schnitzler's genius.

The one sympathetic character is Mary -- not in the writing, but in the acting of the enormously charming, lovely, and gifted Amy Brenneman, whose infrequent casting can be chalked up to the indifference of the current cinema to so appealingly wholesome an actress. At the opposite extreme is the Terri of Catherine Keener: unprepossessing way beyond even the call of her role. Jason Patric, looking like a younger, macho Joel Grey, carries Cary to heights of obnoxiousness you wouldn't think scalable without crampons. Aaron Eckhart, the vile seducer of LaBute's previous film, is now the overweight and inept Barry, and at least proves he has some acting range. As Cheri, the formerly sexy Natassja Kinski looks so unlike her old self that I did not even recognize her.

The nadir, however, is the Jerry of Ben Stiller. Stiller, whose physical repellence is matched only by his histrionic nullity, is in movies because he is the son of the well-known comedy couple Stiller and Meara. For all-around distastefulness he is equaled only by Nicolas Cage, in movies because he is the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola. (You can see Cage now in Brian De Palma's nonsensical and appalling Snake Eyes, with which I shall not detain you.)

Your Friends & Neighbors has vivid cinematography by Nancy Schreiber; it is not her fault that this always indoor film has a deliberately claustrophobic feel, and that sequences in an antiquarian bookshop are annoyingly souped up (Steadicam in excelsis), even as the ones in the art gallery are artily static. The score is mostly songs by Metallica, performed by Apocalyptica, and sounding like Emetica. For prestige, a bit of Schubert and Dvor*ak chamber music is thrown in, but in versions by Killer Tracks which their composers would be hard put to recognize.

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