Your Friends and Neighbors

Director: Neil LaBute
Cast:
Ben Stiller
Catherine Keener
Nastassja Kinski
Jason Patric

Ben Stiller and Catherine Keener are stuck in a relationship that has obviously been drained of all previous sexuality; Aaron Eckhart and Amy Brenneman are in a holding pattern of namby-pamby yuppie over-sensitized tiptoeing around each other. Add in Nastassja Kinski as a bisexual museum assistant with affirmation issues—and Jason Patric as the most horrifyingly misogynist able to string words together, and you've got Neil LaBute's intense, wonderful, dismaying and stunningly dead-on psychological study known as "Your Friends and Neighbors."

Honestly, to go through the psychoses of each character would be a thrill as a writer, but much better for you to see it in the theater. Suffice to say this: these characters are so pure in their reality, so exactly like someone you know (or are trying to avoid) that paroxysms of "screen identification" erupt at least twice a scene. The movie is ultimately about emasculation, or the tightrope all men walk between their sensitivity and primality, and offers no easy solutions. Stiller is creepily wonderful as the college professor unable to stop talking and feel things naturally; his wife Keener is female rage at its most undistilled, pure form. Even Amy Brenneman, obviously wasted in "Heat" from two years ago, simmers in a sexuality that hasn't quite awoken.

But the real frosting here is Jason Patric, who makes us forget "Speed 2" ever happened and turns in one of the most gleefully natural performances of the year. He's what happens when bad frat boys grow up, when awful people are never punished for their social indiscretions, and years of carefree meanness has perfected a philosophy so horrifying that you wonder how he gets up in the morning. But Neil LaBute has written him so wonderfully that you actually laugh with and at Patric, actually cheering on his misogyny, it being about the only honest emotion anyone expresses in the whole ordeal. Full of bombast, rage, self-absorption and delicate humor, "Your Friends and Neighbors" is the best movie of the month, and threatens to be the best this summer. Run!

—Ian Williams

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