Your Friends and Neighbors [18]

In the Company of Men was one of the psychologically most unpleasant and shocking films of 1998. Nail Labute, its writer and director, was clearly inspired by Shakespeare, even if his two protagonists were less subtle than their models Iago and Roderigo. With Your Friends and Neighbors, Labute turns to Restoration comedy for inspiration and the result is a more grown-up and nuanced film, even if it’s still about the favourite topic of Restoration plays: sex, or fucking, as one of the protagonists helpfully explains.

Your Friends and Neighbors introduces us to Mary and Barry, happily married, with a beautiful new home to show off to their friends, the equally glamorous couple Terri and Jerry. But between the Calvin Klein sheets all is not well. There are rumblings in both couple’s bedrooms, and it’s not from sexual activity.

Barry (Aaron Eckhardt) is impotent, overweight and in awe of his sexually predatory friend Cary (Jason Patric) whose stories serve only to make him feel even more inadequate. Mary (Amy Brenneman) is sexually frustrated and thus obvious prey for Jerry (Ben Stiller), her husband’s “best” friend. Jerry’s wife Terri (Catherine Keener) can’t stand her husband talking while they’re having sex, (“Let’s just do it, I don’t need the narration”), and embarks on a lesbian affair with Cheri (Nastassja Kinski), which only shows up her emotional sterility even more sharply than does her failing marriage.
The film deals with different sexual problems and their emotional causes and consequences. Even in the most intimate of situations and in the closest of relationships, there is not necessarily any contact. In a central scene, Labute makes clear that people who have no understanding of themselves cannot understand others, and the inability to communicate that results from this lack of self-awareness, creates the rage, the boredom, the frustration that screw up relationships, sex, and life in general.

Like with Labute’s first film, my reaction was that he is overdoing it: No one that unpleasant, that screwed-up, that unfeeling, behaves in that manner. In particular not in therapy-prone, middle class, well-off suburban New York. Some of the characters feel right in some of the situations, but overall they are exaggerated and too one-sided. The film is enjoyable in its own perverse way, and it does manage to make you realise how difficult relationships can be, but surely these wealthy and well-educated characters would have had therapy long ago.

Eva Gronbech (Unverified), 01/01/99

---