Not my friends or neighbors

By Meghan Tifft
Catalyst

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photo courtesy of Gramcercy Pictures
"Cheri," played by Nastassja Kinski, and "Terri," portrayed by Catherine Keener, talk about relationships in "Your Friends and Neighbors."

Before you pelvic thrust your way to the theater Sept. 4 hoping for a little old-fashioned stimulation from "Your Friends and Neighbors," I must give an advance warning not to expect this movie to give you a very satisfying climax. Instead, you can anticipate six unlikable characters engaging in a tiresome amount of sex talk and overabundant acts of mundane inhumanity.

You will spend two hours with three absurd, self-seeking men and three bitterly despondent women as they muddle through their troubles and neuroses inside locker rooms, over lunch tables and down the toiletry aisle of the grocery store. And periodically you will become uneasy witness to a game of mix and match as they couple off for miscellaneous sex scenes. And, as part of the experience, you will not even know whether to laugh or to be thoroughly disturbed by all of this, a dilemma familiar to those who caught "In The Company Of Men," writer/director Neil LaBute's controversial film debut.

Most audience members will find it hard, for example, to make proper comparisons between any of their friends and Cary (Jason Patric) in the scene where he grips the model fetus in his hand like a football and drop kicks it down the hospital corridor, and they might not be able to recall any neighbors they've had in the past that resemble Barry (Aaron Eckhart) when he tells his wife that he needs to think of her as an enormous vagina.

I suppose the violently empty interactions between different combinations of famous actors like Jason Patric, Ben Stiller, Amy Brenneman and Aaron Eckhart could succeed in this way as a dark and humorous parody of modern relationships. I can easily imagine a world hinged on friendships and love affairs that involve people who have no idea what it means to give through such relationships - so they end up causing each other a lot of unexplained pain and are never the better for it. In fact, it sounds unsettlingly familiar. But the characters are so absurdly immoral, and their exchanges so impoverished, that it is hard not to become distracted from the point, and it is impossible to relate to them. In the end, you will very likely leave the theater feeling assaulted rather than enlightened.