Review of Your Friends & Neighbors (1998) by Jim H — 01 Jul 2012

Six people with various sexual inadequacies act cruelly toward one another.

Because it's essentially a character study, I couldn't think of a better way to sum up the plot of Your Friends and Neighbors. Neil LaBute is the expert at giving us unpardonable characters doing cruel things, but the plot and characters' actions are usually designed to expose a societal foible or comment upon the inevitable impossibility of human connection and communication. I think about The Shape of Things where LaBute shows us how people transform themselves -- oftentimes essentially -- to please a significant other or the play Fat Pig in which social pressures convince a man to deny himself of love. These works are LaBute at his finest, but on the other hand is In the Company of Men in which people do cruel things because they can. And in Your Friends and Neighbors people do cruel things because they can.

The film's most redeeming qualities are its actors. The best performance comes from Jason Patric, whose monologue in the sauna is one of the most haunting moments in the film, and his character's "It's my time now" philosophy is articulated in some of LaBute's best sentences.

Overall, though LaBute's dialogue is very good and the actors are fantastic, there isn't a substantive story or a guiding theme to move the film along; it remains a character study, stagnant, like many of the lives it depicts.