Review of Your Friends & Neighbors (1998) by Alex M — 21 May 2004

[SIZE=3]With his debut feature [I]In the Company of Men[/I], director Neil LaBute showed that he was not afraid to examine the evil and selfishness that exists in the modern world. Unfortunately, his follow-up effort [I]Your Friends & Neighbors [/I] is not so much an examination of selfishness as it is a juvenile, amateurish excursion into the detestable behaviour of loathsome characters. Defenders of the film could claim that LaBute is making a satire about the cruelty inherent in most relationships...but what comes across is an unfocused, meandering mess about six characters so off-putting that spending any amount of time with them is an act of endurance. In all of his films, LaBute has revealed himself to be a director that is disgusted with humanity, and that misanthropic streak casts a pall over all of [I]Your Friends & [/I] [I]Neighbors[/I]. The movie's nastiness and lack of compassion would be forgivable if it were at least somewhat witty or perceptive, but alas, LaBute is content to make a soap opera about self-indulgent fops who repeatedly commit adultery and betray their partners, all in the quest to find personal happiness. We meet the various couples: Terri (Catherine Keener) is together with Jerry (Ben Stiller), whose best friend Barry (Aaron Eckhart) is married to Mary (Amy Brenneman). There are also two single characters: the obnoxious bachelor Cary (Jason Patric) and the needy woman Cheri (Nastassja Kinski). The fact that all of the characters' names rhyme is just one of the pointless in-jokes that [I]Your Friends & Neighbors [/I] contains...it's as if LaBute is trying to make some statement about how interchangeable we all are, but is doing so in a manner that is obvious and forced. As the characters begin to swap partners and experiment sexually, we reflect that the plot of [I]Your [/I] [I]Friends & Neighbors [/I] is quite similar to the stories that are found in many of Woody Allen's films. The crucial difference is that Allen brings humour and poignancy to his best work, while LaBute is aiming strictly for shock value: he's getting a kick out of his ability to make us squirm. Of the six major actors, only Amy Brenneman and Nastassja Kinski bring any kind of believability to their characters...even though we still don't really care about them, they are not as loathsome as everyone else. On the other hand, the normally amusing Ben Stiller is grating as the whiny Jerry, the overrated Catherine Keener performs her tiresome "cold bitch" act once again, and Jason Patric is saddled with a character so grotesque that he stretches the limits of satire. Yet as repulsive as the characters are, what makes [I]Your Friends & Neighbors[/I] such an unpleasant movie is the feeling that LaBute is shoving all of this cruelty down our throats simply because he believes he is telling us some insightful message about modern relationships. The truth is that [I]Your Friends & Neighbors [/I] is merely a misanthropic, unfunny and uninventive soap opera that rolls around in the pig sty of human behaviour and then has the nerve to present itself as a profound drama.

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