Jungle Love

Why, when it comes to romance, do we treat each other so badly? Laura Miller reviews two new movies which investigate that question

By Laura Miller

Aug 21, 1998 | You'd never know from watching Hollywood movies how bitter things can get between men and women these days. Onscreen, boy still meets girl and knows instantly that she's the one -- or else they clash at first, but soon find themselves gliding deliciously into each other's arms. Everyone knows what happens ever after -- why bother with the details? Romance, along with impossibly agile and resourceful action heroes, is part of the brain candy that the movies feed us when we flee our vexed lives and seek refuge in a dark theater.

Neil LaBute is one of those directors who wants to put a vision on the screen that's nearly as dark as the auditorium we sit in, and he intends that vision to reflect the people in the seats. Last year, his tale of two corporate managers plotting to break the heart of a deaf typist, "In the Company of Men," seemed unconvincing and calculated, a bid for controversy. With his new film, "Your Friends and Neighbors," he delivers a more plausible, richer ensemble piece about six urbanites playing musical beds. The result is like a Woody Allen film ("Hannah and Her Sisters" or "Husbands and Wives") without the goofiness and lovable neurotic schtick as a softener. LaBute has made a comedy this time around, but it's not so much black as simply bleak.

The other difference between LaBute and Allen (his most obvious influence, along with David Mamet) is that both of LaBute's movies have been stomping grounds for the Antichrist. In "In The Company of Men," Aaron Eckhart's Chad exercises his power to cause pain with a cold-blooded, motiveless relish; "Because I could" is his answer when another character asks him why. In "Your Friends and Neighbors," Jason Patric plays Cary, a guy whose every moment on screen is devoted to demonstrating his malevolence, whether he's fondly reminiscing about participating in a homosexual gang rape in high school or terrorizing a lover who dares to get her period while sleeping on his 320-thread-count sheets. LaBute doesn't create bad guys, he creates fiends, which may be the most detectable sign of the director's Mormonism. It was Hannah Arendt, after all -- a Jew like Woody Allen -- who came up with the idea of the banality of evil. LaBute will have none of it. Cary seems like such a patent psychopath (Patric plays him with scary, compressed rage) that you can't help wondering why the other characters go anywhere near him.

What LaBute asks is a question that has all too rarely occupied filmmakers of late: Why, in the name of love, do we treat each other so badly? Combine the dissolution of shared courtship rituals and sexual rules after the '60s and '70s with the romance-drunk pop culture that saturates every corner of contemporary life and you have a recipe for disaster -- or a least a recipe for 10,000 Cosmopolitan articles. Boy gets girl is just the beginning of the story, the easy part. What about when boy vanishes without explanation, or girl dumps boy because the novel he's writing stinks, or boy asks girl for a divorce so he can marry another girl half his age, or girl decides what she really wants right now is another girl, or boy announces that he's always seen himself with someone with a tighter butt, or girl announces that she's just not cut out for a monogamous relationship? All of which have happened to various people I know. Hollywood movies took a few stabs at depicting this melee in the '70s -- films like "Carnal Knowledge" and "Shampoo" -- but the anti-romantic comedy has been in short supply of late.

That makes LaBute's film an interesting departure, despite his Miltonian temperament and the frosty moralism that wafts through "Your Friends and Neighbors." On the one hand, it's refreshing that he can muster so much outrage at the notion of adulterous doings behind the fagades of perfect marriages, but on the other he doesn't really understand that betrayal, more often than not, is the result of weakness and self-delusion. LaBute doesn't pay much attention to the consequences of the cheating indulged in by Jerry, a narcissistic drama teacher (played by the wonderfully squirm-inducing Ben Stiller), and Mary (Amy Brenneman), the sexually bewildered wife of his best friend. He's much more fascinated by ruthless, heartless alpha males like Cary and Chad, and the way other men admire them and tacitly endorse their atrocities. As far as LaBute is concerned, cruelty is a secondary sex characteristic, just part of being a guy, and the more testosterone coursing through your veins, the meaner you are.

In my experience, though, squirrely, self-pitying guys like Jerry (or, for that matter, Woody) wreak more romantic carnage -- all in the name of true love, of course -- than sadistic puppetmasters. (In fact, I'm not sure I've ever even met a sadistic puppetmaster, but then I, unlike LaBute's characters, don't spend much time in men's steam rooms asking guys to describe their best fuck. And you gotta wonder who does.) For all that LaBute likes to declaim about his own unblinkered frankness when it comes to human perfidy ("this is the way life is," he told one interviewer), no one's going to look at Patric's creepy, Nietzschean Cary and think, "Oh, God, that's me," any more than most of us can identify with Hannibal Lecter. Evil, in LaBute's cinematic universe, is purely a spectator sport.

That universe doesn't include anyone like the four single New Yorkers in Nicholas Barker's "Unmade Beds," real people who play themselves in this scripted documentary. Barker's unusual technique -- he wrote the screenplay based on interviews with his subjects, then had them perform their own statements (giving them considerable control over how they present themselves) -- makes "Unmade Beds" more complex than its premise suggests. Barker ends the film with four long, silent, motionless shots of each of his subjects staring directly into the camera, challenging us to judge them. That's the director's crudest move, probably intended to deflect charges of exploitation, but it's entirely unnecessary. By the end of "Unmade Beds," if you feel enough distance from these people to pity them, then you're the one who's emotionally deficient.

Barker's toughest case is Michael De Stefano, an unsuccessful 50ish "screenwriter" with a penchant for black shirts and aviator shades, who describes his shag-carpeted home as "my cave. This apartment says to every woman who comes here, 'You're here to fuck. If you don't want to fuck, leave.'" That bit of bravado could have been written for one of LaBute's monsters, but not too far into "Unmade Beds" you realize that no women have been around to receive the cave's message in quite some time. By day, De Stefano types out hard-boiled dialogue and tells Barker, "I don't go out with mutts," but by night he eats his share of humble pie. Recounting one date, he says, with impassive dignity, "She told me she'd be embarrassed to introduce me to her friends because my position in life is not high enough." Later, in another eerie echo of LaBute's steam room confessionals, he recounts the peak of his sex life (sleeping with three different women in the course of two days). He pauses, then volunteers that if he'd been faithful to any of them, he wouldn't be alone today.

The rest of the foursome in "Unmade Beds" includes Aimee and Mikey, at 28 and 40 respectively, both terrified that they'll never get married. Mikey blames his height (5-foot-4) and visits a "dating coach" who warns him that he comes across as a bit too "intense." Aimee doesn't blame her weight (220 pounds) for her predicament, and she can still laugh off the "worst date of my entire life" with her best friend, but she refuses to try a dating service because "it's my last resort. What do I do if that doesn't work?" Finally, there's Brenda, an aging, wisecracking sexpot, who doesn't really want a man at all. "Dick is easy to get. You just reach out anytime and you grab a dick. What I need is cash." In exchange for her still much-sought-after favors, she seeks a fellow "who will give me money, help me with the things I need, and go away."

Perhaps it's not a coincidence that Brenda, the one with the fewest romantic expectations, is the only person in "Unmade Beds" who seems remotely at home in the world. She can even stand in front of a mirror, cataloging the slow deterioration of her scantily clad body ("everything's moving around, and I don't like it") without capsizing into agonized self-hatred. Still, for all the considerable despair they endure, Aimee and Mikey keep trying. Even De Stephano, who mostly lives in a Mickey Spillane-esque fantasy world ("When I bleed, I like to bleed alone"), doesn't lie to himself about his past mistakes and the long odds he now faces. You can see how disappointment -- not cold-blooded sadism -- sometimes leads these people to lash out (as when Mikey berates a potential date for hanging out with gay men) at a world that doesn't fulfill all their Hollywood-fueled dreams. But you can also see that they're human beings, and like the rest of us, they aren't beyond redemption.

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