Written and Directed by Andrew DeYoung | 100 min | ▲▲▲▲1/2
Maybe fans of I Think You Should Leave, Tim Robinson’s TV series, will have some sense of what to expect with this movie, but I went in blind — just knowing that it is an awkward picture about middle-aged men and friendship. It is that, but it’s also so much more. It could plausibly be described as a spiritual sequel to both I Love You Man and Fight Club, but darker and more demented than either. It’s a resonant, relevant dark comedy.
Robinson is Craig: He’s married to Tami (Kate Mara), a cancer survivor with a flower arranging business, someone who is seeing life and her work differently now that she’s come though the other side of her illness. Craig works at a marketing company whose speciality is having people get addicted to products — he prefers “habit forming.” They live in a nice suburban home with a teenage son (Jack Dylan Grazer). This is all pretty normal, and should be fulfilling, but it’s clear Craig isn’t very happy. He doesn’t have any buddies. Tami encourages him to get chummy with a neighbour, Austin (a mustachioed Paul Rudd). He’s a local TV weatherman with a circle of male friends. Austin has a bit of swagger. He takes Craig exploring through tunnels, part of their town’s sewer system, leading all the way to city hall. Craig starts having fantasies of how he and Austin will one day drive around in a “cherry” canary Corvette after the apocalypse, and Craig will be an alpha dog.
This new friendship inspires Craig to try new things, just as Tami is spending some time with an ex-boyfriend, Devon (Josh Segarra). But it turns out Craig isn’t just lonely, he’s also a little unhinged with some undiagnosed rage issues, which sours things with Austin and his cronies.
But that’s just the start of where Friendship takes us. Craig’s inability to come to grips with his own internal life makes him an entirely unpredictable protagonist, and even as we see Austin through his eyes, we start to understand that his friendly neighbour is not nearly the cool guy Craig has fallen in love with — he’s coping with his own unspoken insecurities in his own way.
Central to this very funny, very grim comedy, is how it examines deep seated anxiety in men, and their inability to communicate to themselves and others. but what this movie reveals itself to really be about is the search for meaning in modern society. This is where it aligns with Fight Club, that idea that those things — a job, a house, a family, a car, gadgets, toys — that that we’ve been told are true measures of success and a path to happiness, this movie peels that myth back with a satiric scalpel. In the meantime we stop by Subway and get a sandwich, we dream about flashy cars and go see “the new Marvel.”
The appeal of dudes being in a gang with other dudes, something we might’ve done when we were kids, that sense of a supportive community is so attractive but inchoate. If men aren’t doing the real work to figure out where the schism is between societal expectation and reality, violence can be lying just below the surface.
You may laugh at this with a jagged edge of fear — like I did — but walking out of the theatre with a small group of cinepanions, men and women, I bubbled with joy. We all recognized people in our lives like Craig and Austin, and maybe we even recognized ourselves. Friendship is a contender for one of the year’s best films.
