Your Friends and Neighbors: The Extended Review (or, My 21 Hours Near Hollywood)
Winner, First Place, Arts Feature
Association of Alternative Newsweeklies

What This Article is About
The parodically lopsided and yet somehow symbiotic relationship between the movie industry and film reviewers, in which the former attempts to woo the latter via, among other things, the junket, an all-expense paid trip to an American metropolis (i.e., New York or Los Angeles) in which the reviewer is shown a preview of the movie and provided access to its stars, presumably for interviews.

Some publications have a policy against junkets. The totally impartial review being an impossibility, junkets threaten to compromise even the minimal amount of objectivity critics retain. How can you trust the opinion of someone who has spent a night in a hotel she could never afford, eating food she would otherwise never have the privilege of ordering, asking questions of people she would otherwise have no way of meeting, all on the studio’s dollar?

The vast majority of publications that allow their reviewers to go on junkets do so because they can’t afford to do otherwise.

Not all films offer junkets as part of the marketing package. The general idea is to expose a movie early and widely, so that it gets coverage in the press. Many movies, particularly those distributed by the major studios, will get this coverage without having to fly reviewers to L.A. to see it. Of course, logic does not always reign. Recently, the arts editor of this newspaper was flown to New York to see Godzilla (as if that tiny little independent gem wouldn’t have made it to St. Louis on its own). Just a week before my own junket, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks took questions from junketing reviewers at a “damage control” session, apparently meant to stem some kind of (invisible) tide of concern that Saving Private Ryan was gratuitously violent (as if gratuitous violence were a deterrent to box office success).

Kind of a Lot of Details about My Experience
For less than twenty-four hours from July 24 to July 25, 1998, I went on a Gramercy Pictures junket. I went willingly, even ecstatically, with the hope and aim of getting just a little closer to the industry that informs so much of what, if nothing else, we talk about in America. During this twenty-one hour period, many things were done to and for me:

I was flown to Los Angeles. There, I was driven incrementally, through the kind of traffic that might be used to give theoretical math students an intuitive sense of infinity, past the exit for the Museum of Tolerance (which must be “tolerance” in the sense of, How many drugs can you take without actually dying?). I was also driven past the Cedar Sinai Medical Center (where, mere days before, Jodie Foster had delivered her first child), to the monstrous, peach-colored Beverly Hills Four Seasons Hotel.

At the Beverly Hills Four Seasons Hotel, I was put up in a suite with three televisions, three telephones, and four remote controls, costing no less than $400 a night and across from which, nestled into a discreet, eye-level slot by the door, was a sign which read “Dreamworks: Meeting 9:30 A.M. – 6:00 P.M.,” like a smugly unblinking eye.

From this hotel, I was chauffeured in a deluxe, pre-chilled, wombily upholstered minibus to a screening of Your Friends and Neighbors, the second film by Sundance/Brigham Young University Bad-/Golden Boy Neil LaBute, formerly of the dark, Midwestern, is-this-feminist-or-is-this-misogynistic drama In the Company of Men. The minibus wended its way, again through traffic, to an anonymous and extravagant glass building with a fashionably sparse lobby of immaculate wood floors stained the color of honey. There, I was walked through spare, echoey halls lined with poster-sized black and white photographs of important movie people (such as Jodie Foster) and was ultimately seated in a velour armchair in front of which was enough leg room to dance the tarantella. The screening “room,” a plushly carpeted and upholstered movie palace, was blessed with the kind of acoustics formerly available only at rock concerts and in rotundas. Slim bottles of Evian proliferated.

Upon arrival at this screening “room,” I was handed a thick, gloss-finished, rope-handled shopping bag containing a Your Friends and Neighbors pin (circular), a Your Friends and Neighbors pin (rectangular), a Your Friends and Neighbors ceramic tile (square), a Your Friends and Neighbors notepad, and a Your Friends and Neighbors press kit. After carrying around this bag for several hours, I trashed all of its contents except for the pad, on which I wrote notes for this article, and which later proved surprisingly absorbent, for paper, and the press kit, to which, thanks to an epic session of interviews, I will probably never have to refer. (To be totally honest, a virtue much praised by the actors during the same, epic interview session, what I really could have used was a shiny set of Your Friends and Neighbors AA batteries. My tape recorder glided to a miserly halt a mere twenty minutes in.)

Some Words about the Screening
What I learned is that it’s probably a bad idea to be nice to people who are especially tan and wearing necklaces made of shells, because these people and I do not really have much in common. My sort of post-flight, giddy, out-of-body friendliness (a result of my gratitude at being back on the ground) ended up getting me seated in a small crowd of boisterous, ruddy, totally likeable but not entirely like-minded people, one of whom referred to the place I currently live as “Frisco.” My secretive, superstitious pre-film preparation (writing the name of the film on my pad, for one thing) was rendered impossible by the necessity of keeping up my end of the conversation.

Craig, the tanned and enshelled reviewer to my left, was obviously blessed with a healthy dose of self-respect, mixed inextricably with a kind of good-natured obsequiousness (it’s possible that you had to be there). After misunderstanding the opening scene of the movie, he proceeded to “explain” crucial moments of the film by leaning over and whispering into my ear. The only one of these illuminations I remember is “alpha male,” which he said with reference to Jason Patric’s overtly sadistic character.

After the screening was over, I made a kind of Craig-induced mistake; I laid my cards on the table. We were sitting in the womb/minibus waiting to be transported back to the hotel, and Craig looked at me inquiringly. “Whoosh,” he said, appreciative. “That was really something.” Please understand me when I say that it was difficult to let this comment go. Happily, the concerned-looking man in the seat/placenta behind mine chimed in, nodding and clucking, so that, the following morning, when most of what I had said about the film was quoted back to the actors as though it were, indeed, someone else’s very own opinion, I had a witness.

Dinner
Back in my suite at the hotel, I made a beeline for the Room Service menu, which I pored over slowly and lovingly, as though it were Tolstoy or, more accurately, someone considerably less comprehensible, like Lacan. Pen and Your Friends and Neighbors pad in hand, I made some initial calculations, reworked them, scratched around a little bit, and finally ordered a full dinner despite feeling no trace of hunger. Shortly after a very polite man who addressed me as “Mrs. Levine” had wheeled an entire table into my suite, set with royal precision and actual silver, including the ice cream dish, I proceeded to consume every last morsel of my grilled chicken/roasted rosemary potato/sun-dried tomato/Caesar salad, my fresh watermelon/rhubarb juice, and my apple pie a la mode. Each of these items was delicious in what can only be called an expensive way. The reason I ordered these items in particular is that I had been given a $125 non-transferable allowance and because the $100 caviar, which I also considered ordering, might, with tax and tip, have come too close to that allowance to have enabled me to make the long-distance calls that were necessary from such a location.

Morning
One thing I noticed right from the beginning is that it’s hard to get a really good look at L.A., since it’s so flat and sprawling. On the ground, there’s not much to distinguish the city from any other strip-mall-qua-bee-comb grid than a profusion of movie-related billboards (Do proportionately more people in L.A. see movies?). On my single morning in Beverly Hills, I did get something of a perspective from the terrace of my suite at the Four Seasons, which was on the fifteenth floor. What I saw looked, ultimately, not too different from the suburban sprawl of Tuscon, Arizona, where I went for the first time several months ago, or even of St. Louis. I won’t deny that there was something altogether different in the air, something not smog- but glamour-related, a kind of frantic buzz of self-satisfied fear, as though everybody there both knew they were in one of the coolest places on earth and desperately needed to be told so.

Breakfast
N/A (stuffed from the gratuitous dinner), but it looked wickedly good.

The Interviews
This, too, was a passive endeavor. One of the ubiquitous publicity girls, wired for intra-publicity-girl communication and wearing pedal pushers and open-toed platform shoes, practically held my hand on the way to an interview room. I was seated in a suite still larger than the one I occupied, where the Evian continued to flow, and where I had only to wait as “the talent” circulated and, one by one, ad pretty close to nauseum, appeared in a chair in front of me. I did not have to move. I did not have to fabricate questions, as I was in a room with five other reviewers, all of whom, with one stunning exception (whose phone number I lacked the courage to elicit), asked more than their fair share. I did have to press the Play and Record buttons simultaneously on my recorder (impending battery error notwithstanding). I sort of had to remain awake.

Why You Shouldn’t Trust Me as an Interviewer
I’m shy. I’m hesitant. I lack the guts to ask impertinent questions. When Nastassja Kinski said that one of the reasons she took the role was that she was interested in playing the part of a woman who falls in love with another woman, something she’s never done before, I didn’t say, “What about Hotel New Hampshire?” in which Kinski removes her bear costume only to have sex with Jodie Foster (the very best reason to remove a bear costume). I never gathered the gumption to disturb this meek silence even despite the fact that the distinguished southern gentleman to my left had already revealed, in the most genteel way, that there was apparently “a great deal of scandalous behavior” on the set of Hotel New Hampshire, centering around that very bear-costume-removal scene. In my own defense, the syntax of the Kinski quote (which, though indirect, because of the battery problem, is faithful to the original) makes the statement ambiguous: Kinski could have been saying that playing a woman who falls in love with another woman is something she has never done before (well worth questioning, based on the evidence) or that falling in love with a woman is something she has never done before (less worthy of questioning, due to a lack of evidence). We did learn (through somebody else’s question) that Kinski, mother of three, is currently single.

Why Pronouns in General are a Problem in Hollywood
Despite the fact that everybody knows that these are actors, who by definition play roles, there is a tendency to refer to the actor and the character as one and the same, as in, “That scene where Tom Hanks blows away Morgan Freeman.” Or, from the point of view of the actor himself, “That scene where I drive the flaming bus over a cliff.” For anybody who takes her diegetic levels seriously (which, fine, most people probably don’t), this practice is totally disorienting and stupid and wrong, and not recommended for movies such as this one, where the characters are basically despicable and actors end up saying things such as, “That scene where I’m screaming and pounding on the bathroom door, behind which is a cowering, faceless woman who has just had the audacity to get her period.”

The Two Schools of (Alternative Weekly) Movie Critics
The target audience of Your Friends and Neighbors was discernable by the fact that the studio shelled out dough to bring in not the writers for the large city dailies but reviewers from the smaller, more audacious, flamingly liberal alternative weeklies, where evidence of cinephilia (or whatever the noun is) actually still exists, sometimes. Never before having met an ensemble of this latter class of people, I was interested to discover that we generally fall into two camps: middle-aged, portly men with varying degrees of hair and encyclopediacal knowledge of film history who ask informed, straightforward questions while resting their steno pads on the protruding mounds of their bellies; and young, alternatively spectacled women with artificially enhanced hair, difficult shoes and feminist agendas. Could you die? Are these not the two most adorable classes of people on earth?

Impressions of the (Sort of) Famous People I Met
Ben Stiller (actor): A defensive sloucher. An I’m-keeping-this-flailing-leg-between-us-at-all-times kind of star. I appreciated the way he was unable to hide his discomfort, and I think he would have given us a good interview if the woman in the back of the room hadn’t opened with a genital-related question. My favorite things he said were, with reference to the character he plays in the film, “I understand that that kind of behavior is not going to make me happy; I am hopefully more mature than he is emotionally” and, with reference to himself, “I just want to be happy. That’s an ongoing pursuit.” I thought that that was pretty bold and revealing and worth a whole closet of the Gucci shoes he was wearing, which I also liked. They made his feet look clownishly large.

Nastassja Kinski (actor): The word I would use to describe Nastassja Kinski is: “Tinkerbellesque.” She flits about, flopping her head from side to side in a cute, inquisitive way. (I once had a friend who did this same thing, and she had received no fewer than eleven marriage proposals by the time she was 21). Kinksi is perpetually sort of somewhere else, maybe in the less confounding country of her first language, over there in Europe. I also have to say, against my better judgment, that she is unqualifiably adorable, and that if prodded I would admit that I came to have something of a crush on her, more because of her appealingly deferential personality (“Deed you like thee film? Deed you think it had not enough sweetness?”) than her fairly typically atypical good looks. The other thing to notice about Nastassja Kinski (she didn’t really say anything worth quoting; it was more like her presence that you wanted to quote) is that she smelled really good.

Amy Brenneman (actor): At some point during this interview, while talking about one or another of her romantic relationships, Amy Brenneman “confessed” that she has been blessed with a very active libido (a revelation which Craig scribbled assiduously in his notebook, despite the fact that his batteries were still operative). That may be true, but it seems to me that what this woman has been blessed with, beyond I would be willing to venture 99% of the human species, is a stunning head of hair. This is kind of annoying in someone who wrote her thesis at Harvard on a Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice. I mean, that is absolutely the kind of venture ordinarily attempted by someone with mediocre to sub-standard hair. I really don’t see room for people with superstar hair in that field.

Endearing things Amy Brenneman said: 1) When referring to her husband, she used the word “menschy”; 2) In response to a question about her character’s relationship with her husband, she described a totally dysfunctional relationship she, Amy, had been in, involving alcohol and a total breakdown of communication.

Jason Patric (producer/actor): I’m going to vent a little spleen here, since Jason Patric impressed me as one of the more frightening human beings on the planet. The media have marked him as “difficult,” apparently, and this might be a better article if I could contradict the conventional wisdom and tell you, as his coworkers did, that he’s actually a really super guy, beady eyes and all. However, based on twenty minutes of interaction in a relatively non-threatening environment, I was able to conclude nothing other than that Patric is a barely contained, seething mass of anger, a kind of vortex of highly explosive gasses around whom you really, really, really do not ever want to light a match, or something remotely like a match, not even a distant relative of a match.

Having anticipated the negative reactions to his character, Jason, like most of the cast, seemed to be on board with the honesty defense: i.e., “At least, unlike most people in the film, and in the world, the character says exactly what he means.” Even if this is nothing more than my own personal growth agenda hard at work, I have to question this assertion. This character is a sadistic, raving mass of anger whose best sexual experience was gang-raping a shy, awkward kid in his high school. Is that honest? Is being viciously angry 100% of the time honest? My old therapist, a very honest woman, taught me that beneath anger there is almost always pain, and it would seem to me that that—understanding, seeing and feeling that pain—is honest.

Neil LaBute (writer/director): In the “Which of these kids is not like the others” game, Neil LaBute is most certainly the winner. Pudgy and mild-mannered, he was sloppy not in the purposeful way cultivated on Stiller by Stiller’s publicist but in his own, natural way—shirttails hanging, paunch distended. He kind of has more hair than he seems to need. LaBute came the closest to actually making me appreciate Your Friends and Neighbors, by saying intelligent (if frustratingly postmodern) things about his hopes and desires and intentions for and around it. He said: “I tend to be someone who raises questions and doesn’t offer as many answers, but I’d rather have that happen than package a film so completely that there’s nothing left for the audience.” LaBute also said that his favorite Woody Allen film is Crimes and Misdemeanors, pinning the tail smack dab on one of my personal donkeys.

Post-Interview Lunch
The unrivaled superstar of this meal, where seating had to be secured immediately since supply was flauntingly parsimonious in the face of demand, was a chocolate cake so rich it sweated, and a mound of bloody red fraises freches, the kind so juicy and ripe you would find a way to have sex with them if you could. Dessert actually posed something of a problem, as the other option was a steamy apple cobbler, richly flecked with cinnamon, and, having ingested the previous evening’s room service event in its entirety, I was dealing with limited available real estate in my stomach. I went for the cake.

Something Else You Should Know Before You Read This Review
I liked In the Company of Men. I thought it was a smart, disturbing, beautifully assembled film, and that it made a point despite not actually being terribly deep. I thought its point (some people get away with evil; others are corroded and collapse) was a worthwhile one to make, but that more than anything what the film should be commended for was its stylistic originality, which was undeniable. The music alone made the experience worth two hours of my time. I did not think it was a feminist movie, and I more emphatically did not think it was a misogynistic movie. In fact, I would venture to say that the majority of major motion pictures put out by Hollywood, in which women are viewed as sex objects or mothers and are rarely portrayed as complex and powerful, are far more misogynistic than In the Company of Men. I did think that In the Company of Men was misandropic, portraying men as calculating assholes, insipid assholes, or simpering assholes. That worried me a bit.

Our Friends and Neighbors: The Review
I hated this movie. King-sized bed and plush terry robe notwithstanding, there is no other way to say it. Populated by six despicable or pathetic characters who are so pathological as to be unrecognizable as humans, the movie pits men against women, women against women, and men against men in contrived, meaningless ways. Every character is either a sadist or a masochist, characterized by a single, unwavering state of being that admits no nuance or change. These are not, I most emphatically declare, my friends and neighbors, and if they ever should become them, I will run screaming from this earth.

It’s hard to fully convey the brutality of this film, but I’ll begin with a sample of a few of its most memorable lines: “Nobody gives me more pleasure than myself.” “I don’t give a shit about anybody. This is my life.” “People can’t communicate, and you couldn’t keep your erection.” “I just think for right now we need to see each other as meat.” This last line, more than any other, I think, captures the flavor of the film.

I need to say that the fundamental problem with Your Friends and Neighbors is not that it is shocking and brutal but that it is pointlessly so. In scene after painful scene, no connection is established, no insight garnered, no progress made. Your Friends and Neighbors is merely a pageant of abuse and suffering, in quite a few of their vicissitudes (boyfriend abuses girlfriend for making a comment he views as silly, girlfriend abuses boyfriend for talking while they have sex, wife cheats on husband with equally repulsive and insensitive man, girlfriend abuses girlfriend for asking too many questions, boyfriend cheats on girlfriend with best friend’s silently suffering wife). There is a great deal of attempted communication—endless “ums” and gesticulations—but nobody listens, which is just as well, because nothing actually gets said. Undoubtedly, LaBute is trying to say that people have trouble communicating (none of the six principal characters is ever named, for one thing), but his point is moot when none of the characters with whom he populated his film is believable as an actual person. Of course none of these characters can communicate. These are mere fragments of people. None of them, as merely a fragment, possesses the emotional vocabulary to say anything meaningful.

I hope that whatever dialogue develops around this film, if any does, does not center around where it stands morally or politically, since it is not invested in anything other than stylized cruelty. There is no message here, and LaBute, despite his well-articulated goals, has raised no questions. He is clearly an intelligent, pleasant human being, with admirable artistic goals, and Gramercy Pictures succeeded in making me wish him well. But I hated his movie.