| Neil
LaBute's latest foray into interpersonal carnage easily misconstrued
(like his Your Friends & Neighbors and In
the Company of Men) as the bitter product of a misanthrope.
And like its playish predecessors (& Todd Solondz) it
pretty much works for me. The acting is affected in that high
school play kind of way, which might be a dialogue-imprinted
byproduct of the movie being filmed right after its run on
the stage (w/ same actors), but I marked that off as an extension
of a thematic concern with surface and its Single White
Female [that's Borderline Personality Disorder for
you non-cineastes] relationship with the interior.
Plus I just liked the cavalier fakeness of it. And while that
might make it sound like some played-out po-mo exercise, the
movie manages to be both obvious and layered by conflating
artist with audience (and Heisenberg) via their mutually alienating
invasiveness. I'm not kidding. The movie makes us complicit
in the destruction, as if all existence were one big male
gaze, and all of us voyeurs in it. Meanwhile it's also locked
in an endless bullshit spiral due to its constant evasions
of the tyranny of tone, so that we never hear the one moment
of truth (a passing moment somewhere in the middle of the
movie) in which tone and content coincide: it takes place
as a whisper between the "protagonists", the implication
being that the viewer (including you watching yourself, literally
or figuratively) ruins everything. Contrived, but way good.
[Bonus points to Fred Weller for going beyond the call of
duty with his endearing mix of fratty asshole & honest
weirdo.]
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