One of my cinephile friends once said to me that "a good film is never depressing." As much as I hate to disappoint the latte-sippers
One of my cinephile friends once said to me that "a good film is never depressing." As much as I hate to disappoint the latte-sippers at the Sunset 5 - my friend is correct. Regardless of whether or not it reveals a dark side of life, a film that has insight is never disheartening. Challenging films, like challenging works of literature, are difficult to get through, yet worth the effort. What is really depressing though is when we get our hopes up, and a film that aims for such insight fails. Two recent movies, Todd Solodnz's Happiness and Neil LaBute's Your Friends and Neighbors, do just that.
The hype was good. Both works received rave reviews from many critics. In fairness, it is difficult to disparage this enthusiasm. When audiences lap up Rush Hour like an osteoperotic kitten drinking milk, it is no wonder that critics are thrilled with meager bits of art where they can find it.
However these two films define a genre that could only be called COWS - "the Cinema Of Wallowing in Sadness." This is not a new concept. COWS exhibit a familiar ruse: true art equals misery, intellectual depth equals despair. Film critics, weaned on Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni, immediately recognize these formulae and brand the film "cutting edge." It is a reverse snobbishness - just as a critic will reflexively dismiss a Michael Bay film (probably an understandable knee-jerk reaction) he is eager to beat the drum of the latest work that "truly explores the nature of our loneliness, our solitude, our inability to communicate, our grief." Please.
Unfortunately, these two films substitute misery for complexity. In high school, our literature classes taught us that the brooding character is most worthy of the term paper - the Hamlet, the Heathcliff, the Humbert Humbert. So here is the recipe for the aspiring young independent filmmaker: mix anguished characters together, let them all spar with one another, and it will be profound; garnish with a sly, ironic title (Happiness is about "unhappiness"; Your Friends and Neighbors would rather drown their friends and poison their neighbors) and the film is ready for Sundance.
Unfortunately, art is not made with a cookbook, and these movies have no wisdom behind the angst. They are superficial, disingenuous representations which assert the adolescent opinion that life is filled only with bile and monstrous nastiness. Like the world of Hieronymous Bosch, theirs is a place of damnation and sin. But, as in Bosch's paintings, it is a fantasy, a self-indulgent myth. There is nothing in either of these films to leaven the despair, no thaw to the freeze of cynicism.
Solodnz's Happiness is about a family whose members have materialized from The Jerry Springer Show. One sister is married to a pedophile whose favorite evening entertainment is drugging the kids and raping a little-leaguer friend while the youngster is playing a video game; another Goneril-esque daughter is a famous novelist whose arrogance has become so isolating that her only turn-ons are the obscene phone calls she receives from her blubbery, chronically masturbating neighbor; the third sister is a simple-minded wallflower who is robbed by the immigrant Russian cab driver whom she meets while teaching an English class; their parents live in a retirement "resort" (the long-lost tenth level of Dante's Inferno) and are nagging old people simply counting down the days until death by heart attack, or rot, whichever comes first. Other outside characters include: an obese rape victim who cuts up her attacker and stores his body parts in her freezer; a young boy obsessed with achieving his first orgasm ; a chubby penguin-man who commits suicide after his lover dumps him; and, perhaps most absurdly, a father who yells at his son, a victim of molestation, when the boy cannot comprehend that a friend's father raped him.
ho are these people ? What does all this muck mean ? What can the viewer draw from this mish-mash of morbidity ? Is this a "world view" ? Or is it nothing more than exaggerated ugliness ? The hypertragic mood of the movie makes you question its genuineness. Solodnz, like a mad chemist, seems thrilled by adding each new horror. This is a spectacle, a circus, in which the viewer is constantly shocked. But it is easy to disgust people. It is another challenge to make the experience relevant.
You can feel the director's heavy-handed ache to be "controversial." Take, for instance, the scene that sets most people buzzing while leaving their local Laemmle. After being taunted at school, a boy asks his father, the child molester, what "it" felt like, did he enjoy it, why did he do it. The father answers all questions with curt, brutal answers. The truth of it all ! Thank goodness a director finally has the courage to deal with such issues! If only the world had more directors who could be so courageous! The whole films reeks of this self-importance, this self-righteous confidence of being daring and new.
Roger Ebert, in a characteristically hyperbolic article, writes, "Happiness is a movie about closed doors - apartment doors, bedroom doors and the doors of the unconscious. It moves back and forth between several stories, which often link up. It shows us people who want to be loved and who never will be - because of their emotional incompetence and arrested development." (How do I open my door to the unconscious ?) It's true that the film has characters who are emotionally "incompetent," but this is no revelation. People often have difficulty talking about their secrets. This is not new information - just flip through your average Psych 100 textbook or the pages of a high school literary journal.
Ultimately, we know that pedophiles exist in the world, and that people make obscene phone calls, etc. But there is nothing inherently interesting about tossing them like salad into one film with a plot that goes nowhere. This feels like a wannabe Fellini (ala Satyricon) or Ken Russell (ala The Devils) movie in which we are trying to find meaning in the madness, but only find madness. Solodnz has made a shocking film. However, it is no trick to shock a viewer - all you need to do is put a cute animal on screen and kill it; and, if you feel inclined, eat it. If, however, Solodnz wanted to provide something greater than fodder for a Christian Coalition protest, Happiness is a hoax.
Your Friends and Neighbors, directed by Neil LaBute, uses a similar structure to tell its tale of testosterone gone awry. An ensemble group of characters whose lives connect all are sexually frustrated, spiteful, and deceitful. The stereotypical heathen urbanites who populate Mr. Labute's Neighborhood include: a writer, looking like a freeze-dried version of the woman who played the witch in The Wizard of Oz, hates conversation during coitus; her boyfriend, an impish intellectual-nudnut; a doctor whose best lay was raping another boy during high school; and his friend, a slug who, although married, enjoys masturbating more.
Too much. LaBute revels in piling on each new onslaught. As in Happiness, none of these sick characters resonate - it's a freak show. Janet Maslin solemnly declares that he is exploring "the chasm of bitterness separating men and women." LaBute explores nothing - he demonstrates this bitterness, but unlike a real spelunker, never really probes the inner workings of the cave. In this film's most talked about sequence - men sitting in the steam room discussing their best lays - the dialogue is bitter and jaded and heartless. But there is nothing pithy here, only cynicism. The COWS are mooing - the filmmaker throws his hands in the air and shouts "everything sucks!" LaBute's film is the quintessential work from an artist who records a problem, but lacks the wisdom to probe its origins, or take us past them.
Is it possible to create a film about human catharsis with being overly dramatic ? Robert Altman's 1993 masterpiece Short Cuts does so without plummeting into the abyss of self-indulgence. The film traces human disconectedness and dissatisfaction by focusing on the mundane, the everyday issues that together create the fabric of a tale about how we make it through life peacefully, but are far from happy.
Altman's work, like Labute and Solodnz's, is a pastiche of many different lives that interact and foil each other. But Altman finds illumination and profundity at the smaller scale. Compared to Solodnz, Altman's depiction of sexual dysphoria is not juiced up with pedophilia. Instead, Short Cuts, in one of its many plotlines, presents the story of a man whose wife is a phone sex operator. His jealousy and frustration are nagging because to him because there is a type of infidelity taking place, but not a tangible, concrete sin. He simmers with anger. Altman does not revel in dysfunction and, more importantly, does not manipulate us towards hatred for his characters. Rather, he examines an everyday situation to reveal the anxiety and pathos beneath. It's subtle - both husband ("my wife is faking sex with other men") and wife ("I have to put food on the table") have necessary and genuine motivations. The details, the long close up of the husbands face, his sad eyes as he watches his wife "perform" while she feeds the kids and irons the laundry, are calm and simple, but still incredibly effective. You sense his loss of manliness because he cannot protect his wife - she is forced to become someone else's in a very intimate way. Altman is not going for the kill, not shoving the issue in your face, but rather, hinting at what makes life a battle of compromises.
With LaBute, the depiction of a man and wife who have stopped wanting to be with each other - who have lost hope and are living a life of emotional barreness - is simply histrionic bickering, furious posturing and manipulation. They cut each other down, yell at each other, cheat with their best friend's spouses, anything that will be explosive. In Altman's film, the dissolution of a relationship between family members is dramatized by the story of a grandfather who comes to see his grandson in the hospital, but can only talk about himself and his own problems. Yet the father whose son is sick never mentions how angry this selfishness makes him. But you can see it in his eyes. Again, Altman is subtle - the camera is the key. He uses quick glances and deliberate cuts to reveal how his characters despise one another, are sick of each other's shortcomings, but never say it because they have lost the desire to fix the situation. No amount of angry words can top this ennui. LaBute and Solodnz use only words. Altman puts less faith in dialogue - to use a familiar cliché, people never say what they mean.
It is not that Altman is less edgy. His work is far from the mindless optimism of feel-good, problem-solved movies that Solodnz and LaBute are reacting against. However, in his films, the problems in life are not obvious - they are quiet, and appear in small doses. Daily life is not a constant barrage of misery, it is a slow erosion of the spirit.
As Short Cuts suggests, unhappiness is caused by the inconspicuous disturbances that sneak up on us when our lives are at their most ordinary; of course, Altman also shows the small triumphs - the equally insconspicuous moments of joy which gives life meaning.
The dichotomy between Altman and Solodnz/LaBute reminds me of a girl in high school who wrote an essay about a woman who influenced her life. The thesis was "every moment in life counts." I always thought it was a silly proposition - of course not every moment in life counts ! But, I think, it is in those moments which seemingly "do not count" that a life is defined. With Solodnz and LaBute, you are aware of every stubborn second. A film such as Short Cuts realizes that it is not the passionate times of fury which transform life, but rather the minutiae, the small, daily choices which shape how things will end up.
This is the wisdom which lets Altman's film cross from depressing to pivotal. Watching Short Cuts is worth the pain you endure living with these characters - you walk out of the theater not feeling wretched, but rather, euphoric.
One of my cinephile friends once said to me that "a good film is never depressing." As much as I hate to disappoint the latte-sippers at the Sunset 5 - my friend is correct. Regardless of whether or not it reveals a dark side of life, a film that has insight is never disheartening. Challenging films, like challenging works of literature, are difficult to get through, yet worth the effort. What is really depressing though is when we get our hopes up, and a film that aims for such insight fails. Two recent movies, Todd Solodnz's Happiness and Neil LaBute's Your Friends and Neighbors, do just that.
The hype was good. Both works received rave reviews from many critics. In fairness, it is difficult to disparage this enthusiasm. When audiences lap up Rush Hour like an osteoperotic kitten drinking milk, it is no wonder that critics are thrilled with meager bits of art where they can find it.
However these two films define a genre that could only be called COWS - "the Cinema Of Wallowing in Sadness." This is not a new concept. COWS exhibit a familiar ruse: true art equals misery, intellectual depth equals despair. Film critics, weaned on Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni, immediately recognize these formulae and brand the film "cutting edge." It is a reverse snobbishness - just as a critic will reflexively dismiss a Michael Bay film (probably an understandable knee-jerk reaction) he is eager to beat the drum of the latest work that "truly explores the nature of our loneliness, our solitude, our inability to communicate, our grief." Please.
Unfortunately, these two films substitute misery for complexity. In high school, our literature classes taught us that the brooding character is most worthy of the term paper - the Hamlet, the Heathcliff, the Humbert Humbert. So here is the recipe for the aspiring young independent filmmaker: mix anguished characters together, let them all spar with one another, and it will be profound; garnish with a sly, ironic title (Happiness is about "unhappiness"; Your Friends and Neighbors would rather drown their friends and poison their neighbors) and the film is ready for Sundance.
Unfortunately, art is not made with a cookbook, and these movies have no wisdom behind the angst. They are superficial, disingenuous representations which assert the adolescent opinion that life is filled only with bile and monstrous nastiness. Like the world of Hieronymous Bosch, theirs is a place of damnation and sin. But, as in Bosch's paintings, it is a fantasy, a self-indulgent myth. There is nothing in either of these films to leaven the despair, no thaw to the freeze of cynicism.
Solodnz's Happiness is about a family whose members have materialized from The Jerry Springer Show. One sister is married to a pedophile whose favorite evening entertainment is drugging the kids and raping a little-leaguer friend while the youngster is playing a video game; another Goneril-esque daughter is a famous novelist whose arrogance has become so isolating that her only turn-ons are the obscene phone calls she receives from her blubbery, chronically masturbating neighbor; the third sister is a simple-minded wallflower who is robbed by the immigrant Russian cab driver whom she meets while teaching an English class; their parents live in a retirement "resort" (the long-lost tenth level of Dante's Inferno) and are nagging old people simply counting down the days until death by heart attack, or rot, whichever comes first. Other outside characters include: an obese rape victim who cuts up her attacker and stores his body parts in her freezer; a young boy obsessed with achieving his first orgasm ; a chubby penguin-man who commits suicide after his lover dumps him; and, perhaps most absurdly, a father who yells at his son, a victim of molestation, when the boy cannot comprehend that a friend's father raped him.
ho are these people ? What does all this muck mean ? What can the viewer draw from this mish-mash of morbidity ? Is this a "world view" ? Or is it nothing more than exaggerated ugliness ? The hypertragic mood of the movie makes you question its genuineness. Solodnz, like a mad chemist, seems thrilled by adding each new horror. This is a spectacle, a circus, in which the viewer is constantly shocked. But it is easy to disgust people. It is another challenge to make the experience relevant.
You can feel the director's heavy-handed ache to be "controversial." Take, for instance, the scene that sets most people buzzing while leaving their local Laemmle. After being taunted at school, a boy asks his father, the child molester, what "it" felt like, did he enjoy it, why did he do it. The father answers all questions with curt, brutal answers. The truth of it all ! Thank goodness a director finally has the courage to deal with such issues! If only the world had more directors who could be so courageous! The whole films reeks of this self-importance, this self-righteous confidence of being daring and new.
Roger Ebert, in a characteristically hyperbolic article, writes, "Happiness is a movie about closed doors - apartment doors, bedroom doors and the doors of the unconscious. It moves back and forth between several stories, which often link up. It shows us people who want to be loved and who never will be - because of their emotional incompetence and arrested development." (How do I open my door to the unconscious ?) It's true that the film has characters who are emotionally "incompetent," but this is no revelation. People often have difficulty talking about their secrets. This is not new information - just flip through your average Psych 100 textbook or the pages of a high school literary journal.
Ultimately, we know that pedophiles exist in the world, and that people make obscene phone calls, etc. But there is nothing inherently interesting about tossing them like salad into one film with a plot that goes nowhere. This feels like a wannabe Fellini (ala Satyricon) or Ken Russell (ala The Devils) movie in which we are trying to find meaning in the madness, but only find madness. Solodnz has made a shocking film. However, it is no trick to shock a viewer - all you need to do is put a cute animal on screen and kill it; and, if you feel inclined, eat it. If, however, Solodnz wanted to provide something greater than fodder for a Christian Coalition protest, Happiness is a hoax.
Your Friends and Neighbors, directed by Neil LaBute, uses a similar structure to tell its tale of testosterone gone awry. An ensemble group of characters whose lives connect all are sexually frustrated, spiteful, and deceitful. The stereotypical heathen urbanites who populate Mr. Labute's Neighborhood include: a writer, looking like a freeze-dried version of the woman who played the witch in The Wizard of Oz, hates conversation during coitus; her boyfriend, an impish intellectual-nudnut; a doctor whose best lay was raping another boy during high school; and his friend, a slug who, although married, enjoys masturbating more.
Too much. LaBute revels in piling on each new onslaught. As in Happiness, none of these sick characters resonate - it's a freak show. Janet Maslin solemnly declares that he is exploring "the chasm of bitterness separating men and women." LaBute explores nothing - he demonstrates this bitterness, but unlike a real spelunker, never really probes the inner workings of the cave. In this film's most talked about sequence - men sitting in the steam room discussing their best lays - the dialogue is bitter and jaded and heartless. But there is nothing pithy here, only cynicism. The COWS are mooing - the filmmaker throws his hands in the air and shouts "everything sucks!" LaBute's film is the quintessential work from an artist who records a problem, but lacks the wisdom to probe its origins, or take us past them.
Is it possible to create a film about human catharsis with being overly dramatic ? Robert Altman's 1993 masterpiece Short Cuts does so without plummeting into the abyss of self-indulgence. The film traces human disconectedness and dissatisfaction by focusing on the mundane, the everyday issues that together create the fabric of a tale about how we make it through life peacefully, but are far from happy.
Altman's work, like Labute and Solodnz's, is a pastiche of many different lives that interact and foil each other. But Altman finds illumination and profundity at the smaller scale. Compared to Solodnz, Altman's depiction of sexual dysphoria is not juiced up with pedophilia. Instead, Short Cuts, in one of its many plotlines, presents the story of a man whose wife is a phone sex operator. His jealousy and frustration are nagging because to him because there is a type of infidelity taking place, but not a tangible, concrete sin. He simmers with anger. Altman does not revel in dysfunction and, more importantly, does not manipulate us towards hatred for his characters. Rather, he examines an everyday situation to reveal the anxiety and pathos beneath. It's subtle - both husband ("my wife is faking sex with other men") and wife ("I have to put food on the table") have necessary and genuine motivations. The details, the long close up of the husbands face, his sad eyes as he watches his wife "perform" while she feeds the kids and irons the laundry, are calm and simple, but still incredibly effective. You sense his loss of manliness because he cannot protect his wife - she is forced to become someone else's in a very intimate way. Altman is not going for the kill, not shoving the issue in your face, but rather, hinting at what makes life a battle of compromises.
With LaBute, the depiction of a man and wife who have stopped wanting to be with each other - who have lost hope and are living a life of emotional barreness - is simply histrionic bickering, furious posturing and manipulation. They cut each other down, yell at each other, cheat with their best friend's spouses, anything that will be explosive. In Altman's film, the dissolution of a relationship between family members is dramatized by the story of a grandfather who comes to see his grandson in the hospital, but can only talk about himself and his own problems. Yet the father whose son is sick never mentions how angry this selfishness makes him. But you can see it in his eyes. Again, Altman is subtle - the camera is the key. He uses quick glances and deliberate cuts to reveal how his characters despise one another, are sick of each other's shortcomings, but never say it because they have lost the desire to fix the situation. No amount of angry words can top this ennui. LaBute and Solodnz use only words. Altman puts less faith in dialogue - to use a familiar cliché, people never say what they mean.
It is not that Altman is less edgy. His work is far from the mindless optimism of feel-good, problem-solved movies that Solodnz and LaBute are reacting against. However, in his films, the problems in life are not obvious - they are quiet, and appear in small doses. Daily life is not a constant barrage of misery, it is a slow erosion of the spirit.
As Short Cuts suggests, unhappiness is caused by the inconspicuous disturbances that sneak up on us when our lives are at their most ordinary; of course, Altman also shows the small triumphs - the equally insconspicuous moments of joy which gives life meaning.
The dichotomy between Altman and Solodnz/LaBute reminds me of a girl in high school who wrote an essay about a woman who influenced her life. The thesis was "every moment in life counts." I always thought it was a silly proposition - of course not every moment in life counts ! But, I think, it is in those moments which seemingly "do not count" that a life is defined. With Solodnz and LaBute, you are aware of every stubborn second. A film such as Short Cuts realizes that it is not the passionate times of fury which transform life, but rather the minutiae, the small, daily choices which shape how things will end up.
This is the wisdom which lets Altman's film cross from depressing to pivotal. Watching Short Cuts is worth the pain you endure living with these characters - you walk out of the theater not feeling wretched, but rather, euphoric.
One of my cinephile friends once said to me that "a good film is never depressing." As much as I hate to disappoint the latte-sippers at the Sunset 5 - my friend is correct. Regardless of whether or not it reveals a dark side of life, a film that has insight is never disheartening. Challenging films, like challenging works of literature, are difficult to get through, yet worth the effort. What is really depressing though is when we get our hopes up, and a film that aims for such insight fails. Two recent movies, Todd Solodnz's Happiness and Neil LaBute's Your Friends and Neighbors, do just that.
The hype was good. Both works received rave reviews from many critics. In fairness, it is difficult to disparage this enthusiasm. When audiences lap up Rush Hour like an osteoperotic kitten drinking milk, it is no wonder that critics are thrilled with meager bits of art where they can find it.
However these two films define a genre that could only be called COWS - "the Cinema Of Wallowing in Sadness." This is not a new concept. COWS exhibit a familiar ruse: true art equals misery, intellectual depth equals despair. Film critics, weaned on Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni, immediately recognize these formulae and brand the film "cutting edge." It is a reverse snobbishness - just as a critic will reflexively dismiss a Michael Bay film (probably an understandable knee-jerk reaction) he is eager to beat the drum of the latest work that "truly explores the nature of our loneliness, our solitude, our inability to communicate, our grief." Please.
Unfortunately, these two films substitute misery for complexity. In high school, our literature classes taught us that the brooding character is most worthy of the term paper - the Hamlet, the Heathcliff, the Humbert Humbert. So here is the recipe for the aspiring young independent filmmaker: mix anguished characters together, let them all spar with one another, and it will be profound; garnish with a sly, ironic title (Happiness is about "unhappiness"; Your Friends and Neighbors would rather drown their friends and poison their neighbors) and the film is ready for Sundance.
Unfortunately, art is not made with a cookbook, and these movies have no wisdom behind the angst. They are superficial, disingenuous representations which assert the adolescent opinion that life is filled only with bile and monstrous nastiness. Like the world of Hieronymous Bosch, theirs is a place of damnation and sin. But, as in Bosch's paintings, it is a fantasy, a self-indulgent myth. There is nothing in either of these films to leaven the despair, no thaw to the freeze of cynicism.
Solodnz's Happiness is about a family whose members have materialized from The Jerry Springer Show. One sister is married to a pedophile whose favorite evening entertainment is drugging the kids and raping a little-leaguer friend while the youngster is playing a video game; another Goneril-esque daughter is a famous novelist whose arrogance has become so isolating that her only turn-ons are the obscene phone calls she receives from her blubbery, chronically masturbating neighbor; the third sister is a simple-minded wallflower who is robbed by the immigrant Russian cab driver whom she meets while teaching an English class; their parents live in a retirement "resort" (the long-lost tenth level of Dante's Inferno) and are nagging old people simply counting down the days until death by heart attack, or rot, whichever comes first. Other outside characters include: an obese rape victim who cuts up her attacker and stores his body parts in her freezer; a young boy obsessed with achieving his first orgasm ; a chubby penguin-man who commits suicide after his lover dumps him; and, perhaps most absurdly, a father who yells at his son, a victim of molestation, when the boy cannot comprehend that a friend's father raped him.
ho are these people ? What does all this muck mean ? What can the viewer draw from this mish-mash of morbidity ? Is this a "world view" ? Or is it nothing more than exaggerated ugliness ? The hypertragic mood of the movie makes you question its genuineness. Solodnz, like a mad chemist, seems thrilled by adding each new horror. This is a spectacle, a circus, in which the viewer is constantly shocked. But it is easy to disgust people. It is another challenge to make the experience relevant.
You can feel the director's heavy-handed ache to be "controversial." Take, for instance, the scene that sets most people buzzing while leaving their local Laemmle. After being taunted at school, a boy asks his father, the child molester, what "it" felt like, did he enjoy it, why did he do it. The father answers all questions with curt, brutal answers. The truth of it all ! Thank goodness a director finally has the courage to deal with such issues! If only the world had more directors who could be so courageous! The whole films reeks of this self-importance, this self-righteous confidence of being daring and new.
Roger Ebert, in a characteristically hyperbolic article, writes, "Happiness is a movie about closed doors - apartment doors, bedroom doors and the doors of the unconscious. It moves back and forth between several stories, which often link up. It shows us people who want to be loved and who never will be - because of their emotional incompetence and arrested development." (How do I open my door to the unconscious ?) It's true that the film has characters who are emotionally "incompetent," but this is no revelation. People often have difficulty talking about their secrets. This is not new information - just flip through your average Psych 100 textbook or the pages of a high school literary journal.
Ultimately, we know that pedophiles exist in the world, and that people make obscene phone calls, etc. But there is nothing inherently interesting about tossing them like salad into one film with a plot that goes nowhere. This feels like a wannabe Fellini (ala Satyricon) or Ken Russell (ala The Devils) movie in which we are trying to find meaning in the madness, but only find madness. Solodnz has made a shocking film. However, it is no trick to shock a viewer - all you need to do is put a cute animal on screen and kill it; and, if you feel inclined, eat it. If, however, Solodnz wanted to provide something greater than fodder for a Christian Coalition protest, Happiness is a hoax.
Your Friends and Neighbors, directed by Neil LaBute, uses a similar structure to tell its tale of testosterone gone awry. An ensemble group of characters whose lives connect all are sexually frustrated, spiteful, and deceitful. The stereotypical heathen urbanites who populate Mr. Labute's Neighborhood include: a writer, looking like a freeze-dried version of the woman who played the witch in The Wizard of Oz, hates conversation during coitus; her boyfriend, an impish intellectual-nudnut; a doctor whose best lay was raping another boy during high school; and his friend, a slug who, although married, enjoys masturbating more.
Too much. LaBute revels in piling on each new onslaught. As in Happiness, none of these sick characters resonate - it's a freak show. Janet Maslin solemnly declares that he is exploring "the chasm of bitterness separating men and women." LaBute explores nothing - he demonstrates this bitterness, but unlike a real spelunker, never really probes the inner workings of the cave. In this film's most ta
