Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

You know the male leads must be really noxious when Aaron Eckhart is the nicest of the guys, as in Neil LaBute's "Your Friends & Neighbors" (1998). Eckhart's character, Barry, is a chump. His friends are major a__holes. Ben Stiller plays Jerry, a college professor who never shuts up in bed with Catherine Keener's Terri and then seduces Barry's wife, Mary (Amy Brenneman).

Jerry is very narcissistic, except in comparison to Cary (Jason Patric), a boundlessly arrogant physician who considers himself God's gift to women. LaBute gives him quite a monologue in the steam room and the movie's best line a bit later in the locker room.

Meanwhile, Terri begins an affair with Cheri (Nastassja Kinski) whose insecurities soon turn her to babbling, seeking reassurance about sexual performance, etc. Way too much like Jerry.

Terri has good lines in a restaurant meeting with Jerry, who is unable to understand her leaving him for a woman, though it is obvious from their first scene together when they are in bed that they are not compatible. (I blame him. Wait! Is this a chick flick? Guess so, though written and directed by a man and coproduced by Patric, 99.9% of the blame for failed relationships is assigned to the male characters.... I guess this is down from the 100% of the nastiness and malignancy emanating from the male characters in LaBute's "In the Company of Men.")

I found the first hour mostly boring, persisting only because I'm having my own Jason Patric mini-retrospective. He and the movie got more interesting in the last half hour. Not an more likable: more interesting. I would not want to spend time with any of these people. Even an hour and a half seemed too long an acquaintanceship.

I did not feel that way watching LaBute's loopy "Nurse Betty" which he made after "Friends, though Eckhart was deeply unsympathetic in it and in LaBute's earlier "In the Company of Men," a reworking of Les liaisons dangereuses for two male plotters (Eckhart and Matt Malloy with Stacy Edwards as the Cecile De Volanges for the late-20th century).

I forget who says "Love is a disease." As with "The Earrings of Madame de...", I'd say that vanity and egotism are more toxic. In "Friends and Neighbors," they preclude love (whereas I consider that all three leads fall from sophisticated distance into love to varying degrees of lethalness). LaBute's characters don't have a code to fall back on, unless utter selfishness can be considered a code.

The two movies share having some very pointed lines, but LaBute's movie has very boring back-and-forth crosscutting of closeups or midshots of the characters, whereas Ophuls tracked and tracked and tracked and only rarely crosscut interlocutors. Ophuls made cinema, LaBute is a wordsmith with even less cinematic sense than David Mamet IMHO. (And I am not a fan of Mamet's stylized f-word-heavy repartee. LaBute uses the word with more restraint in a failed attempt at recycling Mamet's "Sexual Perversity in Chicago.")

The only DVD bonus features are filmographies of some of the actors (but not Patric!) and a commentary track I have no urge to play.

BTW, I think that Patric was again very good. He makes his arrogant, nasty character detestable, which was his job here.  do think that Patric may have watched "last Tango In Paris" a few times too many, however.

I thought the slight variations on the same conversation of other characters with Cheri in the gallery where she is an "artist's assistant" was mildly amusing (and, again, uncinematic).

One wish for the new year or anytime is that none of my readers has friends and neighbors like these people! Nor an obstetrician like Cary...

©  2008, Stephen O. Murray

The other movies in my Jason Patric mini-retrospective (all of which I like more) were  The Beast (he did not play the title role!), After Dark, My Sweet, and  Incognito. I think that Patric has impressive range.

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age