4 hours ago
4
FRIENDSHIP
★★½
CTC. 100 minutes. In cinemas July 17
Friendship is a comedy of embarrassment. It may make you may laugh or, like me, you may spend most of the film muttering, “No, don’t do it.”
Tim Robinson (left) and Paul Rudd: Unlikely buddies in Friendship.
It’s an absurdist take on male friendship. Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson) has no friends of either sex. In contrast, his wife, Tami (Kate Mara), who readily admits that their sex life is far from orgasmic, has many friends. In the film’s opening scene, she’s about to go out with one who also happens to be an ex-boyfriend. Craig, on the other hand, is staying home alone in front of the television, having failed to persuade their teenage son to watch the latest Marvel movie with him.
This routine changes abruptly when Craig meets the family’s new neighbour, Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd), a TV weatherman who fancies himself an adventurer. Instead of saying “see you later” at the end of their first meeting, he points a finger at Craig and cries: “Stay curious!”
Instantly entranced, Craig takes him seriously and Austin, deciding that he’s an affable eccentric with entertainment value, starts hanging out with him. They go on adventures together and Craig begins to loosen up with predictably mortifying consequences.
The film’s director, Andrew DeYoung, a friend of Robinson’s, wrote the role especially for him by way of giving him the chance to elaborate on the kind of embarrassments he’s been perpetrating in I Think You Should Leave Now, the sketch comedy series that has acquired a cult audience on Netflix.
The typical Robinson character knows no boundaries. He’s a juvenile variation on Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. Whatever you say about Larry’s tin-eared response to the sensitivities of others and his tenacity in holding a grudge, he’s a grown-up. Robinson, however, is stuck in pre-adolescence. He’s the naughtiest kid in the class, harbouring an obsession with bodily function jokes together with a bubbling desire to shock in the most bizarre way he can dream up.
Naturally, he soon proves too much for Austin and after one particularly disastrous evening, Austin tells Craig that they’re breaking up. The friendship is over.
It’s a rash move, underestimating Craig’s stubbornness along with the lengths to which his obsessiveness will take him.
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It would be futile to worry about the plot’s inconsistencies. It’s such an extreme portrait of an unhinged personality that you can only wonder at the fact that we’re supposed to believe he’s reached middle age as a husband and father with a job as a team leader at a marketing company even though none of his team can stand him.
Credibility is not the point. DeYoung and Robinson are creating an essay in the art of social suicide and, to their credit, they do manage to sustain a heady pace with their ability to conjure up an accelerating cascade of calamities. But by the end of it I wasn’t even wincing any more. I went out with a shrug and a “so what?”
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