Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Andrew DeYoung
Starring: Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd, Kate Mara, Jack Dylan Grazer, Josh Segarra, Billy Bryk
We've heard much talk lately of a male loneliness epidemic. Men are being encouraged to gather in groups, often in sheds, and talk out their feelings. I can't think of a worse way to spend an evening than making awkward small talk about how many miles you can get to a gallon while trying to fashion a doll's house in some bloke's shed. I've spent much of my adult life making excuses to avoid spending time with other men (I attended an all-boys school and got enough male company in those five years, thank you very much), and I've finally realised my lifelong ambition of living far enough away from my friends that they don't feel the need to invite me to their social gatherings. Ah, bliss. 10 minutes in the company of my barber once every three months is as much male company as I'm willing to put up with.
But some men desire the company of other men. Take Craig (Tim Robinson), the creepy protagonist of writer/director Andrew DeYoung's feature debut Friendship. He seems to have a pretty good life. He's married to a woman out of his league (Kate Mara's Tami) who seems to let him do his own thing while she runs her florist business with their teenage son (Jack Dylan Grazer). But then Craig ruins everything by making a male friend.
When he receives some mail meant for the house across the road, Craig has a platonic meet cute with his new neighbour Austin (Paul Rudd). Austin is friendly to Craig in a way we suspect very few other men have been throughout his socially awkward life. He invites him over for a few beers, takes him exploring some underground tunnels that lead to a secret entrance to city hall, and shows him a prehistoric rock from his collection that has an almost euphoric effect on Craig when he touches it. This fledgling bromance proves one-sided, and when Craig makes a fool of himself at a gathering of Austin' mates, Austin breaks off the friendship. Craig isn't quitting Austin without a fight however, and he engages in increasingly disturbing behaviour in a deluded attempt to win his buddy back.
We've seen male-on-male stalker movies before, but it's usually the cool guy (what I like to call the "homme fatale") who stalks the timid nerd (the best of these movies is Curtis Hanson's Bad Influence). Friendship's premise of flipping this towards something closer to a gender swapped Single White Female has bags of potential, but DeYoung can't nail down a satisfying plot. The aim here is clearly for cringe comedy of the variety Robinson practices in his Netflix sketch show I Think You Should Leave, but cringe comedy requires the audience to relate to the protagonist's awkwardness in some fashion. Robinson's Craig is simply too deranged for us to have any sympathy with him. He's less a comic lead and more a thriller villain. Craig is so clearly nuts that we can't buy that he somehow managed to build a comfortable suburban life for himself. We don't buy someone who is this terrible around people being able to hold down a job as a marketing exec, and we certainly can't accept him being married to someone who looks like Kate Mara and who seems perfectly normal.
There's a subplot regarding Craig being inattentive to his wife, but the movie is guilty of the same thing. More needs to be made of Tami's struggle to live with this creep, and the detail of her being a cancer survivor adds practically nothing to the character. Rudd's Austin is also absent from too much of the narrative. We get a few hints that he might be an asshole, but not enough to get us on Craig's side. We suspect Craig might do something terrible to Austin, but we don't care about what effect that might have on either of these men.
The role of Craig was apparently written specifically for Robinson, and his experience in sketch comedy appears to have influenced DeYoung's writing here. Too many scenes play like individual skits with their own punchlines rather than pieces that slot together to form a satisfying narrative whole. Some of the individual skits are mildly amusing (the best being one that sees Craig stand up to an anti-social diner only to discover he's picked a fight with a Russian mobster) but many are simply a distraction from the main plot. By the time Friendship's credits began to roll I wondered if spending the evening with some bros in a shed mightn't have been a better alternative after all. Nah.
Friendship is in UK/ROI cinemas from July 18th.
