The Shape of Things Review
by Harvey S. Karten (harveycritic AT cs DOT com)May 14th, 2003
THE SHAPE OF THINGS
Grade: B+
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten
Focus Features/Working Title Films
Directed by: Neil LaBute
Written by: Neil LaBute
Cast: Paul Rudd, Rachel Weisz, Gretchen Mol, Fred Weller
Screened at: Loews Lincoln Sq., NYC, 5/13/03
Ever since "The Great Train Robbery" hit the screens at the turn of the last century, academics have wondered why the movie-going public simply loves to see destruction. Police cars turn upside down, buildings blow up, heads literally roll–events which, if seen close-up by normal people (as opposed to rubbernecking them at a distance), could make some throw up their McDonald's. The simple answer is that we carry a weight of hostility, of actual or imagined grievances, and seeing things destroyed on the screen are at least a legal way of getting revenge.
In TV and in the movies, we also like to see human relationships destroyed, battered, pulverized. The trouble with soap operas is that they are redundant, each bearing the feeling of deja-vu, and that the characters are portrayed too broadly, too predictably, too melodramatically.
Neil LaBute offers something different, a distinctive look at the destructive way people really are underneath the smooth talk at fancy restaurants, at the mall, in the office and in the home. One cannot be blamed for leaving his films with the impression that he thinks of humankind as pretty nice on the whole superficially, but bursting from a miasma of noxious gases beneath. Aren't there times that you think that we insult one another, whether playfully or with serious intent, not so much to hurt but simply because that's the way we are? Think of a sixty-year-old person as the terrible two's multiplied by a factor of thirty.
Where LaBute's debut offering six years ago, "In the Company of Men," deals with a pair of yuppie office workers who plot to get a deaf woman to fall in love with them while intending to dump her; and where his "Your Friends and Neighbors" explores two socially dysfunctional characters; his latest, "The Shape of Things," combines the two concepts, a large part of the 96-minute story providing a solid exploration for a payoff that will knock your socks off.
Based on a LaBute stage work with the same name and coming across on the screen as a filmed play albeit with scenes of a college campus as background, "The Shape of Things" is about four people, supposedly friends and lovers, who are to learn that more than simple companionship lurks beneath the joshing and sometimes pretentious chit-chat.
Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) and Adam (Paul Rudd) are graduate students who meet at a museum where Evelyn has stepped over the line to photograph a statue of a nude sculpture of God–which bears a fig leaf attached at the appropriate part to be in tune with community sensibilities. They date, become lovers, and socialize with Adam's Joe-College friend, Phillip (Fred Weller), and her Doris-Day-like fiancé, Jenny (Gretchen Mol). While LaBute deliberately holds back on the chemistry between Phillip and Jenny to prepare us for a change in their relationship, he focuses on Evelyn's compulsion to make changes in her boy friend. (LaBute holds the view that the typical, intimate couple do not see each other as without flaws, eager to make alterations in looks and personality that would make their partners perfect.) While Jenny seems Phillips as a guy with a few imperfections, she does little or nothing to change him. On the other hand, Evelyn (read Eve) takes aggressive action to tempt her nebbish-like man (read Adam) into become more worldly, better looking, and succeeds all too well.
As film critic David Thomson has said of LaBute, he plays out his characters' misanthropy "with a very cool directorial hand, observant writing, and fine playing...he absorbs talk and the helpless ways it betrays us....unwilling to scold malice, wickedness, or unkindness." LaBute is nothing if not detached, looking with amusement–but not bemusement–at the human condition, but not about to make moral judgments on his flawed characters. In this well-acted, theatrical piece, he affords us a look at a world in which talk is mere surface. Don't listen to the pleasant ways people befriend you. Think of your circle of friends not so much as wanting revenge for past or present wrongs but as people who are tragically flawed. That's just the way they are; the motiveless Iago multiplied infinitely, doing their damndest to manipulate us and to bring us down. What a cogent, witty, ultimately chilling way he succeeds with "The Shape of Things"!
Rated R. 96 minutes. Copyright 2003 by Harvey Karten at
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