THE SHAPE OF
THINGS / ***1/2 (R) May
9, 2003 Adam:
Paul Rudd Evelyn:
Rachel Weisz Jenny:
Gretchen Mol Phillip:
Fred Weller Focus
Features presents a film written and directed by Neil LaBute. Running time: 96
minutes. Rated R (for language and some sexualtiy). BY
ROGER EBERT The world of Neil LaBute is a battleground of carnage between the sexes. Men and women distrust one another, scheme to humiliate one another, are inspired to fearsome depths of cruelty. Their warfare takes place in the affluent habitats of the white upper middle class--restaurants, bookstores, coffeeshops, corporate offices, campuses, museums and apartments of tasteful sterility. Although one of his Gender Wars films was shot in Fort Wayne, Ind., and the other two in Southern California, there is no way to tell that from the information on the screen. All of his characters seem to live in clean, well-lighted, interchangeable places. "The
Shape of Things" is the third of these films. First came "In the
Company of Men" (1997) and "Your Friends and Neighbors" (1998).
Then there were two mainstream films, "Nurse Betty" (2000) and
"Possession" (2002). Now we are back in the world of chamber dramas
involving a handful of intimately linked characters. The first film was driven
by a man of ferocious misanthropy. The second involved characters whose
everyday selfishness and dishonesty were upstaged by a character of astonishing
cruelty. In "The Shape of Things," while the two couples have their
share of character defects, they seem generally within the norm, until we fully
understand what has happened. In
a museum, we see Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) step over a velvet rope to take
Polaroids of a male nude statue--or, more specifically, of a fig leaf added at
a later date. The museum guard, named Adam (Paul Rudd), asks her to step
outside the rope, but eventually steps inside it himself, to plead with her not
to cause trouble just before his shift ends. He's a student, working part-time. They
begin to see each other. She's a graduate student, working on a project which
she describes, as she describes a great many things, as a "thingy."
Eventually we meet an engaged couple, Jenny (Gretchen Mol) and Phillip (Fred
Weller), who are friends of Adam's. Over a period of months, they notice
changes in him. He loses weight. Gets a haircut. Rids himself of a nerdy
corduroy jacket that, we learn, Phillip has been urging him to throw away since
freshman year. He even has a nose job, which he tries to explain as an
accidental injury. What,
or who, is responsible for these changes? Can it be Evelyn, who is now Adam's
girlfriend? Adam denies it, although it is not unknown for a woman to make over
the new man in her life, and even Jenny observes that most men have traits that
stand between them and perfection--traits women are quick to observe and quite
willing to change. The
movie unfolds as a series of literate conversations between various
combinations of these four articulate people. Their basic subject is each
other. They are observant about mannerisms, habits, values and changes, and
feel licensed to make suggestions. There is even a little low-key sexual
cheating, involving kissing, and low-key emotional assaults, involving telling
about the kissing. And
then ... but I will not say one more word, because the rest of the movie is for
you to discover. Let it simply be said that there are no free passes in
LaBute's class in gender studies. "The
Shape of Things" builds a sense of quiet dread under what seems to be an
ordinary surface. Characters talk in a normal way, and we suspect that their
blandness disguises buried motives. Often they are quite happy to criticize
each other, and none of them takes criticism well. These characters are perhaps
in training to become the narcissistic, self-absorbed monsters in "Your
Friends and Neighbors." LaBute
has that rarest of attributes, a distinctive voice. You know one of his scenes
at once. His dialogue is the dialogue overheard in trendy mid-scale
restaurants, with the words peeled back to suggest the venom beneath. He also
has a distinctive view of life, in which men and women are natural enemies--and
beyond that, every person is an island surrounded by enemies. This seems like a
bleak and extreme view, and yet what happens in his films often feels like the
logical extension of what happens to us or around us every day. It is the
surface normality of the characters and their world that is scary. LaBute
has been compared to David Mamet, and no doubt there was an influence, seen in
the devious plots and the precisely heard, evocative language. But Mamet is
much more interested in plotting itself, in con games and deceptions, while in
LaBute there is the feeling that some kind of deeper human tragedy is being
enacted; his character deceive and wound one another not for gain or pleasure,
but because that is their nature. Actors
have a thankless task in a film like this. All four players are well cast in
roles that ask them to avoid "acting" and simply exist on a
realistic, everyday level. Like the actors in a Bresson film, they're used for
what they intrinsically represent, rather than for what they can achieve
through their art. They are like those all around us, and like us, except that
LaBute is suspicious of their hidden motives. One person plays a cruel trick in
"The Shape of Things," but we get the uneasy sense that, in LaBute's
world, any one of the four could have been that person. Copyright
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