As grotesque social satires go, “Friendship” doesn’t hold a candle to last year’s “The Substance.”
Writer/director Andrew De Young makes the leap from television to cinema with less than you might hope for in his feature film debut.
Set in a fictional (Midwest) suburb city named Clovis, TV weatherman Austin (Paul Rudd – also executive producing) gets a wrong-address package assist from his neighbor Craig (Tim Robinson).
An all-too-quick friendship develops with both men underestimating the dangers of problematic influence that each man possess.
Craig is on the spectrum, big time. He only wears ugly oversized beige clothing from the same store. Craig’s occupation is as a programmer tasked with weaponizing data to control people. You wouldn’t call Craig a very well socialized human being.
Indeed, there is no social event that Craig won’t ruin if given a chance.
At work, Craig insists on filling his coffee mug all the way to the brim before walking past busy co-workers with the speed of a sloth.
OCD all the way baby.
Tim Robinson’s performance is just about as creepy as creepy gets.
Now, I never need to see him again.
But there’s more to it than that. Craig is a narcissist par excellence. He’s a bad omen, capable of inflicting great harm on those around him. Craig also has a proclivity for crime.
Craig’s cancer-surviving wife Tami (Kate Mara) barely stands a chance.
Austin, on the other hand is a hard working news broadcaster. Austin even fronts a band of cool middle-aged local musicians who perform at their neighborhood bar.
Still, Austin has his own potential for exerting bad influence, as when he takes Craig on a long, winding tour of a sewer that leads inside City Hall’s corridors of powers during the dark of night, an experience that will come back to bite both men.
“Friendship” doesn’t add up as a complete narrative due to its lack of an empathetic protagonist. Craig is too cringy to be an anti-hero. Austin is just another of Craig’s ostensibly long list of victims.
That leaves Kate Mara’s Tami to carry the movie on her shoulders. For a moment it seems that Tami will make the crisis decision that she verbally promises but then reneges on without comment.
“Friendship” is a feel-bad movie that never manages to make a viable point. The movie never hits the black comic goal that it seems to target. A character would have to perish for that to happen.
If you’re looking for a cogent thesis on the current state of strained friendships between men of social class in America, you won’t find it here.
The movie’s overriding theme could well be that spectrum narcissists are the new real-life villains making the world hell for the rest of us.
Don’t go mushroom hunting with them, or anyone else for that matter really.
Rated R. 100 mins.
