Ray Pride

Who hates you, baby?

After Neil LaBute's detour into post-Tarantino comic brutality ("Nurse Betty") and then tony literary adaptation ("Possession"), he's back to plumbing his vein of deepest inspiration: theatrically derived misanthropy that masquerades as romping misogyny. Only a few of my colleagues admire this blithe trifle of an allegory, "The Shape of Things," most dismissing it as a loathsome, ineptly stylized show of contempt for audiences and even for theater itself. (See Jim Hoberman in the May 7 Village Voice.)

But LaBute has no problem with labels or critical disdain. Speaking with him when "Possession" was released, the prolific playwright-screenwriter referred to his movies ("In the Company of Men" and "Your Friends and Neighbors" complete his output) as "a small body of work." He smiled at the thought of his play transferred to film, which he'd already completed. Noting that it would premiere at Sundance 2003, the amiable interviewee said, "People will go, 'Look, you hate women again, what happened? You were doing so good.' That's just the way it goes."

In its theatrical incarnation in London and New York, LaBute, who directed as well, used amped-up music by Smashing Pumpkins to drown out any audience conversation, loud enough that mentor Harold Pinter quickly headed for the exits. (Elvis Costello takes over for Billy Corgan in the film.) It's the kind of hyperbole that will give some viewers fits, but its clinical dissection of the urge to make art of one's experiences, regardless of the cost to others, makes me smile throughout.

Rachel Weisz plays a so-smart graduate student at the archly named Mercy College, who seems to have devoured the corpus of female-centered, confessional gallery art of the last couple decades, notably British artist and celebrity Tracy Emin, whose 1999 "My Bed," an installation which captures the site of her dreams, her sex, her indulgences. Some call Emin a con artist. The same's been said of LaBute. Watching the playful callowness of Weisz's Eve(lyn) as she lures bumbling, doofusey museum guard Adam (Paul Rudd) under an emasculated David-like sculpture, I had a different thought: I know that woman. Or, have known at least a couple variations on the genre.

She's a bully, this enactor of "Pygmalion" in reverse, Medea as a single woman. What do you want with me, Adam says a dozen different ways, always scrunching his nose in play-cute fashion as she urges him to change his hair, lose weight, shed his LaBute-like corduroy jackets. With her exquisite, round features marked by graveled, textured skin, her coy drawls, her blunt sexual come-ons, he should be asking, what are you doing to me? He should keep asking even when his friends, a couple played by Frederick Weller and Gretchen Mol, note that he's suddenly sprightlier, that he seems smarter, even "sexier" (at least in the most superficial aspects).

Mol gives the most naturalistic performance of the quartet, with the others bringing a kind of acting to the screen that has its place, a concentrated, speak-to-the-rafters style. (She's delicious, fragile and fresh, several adjectives I would never have applied to anything I've seen her in before.) The campus-bound turns of the story, indicated for the most part rather than based in any attempt at psychological plausibility, make the four characters, at moments, seem stuck in "Who's Afraid of Who's Read Virginia Woolf?" How smart can books, ideas and intellectualization make you when you're heartless with your heart? (As a neon installation bluntly puts it at film's end--which did not appear in the stage version--"Moralists have no place in an art gallery.")

When the characters visit damage upon one another, is LaBute also investigating his own project? Is he, like Evelyn, a heartless taskmaster, ripping the sex and soul from his ciphers? When the characters move through the deliciously precise production design or the actors juggle several styles of acting at once, LaBute seems to be the Woody Allen that Woody Allen has worked to suppress, someone unafraid of his most atavistic and unforgiving insights. ("Don't you ever have an unexpressed sacrilege?" is a question for the Mormon convert that only just came to me.)

"Oh yeah. I think I'm a regular Philistine," he once told me. Speaking of "In the Company of Men," which "Shape" has been described as a distaff version of, he elaborated, "Quite honestly, it's very Old Testament. It's like, you sin, you pay. That's all I show. There's barely any thought of redemption.... I don't think "Company of Men" is a Greek sort of tragedy, whimsically flicking these characters around the table, but a dispassionate looking down on them. I think ultimately I feel for these people, but no one's forced them to do what they do." The case is different in "Shape," with Rudd's giddy dork and Weisz's despoiling siren, decrying the haunted, hunted, stunted, emotionally skittering male's "fuckin' in-securities!"

With a plot this spring-loaded, stacked, and cantilevered, it's simple to recoil from "The Shape of Things." More arch than a shoe factory, some will take it as smug, this talky, stagy seduction, with an outside world indicated only by stray, stylized sound, reducing a city's cry to the Doppler of receding sirens.

Love and pursuit and performance art seem passé to some reviewers. Are we all that sophisticated? Are we all that resistant to cruelty in our lives, or in movies? LaBute again: "The whole idea of cruelty, it's sustaining the pain. Shoot a character on screen, it's over in a couple of minutes, but to mete it out slowly, you see how much an audience can take."

"The Shape of Things" opens Friday.

(2003-05-07)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
A rare retrospective of the painstaking documentarian's work brings together nine of his features, which are among the more astringent nonfiction films made in the last thirty or so years.
(2003-04-30)

Short Runs
This week's limited screenings
(2003-04-30)

X appeal
Trumping the multi-character concoction of "The Usual Suspects," in "X2" (also known as "X2: X-Men United"), is a lineup of fourteen principal super-powered characters and a mix of tones that ranges from delicate comedy to sly sociopolitical commentary
(2003-04-30)

Terror's isms
In his intently cinematic debut as a director in "The Dancer Upstairs," based on Nicholas Shakespeare's adaptation of his own sturdy novel, the legendary-to-some Steppenwolf actor does few of the things you'd expect from an actor-turned-director and most of the things you'd want from this complicated character.
(2003-04-30)

Tip of the Week
(2003-04-22)

Short Runs
(2003-04-22)

For Peet's sake
(2003-04-22)

The day the clown cried
(2003-04-22)

Tip of the Week
(2003-04-15)

Short Runs
(2003-04-15)

This American guff
(2003-04-15)

Growing up
(2003-04-15)

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