Tim Robinson, star of the cult sketch show I Think You Should Leave, moves satisfactorily into cinema with a comedy that sits just outside the buddy-buddy mainstream. How do we thus place it on the map? Well, it begins with Tami and Craig (Robinson and Kate Mara), a suburban couple, at a counselling session where she addresses her recovery from cancer and expresses her difficulty in achieving orgasm.
Andrew DeYoung, in his debut as writer and director, is plainly skirting the realm of indie alienation. There is a suppressed fury in Robinson’s performance – a whisper of bitter loneliness – that passes unexpected levels of stress on to the poor viewer. It’s funny, but it’s never exactly fun.
The story properly kicks off when Craig, who is trying to sell his house, returns a wrongly delivered package to a new neighbour up the street. This turns out to be Austin, a handsome TV weatherman in the form of the ageless Paul Rudd. The two get chatting and end up forming an initially successful friendship.
DeYoung’s screenplay can’t quite decide what we are to make of Austin. On their first night of boozing, he takes his neighbour on an illicit tour of an underground aqueduct that eventually leads them into the city hall. He plays in a punk band. The notion appears to be that he’s an offbeat guy locked in a straightedge job. Yet the more the film goes on – and the more Craig takes on the persona of stalker – the less out-there Austin appears. Are we initially seeing the man that our anti-hero thought his neighbour to be?
READ MORE
At any rate, though loose in structure, Friendship offers a few minor masterpieces in the art of cringe. Robinson, like Adam Sandler in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, gives some impression of how the classic saddo of broad comedy – the Jerry Lewis, the Norman Wisdom – might appear in something like the real world: scary, demented, potentially threatening. His wide, gap-toothed grin is that of the killer clown. His tight face seems always on the point of bursting open in a mess of bloody tendons. We (if we are men) are invited to laugh at him while worrying that we’re laughing at the worst, most pathetic aspects of our own personalities. Not a cheery sort of hilarity.
In cinemas from July 18th
