Review: Friendship

Director:  Andrew DeYoung

Stars:  Tim Robinson, Kate Mara, Paul Rudd

Perhaps only those familiar with cult Netflix showcase I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson will be prepared for the onslaught of offbeat male malaise and fragile egos coursing through Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship. Robinson has made a career out of angry, socially awkward characters, but where previously these have been consigned to the single cells of sketch comedy, here one of his creations is let loose over a feature running time. The lunatic has taken over the asylum.

Robinson stars as suburban family man Craig. His job is to make apps more addictive (sorry, “habit forming”). He buys all of his (mostly brown) clothes in one store. He doesn’t really have any friends. Honestly the movie’s biggest hurdle to vault is how he’s managed to stay married to cancer-survivor Tami (Kate Mara) for so long. They have a 16 year-old son, Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer). Based on the span of weeks that Friendship chronicles, 16+ years with this man beggars belief.

Craig doesn’t strike you as someone who spends a lot of time on self-reflection, so it’s hard to say really if he’s in a rut when we meet him, but he’s dazzled when a chance postal error brings him into contact with his new neighbour, Austin (Paul Rudd). A TV weatherman with his own punk band, Austin is the definition of cool to Craig, and the two become fast friends. But when an inevitable social faux pas (or five) causes discomfort, Austin is moved to call time on their adventures together, triggering a disastrous downward spiral.

Its never once mooted that Craig might be neurodivergent, but still Friendship walks a pretty fine line between trying to understand him and outright mocking his difficulty sustaining human relationships. Robinson’s comfortably within his own wheelhouse of character-based comedy, and his work here often kindles memories of Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love. Keegan DeWitt’s score even apes Jon Brion’s, percolating away, soundtracking the fizz-pop of terrible ideas entering Craig’s mind.

The laughs are as often born out of carefully workshopped situations as they are the general unease of where this is all going. Credit where it’s due, Friendship is thrillingly unpredictable; something that’s all too rare to say about a wide-release US comedy feature. One of the movie’s strongest sequences appears in the middle, when Craig tries – disastrously, of course – to reignite a sense of adventure in his marriage to Tami. By this point I was fully prepared for her to exit the narrative entirely, never to return. Such is the sense that this movie will do, really, anything it wants. 

The result of this level of narrative subterfuge is that there’s no acute sense of direction. One day Craig seems to be learning lessons and getting himself back together. The next he’s breaking into houses or trying to lure the underage kid at the phone shop out for a beer. I said Austin’s rebuttal of their friendship led to a downward spiral, but the shape rendered is more like a scribble in crayon, messy and difficult to trace back. 

But in this mess maybe Robinson and DeYoung are onto something. We’re inclined – perhaps through watching too much television – to apply narrative logic to the human condition. That a person will grow consistently, evolve, mature. But that’s often not the case. People regress, renege, veer back toward bad habits and learned behaviour. Craig represents a particular kind of American male torn this way and that by the confused media and social messaging of who he’s allowed to be. Desperate for validation, his acts are constantly self-serving and, in their processes, frequently baffling to outsiders. He’s a disconnected person who’s grown obsessed with fitting in. 

He’d be pitiable if he wasn’t so unpleasant to be around. Rudd conjures some of his charm from the old Anchorman days (Austin’s job on daytime news prominently brings this past to mind), and its easy to assume the constant references to Marvel are at his expense. But Robinson’s Craig – the fulcrum of every scene – is a volatile, foul-mouthed and selfish person to sit with for 100 minutes. Mileage may vary with this guy depending on your patience and/or enjoyment of this kind of comedy. Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse also kept coming to mind while I was watching Friendship. Not particularly for the character or story, but for the prickly tone and sense of suburban culture rot. DeYoung seems as worried and untrusting of American suburbia. 

For all the discomfort, it’s heartening to see a team taking the genre to queasily volatile places, to prod at what we want from a ‘good time’. Friendship has cult status written all over it. Maybe it goes after this goal with a little too much self-awareness at times, but there’s some undeniable gold here. Not least of which is easily the best drug-induced ‘trip’ sequence to hit screens in many, many years.