Man Candy
By Justin Stewart
Friendship
Dir. Andrew DeYoung, U.S., A24
Taken as an MRI of the state of modern middle-aged male emotional wholeness and maturity, director Andrew DeYoung’s first feature, Friendship, finds the patient lacking. He’s insecure, with childish interests (the latest “Marvel”), degraded palates (Subway), and an inability to relate to his male cohort. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the heavily thinkpieced wave of Apatowian “man child” shows and films of the aughts (I Love You, Man, Step Brothers, The Hangover, Observe and Report, and many more) fumbled onto the same diagnosis, even with some of the same players as here (Paul Rudd). That spike in films about kidults with Peter Pan syndrome may have had something to do with a disillusionment that set in soon after 9/11, after the jingoistic cowboy patriotism drained away with Katrina, foreign policy quagmires, and finally the Great Recession. With the dip in the stock price of alpha males, it left a vacancy filled in politics by the more cerebral articulate oratory of Obama, and, at the multiplex, grown men, like Seth Rogen’s Knocked Up surprise papa, ill-prepared for adulthood but who could win the understanding of the beautiful women who loved them.
While Friendship centers on a particularly fringe boy-man case (Tim Robinson’s toddlerish, hyper-autistic Craig Waterman), the men who surround him seem only superficially happier as they gather for strange, overcompensating hangouts with singalongs and boxing sessions, or are revealed to hide deep insecurities (Rudd’s Austin Carmichael). DeYoung possibly had no intention to make a statement of concern about male loneliness and empathic handicaps, but his choice of subject matter alone resulted in a film that feels very 2009-coded.
The charm and skill of the cast, especially the mesmerizing oddness of Robinson, known mostly from a short SNL stint and his sketch show I Think You Should Leave, prevent this from feeling completely like aughts leftovers. His Netflix show, which spawned a thousand memes (the “we’re all trying to figure out who did this” hot dog suit guy, others), seemed to fill an unexpected desire for a new Mr. Show and cooler SNL when it debuted in 2019, with its rollicking theme music, popping colors, bountiful cameos, and unapologetic abrasiveness. I often find episodes laughless, until every time there’s a gut punch or just one strange note—like Robinson finishing a solemn eulogy by singing a “Friday Night” party song—that makes it seem like the freshest comedy thing going.
In the show, many of the other characters are just as bizarre as Robinson’s, but in Friendship, his dopey Craig is a man apart, desperate to relate to the normals at his human-filing-cabinet glass tower office job in some anonymous landlocked American town (a package appears to read “Clovis, USA”). In this way he’s very much channeling prime Jerry Lewis, complete with the same crew cut and inability to “walk like a man.” In his big puffy brown coat, Craig seems to shuffle down the street and hesitate before every step. But Craig’s palpable desperation, and the film’s muted wintry hues, stop this from being the live-action cartoon that some of Lewis’s films were—as Craig platonically “courts” his cool TV weatherman neighbor Austin with increasing sweaty neediness, you wait for the other shoe to drop and for the proceedings to turn ugly.
The film opens on a couples’ support group session, with Craig’s wife Tami (Kate Mara) confiding in front of everybody that she has not orgasmed since she was with her ex. At home, she repeatedly mentions the ex, kisses their teen son (Jack Dylan Grazer) on the lips, and looks so bored as Craig raves about how he heard “the new Marvel” is “so crazy it’s literally driving people insane” that you wonder how this marriage exists. Pounding the “emasculation” button so hard it makes the first half of the Breaking Bad pilot look subtle, the film improves once Craig brings an erroneously delivered package over to Austin and falls in friendship with the seemingly carefree meteorologist who plays guitar in a band, orders rare artifacts by mail, and, on their first meeting, parts with a “stay curious, Craig Waterman.” Rudd isn’t breaking new ground here—his character seems like a conscious updated riff on his similarly mustachioed and bluffing Anchorman field reporter—but after all these years his natural likability and artfully tamped sarcasm have aged just as gracefully as his looks. He’s so charming that it stings us, too, when he terminates the friendship after Craig embarrasses himself at a gathering of the guy-friends (where the other men break into a harmonized rendition of Ghost Town DJ’s “My Boo”), banging into a glass door and hitting Austin too hard in the boxing sesh. Unable to take a hint, Craig visits Austin at work where he sees him debasing himself on a neutered daytime show in corny golf clothes, and later is privy to Austin’s ultimate secret vanity. (For those paying attention, it's the same as the “shock” makeup reveal in this year’s Flight Risk.)
Craig’s life spirals once Austin cuts him loose. When he takes Tami on the same exploratory adventure in the city sewers he did with Austin, she mysteriously disappears, making the rest of the film a missing-person hunt, as well as a countdown to the moment when Craig’s roiling neediness will turn (even more) violent. His descent leads him to accept a Gen Z phone store staffer’s offer of illicit merchandise, which for Craig turns out to be a frog whose poison coating causes people to trip when they take a lick. He even fails at this, as his psychedelic journey into the cosmos begins and ends with a liminal visit to a brightly lit Subway where he orders a sub from Austin. Here, gauche product placement plays as pointed satire on how bland mass consumer/corporate identity and ubiquity has dulled even our wildest imaginations (there was a similarly dystopic Subway appearance in James Gray’s Ad Astra).
Though the hilarious Jon Glaser (Delocated, Late Night with Conan O’Brien) is wasted as one of the censorious, disappointed Austin coterie, the gonzo actor, comedian, and video artist Conner O’Malley nearly steals the film when he walks in on Craig playing drums and starts babbling about how the ’70s were tough “economically,” and is later heard offscreen on a mic telling a party that “we never should have got out of Afghanistan.” Touches like Craig’s Rain Man-like habit of wearing only clothing by a line called Ocean View Dining (the odd name seems like an inside joke), and his obsession with eating a local gastropub’s “Seal Team 6” dinner (four racks of ribs, mac and cheese, and Caesar salad), along with Robinson’s extraterrestrial watchability, ensure Friendship’s svelte 97 minutes are ever-entertaining. It’s too early to tell, and it might take too much gymnastic dot-connecting, to argue that this augurs nostalgia for the early Obama years and a renaissance of arrested male development American film comedy, but there’s pleasure in uncorking this vintage, a distinctly bitter nostalgia.