Tim Robinson obviously makes 'Friendship' funny and uncomfortable
A24
On the Tim Robinson scale, “Friendship” isn’t that weird. Anyone who’s seen “Detroiters” or especially “I Think You Should Leave” actually might be surprised that the star’s movie — in which he plays the same sort of social boundary-crosser as always — doesn’t wander farther.
But the point still hits, and the center still holds, even if 95 minutes of faux pas-courting desperation feels quite different than, like 12. The plot is simple, alternating between “I Love You, Man” and “Single White Female” and all the open-hearted discomfort that suggests: Craig (Robinson), whose social calendar currently consists of roughly no bro time whatsoever, meets his neighbor Austin (Paul Rudd, who played the opposite role in “I Love You, Man”), a TV weatherman who’s in a band and collects super-old artifacts and is pretty much the coolest. They bond and have some laughs and before you can say “The Talented Mr. Ripley” Austin no longer wants to be around Craig, which, contrary to any antiquated notions of male emotion, feels like a crushing breakup to a guy who is far lonelier than he’ll ever admit.
The feature debut for writer-director Andrew DeYoung (“Our Flag Means Death,” “I Love That For You”) echoes Robinson’s past work in exploring the thin lines of social expectations and the transgression of awkwardness. When Craig unendears himself to Austin and his friends, the separation is arguably caused more by a bad joke, lunging to get back in their good graces, than by a more confrontational accident that comes before. That element of a character teetering on the edge is rarely easy to watch, and part of Robinson’s fearlessness is never trying to make his uncertainty or frustration go down easy. The idea is to feel the unease and question the forces that result in the feeling, which, again, is something plenty of people might not really want to do.
“Friendship” also would work better with a bit more curiosity about its fringe characters, but hardly anyone beyond the central dudes gets much development and even they could use some fine-tuning. (As Craig’s wife Kate Mara gets about half a character, which is far more than Meredith Garretson has as Austin’s wife.) The story repeatedly dead-ends, smacks against the wall a few times, then reverses and rotates. The abundance of articles about adult male friendship and the corresponding loneliness epidemic deserves a movie that can look closely at those struggles. This isn’t it and isn’t trying to be.
There are many highlights, though, often touching on the fragile building of trust as well as the unwritten rules that not everyone subscribes to in the same way. Feelings and decisions spin out of control, envy blurts like an airhorn, and rejection is a physical blow. Anyone who spends much of “Friendship” muttering “Ummmm” or needing to shake it off a little afterwards wouldn’t be wrong. But the laughs are big, and the movie understands the fear of relationship impermanence, and the fork between revealing yourself or hiding, and how vulnerability breeds both revulsion and connection. And the complicated thing that remains even when a dynamic goes bad.
B-
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