Spring Break
Movie forms a funny 'shape'
Fernando F. Croce, Senior Staff Writer
The quote, from Chinese writer Han Suyin, is featured prominently near the end of writer/director Neil LaBute's latest poison-candy offering, "The Shape of Things," opening Friday. By then, viewers have had so many "artistic insights" snapped at them like wet towels that philistinism may start looking good by comparison.
An adaptation of LaBute's 2001 play set in an unnamed college town, the film uses as its arc the course of a relationship over a period of time. Adam (Paul Rudd), a dorky English undergraduate, falls for Evelyn (Rachel Weisz), an attractive art student he meets as she's about to deface a museum statue with a can of spray paint.
As their romance seemingly blossoms, Evelyn's presence molds Adam's appearance. His doltish, bespectacled demeanor dissolves into a slimmer, sleekly handsome one (complete with a detour into minor plastic surgery), much to the surprise - and confusion - of his friends, Jenny (Gretchen Mol) and Phil (Fred Weller).
Feeling more assured, Adam even flirts with the idea of romancing Jenny, on whom he had a crush before she got engaged to the obnoxious Phil. Given an ultimatum by the increasingly possessive Evelyn, he picks her over his friends - unaware of how cruelly pivotal a role he will play in her mysterious upcoming art thesis.
LaBute, a critic's darling since his Sundance Film Festival debut with "In the Company of Men" (1997), has gotten a reputation over the years as a fearless provocateur with piercing truths about modern relationships. That seems like wishful thinking. His films indicate a gift for showcasing human nastiness, which gives his work its surface validity and severely limits it at the same time.
Lack of personal connection is the meat of his course. The relationships in his films are invariably doomed by the characters' failure to strike meaningful bonds with each other. His filmmaking, blandly elegant, emphasizes medium shots with people separated either by the editing or, within a long take, by background verticals such as posts, trees and poles.
In place of positive, constructive give-and-take, there is a cultivated meanness that drips from every pore of life, whether in casual bouts of verbal jostling or in elaborately arranged machinations. The opening scene at the museum, with its repellently glib "Will & Grace" humor (typical gem: Evelyn spray paints her phone number on Adam's jacket), is just a facetious mask under which gruesome malice lurks.
Which might be just as well, since LaBute has proven again and again to be incapable of displaying delicacy or a sense of emotional fullness on the screen, hence the dismal failure of "Nurse Betty" and "Possession," his two previous "life-affirming" pictures. Instead, he works with an icy surgeon's eye, moving the couples around mathematically, presiding over his creatures like a dispassionate scientist.
The result is not the eye-opening expansion of understanding that many critics have hailed, but rather a willful reduction of the possibilities of human interaction. Life is distilled to its most negative, emerging as petty, insecure, manipulative, full of suspicion and hate - the kind of facile worldview that, in the long run, makes his work barren and puny.
That's not to say art needs to be light and likable. After all, figures as varied as William Blake, August Strindberg, Pablo Picasso, Ingmar Bergman and the Rolling Stones have amassed magnificent works out of the notion that art should disturb, using it to enlarge our world by undermining the certainties of life.
By contrast, in "The Shape of Things" LaBute again purveys mordant shocks not as the jumping-off point for a wider exploration, but as an excuse to indulge in the most fashionable misanthropy. Make no mistake about it - the nihilistic poseur's stretched middle finger near the end is aimed straight at his critics, as well as at his audience.
"If you feel it, it's not stupid," Adam tells Jenny in the movie. The problem with LaBute is that, following his own advice, he cannot help but find everything stupid.
