The suburbs are a war zone. That was how the General saw things. He was my aunt’s father-in-law. I met him only a handful of times over the years, mostly at family celebrations, like my grandparents’ golden wedding anniversary. The General came from generations of men from his own family who’d gone to the Citadel, though he was from Southern California, not the Deep South. I used to enjoy sitting next to him on the beach house deck at those family events. The reflection of the flares from the Texaco oil refinery across Padilla Bay in Anacortes, Washington laughed in his Ray-Ban sunglasses.
Though he’d been trained to command troops and had done so in times of war, the General’s long retirement was a lone battle against the forces of evil arrayed behind two-car garages and in enemy HQ down at city hall. Even those kids on bikes needed to be neutralized:
“I’m not going to pay a buck for that goddam paperboy to throw that rag into the shrubs!” The General drove his Cadillac through the hostile territory of his new subdivision in Rancho Palos Verdes to the nearest shop to buy the morning newspaper. There was never any mention of friends, only foes.
Misplaced deliveries also figure in the ill-fated bromance of Friendship, the new cringe-fest of a film from first-time director Andrew DeYoung that treats man-to-man social relations as a form of combat. A package intended for a neighbor arrives at the doorstep of Craig Waterman (SNL alum Tim Robinson) and he dutifully traipses down the street to return it to the rightful recipient, the charismatic local tv weatherman Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd).
The soundtrack warns Craig against the mission with fateful Hitchcockian strings augmented by medieval choral omens.
Craig is loathsome, but every other man in the movie is too, with the possible exception of Austin, who nonetheless flaunts his suspect charisma.
Velcroed for an evening to his recliner, stay-at-home Craig can’t believe his good luck when he’s invited to the weatherman’s house for guy night. Beers in the hand, the men break into sentimental song. All but Craig know the words (“I wanna be your baby …”). Craig is besotted by the sight and sound of what he hears, but is tone-deaf to the music’s dubious message.
When the plot’s plan of campaign requires it, new packages for Austin turn up at Craig’s place. The real address is disaster. The General knew by bitter experience, as Craig does thanks to a fool’s intuition, that suburban civility is often a mode of clandestine warfare. A succession of skirmishes drawn from training ground of sketch television, the movie’s rules of engagement are darkly, embarrassingly comic and deadly for the prospects of male companionship.
Beneath all the angry tirades, there was music in the General. I couldn’t tell whether it fueled his anger or assuaged it. He had a winning baritone voice etched and polished by officer’s club cigarettes and cocktails. I remember him serving up snatches of “My Way” when he came up for air after blazing away at “the DC politicians and so-called journalists.” Did melody provide him solace or did it fuel his rage?
The same question is posed throughout Friendship, a movie thick with music. None of it soothes. It’s a weapon, both within the story’s suburban hellscape and in the filmmakers’ strategies of subliminal destabilization.
Singer-songwriter and film composer Keegan Dewitt’s soundtrack launches a two-pronged attack. The valium-laced optimism of gentle grooves and bell-like keyboard riffs sound like the intros to lost Carpenters’ songs. These soften up the ears and minds of moviegoers for the subsequent assaults of Gothic chanting that both warn Craig against his foolish quest for unattainable friendship and at the same time urge him towards his annihilation. Everyone hates Craig, even the soundtrack.
At King Arthur’s court, Sir Gawain battled a Green Knight and other adversaries from across the color spectrum. Craig is always clad completely in the blandest beige, his over-big down coat is a loser’s puffy armor. He convenes a men’s group of his own with the guys from work who spend their break time outside the building smoking and making fun of Craig even as he looks down at them from his window, clueless that he is the butt of their jollity.
Back at his place he pulls out a tiny dagger claiming it is the antique sword of an ancient knight. The bully-boys chortle at its ridiculous size and Craig angrily ejects them from his garage. The soundtrack laughs at him too.
The General always had a stiff drink in one hand. With the other hand he’d gesticulate as he ranted about how, if not for those bureaucrats in Washington, we’d have won the Vietnam War.
At a party in Friendship hastily organized to celebrate the rescue of Craig’s wife Tami (Kate Mara) after she’d gone missing in the city sewer system, a drunken man stands on a chair and gushes about how much he loves her, though she’s not his wife. The man can’t help but conclude his weirdly effusive speech with what he feels is an important message, the General would surely have agreed with: “We should still be in Afghanistan!”
This addled veteran has just come from the garage where he encountered Craig sitting alone at the drum set he’s bought in hopes of gaining some cred with Austin, who fronts his own band that plays around town. The vet has stumbled into the garage supposedly in search of the bathroom and begins a pleasant conversation with Craig.
But behind every amiable exchange lurks an ambush of toxic masculinity and loathing—almost all of it directed at Craig, who, frankly, deserves the abuse if anyone does, especially for purposes of getting some laughs in the movie theatre.
After extolling the cool 1970s green hue of the drums, the vet suddenly shifts into attack mode, screaming at Craig for deserting his wife in the sewer. In this suburban jungle, everything from coffee breaks to muscle cars to mini-vans to sliding glass doors can be weaponized—and is. A gold-plated handgun eventually discharges its Chekhovian duty, but that is only the loudest and most obvious incident of unfriendly fire.
Across the half-century from Fritz Lang’s White Heat (1949) to Sam Mendes’s American Beauty (1999), moviegoers have been ushered into the moral darkness and isolation of suburbia. There, the male gaze of longing and envy drifts across the driveway and through the neighbors’ window. The repressed same-sex urges that haunt American Beauty are kept at a seemingly safe distance from Friendship, deflected by the usual flak of irony. When those monastic male voices join together, it’s not in the spirit of brotherly love. There are snatches of rough harmony, but these unseen soundtrack singers don’t seem to like each other either.
As the beige oaf blunders away onscreen, we eventually hear female voices also of medieval cast, simultaneously angelic and acid. In this unabashedly binary movie, composer Dewitt has both genders beat up on Craig.
Kicking him to the curb like a piece of spent amazon packaging sent to the wrong house number might make you laugh and squirm, but the derisive anti-optimism that saturates the movie seems more intent on convincing every guy that he’s as vicious as the next—and just as alone.
As the credits rolled on this bleak bromantic comedy, I thought of the General, the whiskey sour sweating in his grasp as he opened up his pipes: “I ate it up and spit it out / I faced it all, and I stood tall / And did it my way.”
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
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