Making new friends in middle-age is hard for men — just ask Elon Musk about Donald Trump. Or ask the pair at the centre of Andrew DeYoung’s darkly comic film Friendship.
Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson) is a socially awkward suburbanite who drops off some misdirected mail to a new neighbour, Austin Carmichael. A charismatic TV weatherman and self-proclaimed “man’s man”, Austin is played — of course — by Paul Rudd, who has been playing the dream-buddy-next-door for so long now, from The 40-Year-Old Virgin to I Love You, Man, that his nice-guy energy has become axiomatic, like Tom Hanks’s trustworthiness or Keanu Reeves’s powers of Zen.
The difference with DeYoung’s film is that here it’s played for something a little darker. It’s a bromance cringe comedy with one foot in the psych ward. Austin invites Craig into his life, asks him along to a gig and then a soulful beer-and-a-singalong with his buddies that leaves Craig’s eyes wide with longing.
Craig is a gaping suckhole of midlife male need — so hungry for the barest glimmers of acceptance that he lunges into every situation, and then extracts scalding rejection from the social awkwardness that results. He’s a one-man self-esteem spiral, incapable of dealing with even a scuff on his padded anorak (“Ow, I got water on me!”), so when Austin pulls away, alarmed by an evening that takes a turn, Craig goes to pieces.
“One strange thing and I’m toast?” he wails on Austin’s porch during their break-up. “You made me feel accepted way too fast! You can’t do that! People need rules!” There’s a raw honesty to his outburst that pushes the film beyond mere comic caricature. The Saturday Night Live alumnus Robinson has crafted a superb comic creation: his Tourettic social interactions hide deep pools of hurt and need, as well as bottomless anger at the alienation he inevitably provokes. The film is like a male version of Play Misty for Me, Fatal Attraction or any one of those slightly misogynistic bunny-boiler thrillers where a woman is pushed into Madame Butterfly territory by the casual cruelty of a male ex.
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Numb with grief, Craig pushes his family and workmates into agonisingly ill-judged replays of the bonding sessions he briefly enjoyed with Austin — “This is a non-Marvel spoiler garage,” he tells a hastily convened beer party with incredulous and openly mocking work colleagues — and when these efforts, too, rebound on him, his hurt metastasises into something more dangerous.
You may not entirely buy a lot of what follows. The film has been crafted solely as a vehicle for one performance and one performance alone: when Rudd disappears to make way for the disintegration of Craig’s marriage to his wife, Tami (Kate Mara), the movie loses its focus and becomes a more diffuse, at times hallucinogenic voyage into the bad neighbourhood of one man’s psyche. But as a vehicle for Robinson’s solipsistic monomaniac, it’s a trip.
★★★☆☆
15, 101min
Pierce Brosnan spent so long perfecting the manner of a twinkling, poolside sophisticate for Remington Steele and Bond that his own Irish accent now sounds as affected as Richard Burton’s Welsh accent did in The Last Days of Dolwyn. In Polly Steele’s adaptation of Niall Williams’s bestseller Four Letters of Love, Brosnan plays William Coughlan, a civil servant who one day quits his job, on the advice of God, to become a painter.
“It’s about beauty and mystery and your spirit and something in you which can’t be denied,” William tells his son, Nicholas (Fionn O’Shea), as he hauls his easel across the beaches of Donegal, where his long hairpiece is windswept with divine mysteries. Even on the bus he looks like a man in a wind tunnel.
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Hair is destiny in Steele’s film, a heartfelt piece of purest blarney. Growing up in another part of Ireland is Isabel (Ann Skelly), who lives with her parents (Helena Bonham Carter and Gabriel Byrne) and disabled brother — until she is sent away to convent school, where her unbridled soul and cascade of red curls soon drive her into the arms of a local ne’er-do-well, Peadar (Ferdia Walsh Peelo).
What do Isabel and Nicholas’s stories have to do with one another? Quite a lot, thematically: kept apart by fate then drawn together by a series of coincidences — sorry, miracles — their destiny is written in the stars, or, the next best thing, the film’s voice-over narration. Everyone feels this couple should be together — the seagulls, God — everyone except the audience, who experience their final union as nothing more than an 11th-hour Hail Mary. There’s more chemistry between Brosnan and his wig.
★★☆☆☆
12A, 110min
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