Though an excruciating movie to watch, even by cringe comedy standards, Friendship is a popular indie film that’s gone into wide release.
The feature debut of writer-director Andrew DeYoung, who’s mainly worked in television (Our Flag Means Death, Pen15), Friendship is surprisingly well-done, sustaining a limited conceit long enough to make you consider the oddities of friendship between men in particular, and the increasingly common phenomenon of the isolated male. Recent studies have made much of the paucity of adult male friendships, with 15 percent of men in the United States and an astounding 28 percent of men in the UK reporting the lack of even one close friend.
The dark laughs generated by Friendship all strike the same nerve of social embarrassment, intensifying rapidly to a point of mortification that continues through the film’s ninety-seven minutes. It features Tim Robinson of the Netflix sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave playing Craig Waterman, a perpetually awkward and self-involved manchild who’s achieved an amazing level of upper-middle-class success. Like Homer Simpson as seen through the eyes of Frank Grimes in the immortal Simpsons episode “Homer’s Enemy,” Craig can only amaze us by having somehow managed to become a marketing executive who’s acquired a beautiful wife Tami (Kate Mara) and son Stephen (Jack Dylan Grazer) and a nice house in the suburbs.
Though how long he can keep them is another question. Tami is introduced in the first scene in a group therapy session for people recovering from cancer. As she worries poignantly about a recurrence of the disease, Craig leans in to intone in a strange mock-humorous voice, “It’s not coming baaaaaaaack.”
This is presumably his attempt to act as a consoling husband, but Craig’s version of expected behaviors is always way off. His entire wardrobe is oversized and in shades of tan, yet he boasts about the great clothes he buys exclusively from…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
