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Filmmakers such as Robert Towne and Neil LaBute have learned from Restoration drama the value of an unsparing delineation of character and the force of formal dramatic structure in ironic contrast with conflicted lives. These lessons are turned to powerful effect by writer-director LaBute in the pitchblack comedy Your Friends and Neighbors . LaBute, who earlier wrote and directed In the Company of Men , again foregrounds male rage and resentment as primary motives in middle-class American life. In this more complex work, whose mysterious subtext concerns female desire, misogyny is symptomatic of a culture that Michel Foucault (1980) would have recognized as motivated by the production of discourse where sex and language are in dangerous liaison.
If not as interchangeable as suggested by their rhyming names, LaBute's “friends”—30-something professionals and, as the title suggests, our contemporaries—share a bleak moral universe dominated by sexuality and its discontents: masturbation, sadism, and satyriasis; impotence and depressed desire.
Friends has one central action—Jerry's (Ben Stiller) abortive affair with Mary (Amy Brenneman)—while he is directing and acting in a production of a Restoration comedy of manners by William Wycherley, presumably The Country Wife. The leading male character of Wife is a notorious seducer, Horner, whose name is synonymous with cuckoldry. Horner's strategy is to feign incapacity from venereal disease, thus assuaging the suspicion of otherwise jealous husbands. This device inspired Robert Towne's Shampoo , in which George Roundy's (Warren Beatty) seductive powers are masked by his occupation as a hair dresser and putative homosexuality. The “country wife” and supposed innocent of Friends is the virginal Mary: Barry's (Aaron Eckhardt) wife, she has an assignation with Jerry and becomes the lover of Cary. Cary (Jason Patric), the counterpart to Horner (and to Roundy, a pun on “randy,” “rendez-vous,” and “la ronde”), is a doctor whose woman