There is a brilliant moment early on in Patrick
Stettner’s directorial debut The Business of Strangers
when Stockard Channing unleashes a glare towards Julia Stiles
that ran my blood cold. If a film can be condensed to one
moment, this is that moment here. In that millisecond glower is
all the fear, frustration, pent-up emotion, aggression and pure
unadulterated self-loathing imaginable and it says volumes about
where Strangers is heading.
Channing plays Julie, a career businesswoman at the end of
her rope. Sure she is about to be laid off when her current
lecture tour comes to a conclusion, she’s a mess of anger and
frustration. Pity poor Paula (Stiles) then when she arrives late
for one of her boss’ lectures. With a sudden ferocity she
becomes the target of all the rage of a cornered animal, Julie
ending the young aid’s career in a ballyhoo of derision.
Julie’s fear is all for naught when she discovers that
instead of losing her job she’s receiving a coveted CEO
promotion. Like her earlier ire, her now exuberant celebrating
extends to the appealingly fragile Paula. Over drinks in the
hotel bar the two begin to bond and the new CEO re-hired and
promotes the young woman to be her assistant.
It quickly becomes apparent that however delicate Paula
appears she is no demure wallflower. And as iron-willed and
stern Julie seams, the subsuming of her femininity for corporate
power is as much a corrosive illusion as is her young protégé’s
flaunting of it. The result: a caustic power play of gender and
business politics let loose on a cocky and unassuming rube
played with a snide enthusiasm by Frederick Weller.
It is far too easy to assume that the gifted Stettner is
doing a gender-reversed variation on Neil Labute’s In the
Company of Men. There are many surface similarities to be
sure but Strangers is far more humane in its dealings
than the scathingly vicious Men. There is a genuine
sympathy for these female warriors that was gleefully absent
from Labute’s virile vision, and Stettner’s film is all the
better for it.
It helps he’s got a couple of gifted woman to say his
Mamet-like musings. To call Channing one of the most gifted
actresses of our time would be almost an understatement. To then
point out that she’s been cinematically ill used over her
career is cause for despair – her last great roll an Oscar
nominated turn in Fred Schepsi’s Six Degrees of Separation.
She owns the character of Julie with a fiery conviction that
galvanizes your attention. This may be a career-best
performance.
To say that young Stiles holds her own is a fine
compliment. As they play their power games of sex, class, style,
education, cruelty and indifference her Paula rolls and rocks
along with the ebb and flow of Stettner’s complex screenplay.
She consumes every nuance of the character that the cutie-pie
image of her from teen pap like Save
the Last Danceblissfully erases from memory.
That said, some of the film’s direst moments do border on
the overly cruel, and there’s not too much suspense as to
where these contests are going to lead. To Stettner’s credit
he doesn’t shy away from leaving things literally up in the
air as Strangers fades out, and he’s easily created two
of the more complex female characters to grace the screen in a
long time.
Inherently strangers to their own selves, Julie and
Paula’s games of sex and power do little but reveal their own
heartbreak at a world they’ve perceived as being out to get
them. It is a stark, brutal and bracingly funny journey and one
of the more blisteringly entertaining ones of 2001.
