MOVIE REVIEW

Shape of Things, The  (2003)

Starring: Paul Rudd, Rachel Weisz, Gretchen Mol
Director: Neil LaBute

Rating: R

Studio: Focus Features

Release Date: 5.9.03

Review Posted: 5.9.03

Spoilers: Minor

By Sara Michelle Fetters

"The Shape of Emotional Indifference"

Neil LaBute is good at acid tests. His directorial debut was the ice cold In the Company of Men, where two men of corporate America communally destroy a young woman with tenderness and seduction. Next came the equally calculating Your Friends and Neighbors, and if the film itself was too one dimensional to really grab hold, Jason Patric’s personification of pure unadulterated male egotistical evil certainly wasn’t.

After two quirkily different and original films, the sublimely wondrous Nurse Betty and the deeply passionate – if a tad distant – Possession, LaBute returns to the darker side of the human condition with the starkly humorous college tale The Shape of Things. A movie about love, sex, art, free will and change amongst four disparate characters, LaBute once more refuses to pull his punches. And if the film isn’t quite completely successful, it’s still one of the most unsettlingly brilliant pieces of cinema to be put out this year.

It all starts when graduate thesis student Evelyn (Rachel Weisz, Confidence, The Mummy Returns) walks into the campus museum intent on defacing a priceless statue. She dislikes and finds unnatural that a committee has deemed the piece to be obscene, using a cheap plaster leaf to cover the nude’s private parts. Frumpy fellow student Adam (Paul Rudd, Clueless, The Cider House Rules) – a museum employee – catches Eve just before the act, but ends up becoming so caught up in her erstwhile charms he instead asks for a date instead of stopping the vandalism.

What appears to be a romantic comedy-like variation a young couple’s cute and endearing first meeting is really anything but and soon Evelyn is slyly manipulating Adam into what, on the surface, appear to be personal changes made all for the good. She puts him on a diet, gets him exercising, talks him into a new more stylish haircut, convinces him to buy popular clothes and even starts helping him become a better lover. Granted, she never tells Adam to make these changes in his life and appearance, but while the final decision may always be his, the underlining coercion by Evelyn is readily apparent.

Friends Jenny (Gretchen Mol, Rounders, Celebrity) and Philip (Frederick Weller, The Business of Strangers) notice the changes in Adam right away. They don’t stop at the surface, however, as both sense the newfound confidence these physical alterations have produced in their friend. But confidence is only one of the side effects. Adam becomes far more moody, angry and willing to lash out when he feels threatened than he ever would have done in the past, and both Jenny and Philip just aren’t sure of what to make of it all.

All this builds to Evelyn’s thesis art showing, where everyone finds their lives blown open for an entire campus to witness and the line between art and privacy is blurred to the point of nonexistence. Emotions are laid bare for all to see save for the instigator, the person’s emotional tenderness and empathy only an illusion to illuminate a certain position towards the human soul. And while this conduct might be the most soulless of all, for the sake of art and all deepest truth no sacrifice in its search can be considered too great. Or can it?

After finishing up In the Company of Men, LaBute was hounded with inquiries as to if he thought a woman could be capable of the same type of heinous atrocities committed by the male characters in that film. While he certainly didn’t see why that couldn’t be the case, LaBute also concluded that such an act as done by a woman would be a much more solitary venture as compared to the communal sins executed in his debut.

Thus were born the seeds for The Shape of Things. Originally written as a play during his time working on Possession, LaBute has taken minimal effort to hide his script’s staginess. The characters all talk like they stepped right out of an acting class run by David Mamet, whipping out lines like, “It’s never nothing until it’s something,” as if the fate of the free world rested on deciphering the incomprehensible meaning.

Yet, while it moves along like tersely acted stage-bound scenes and the dialogue takes getting used to, once I did The Shape of Things slowly built into a darkly facetious cocktail of passion, pain, love and extreme disappointment. LaBute handles it all delicately and with a sublime wit and precision he’s grown into as a director, and while In the Company of Men was ultimately far more devastating this film is far more accomplished and richly satisfying on a level his debut couldn’t achieve.

A great deal of the credit for that must go to co-producer and star Weisz. An actress I’ve always thought kindly of if never completely adored, she’s a revelation here tearing into Evelyn with a precision and symmetry the likes of which she’s never shown. As catalysts go, this woman is a dynamo, wrapping Adam so far around her little finger that were she the devil – and in the end I almost thought she was – I’m sure she could have gotten his soul for half a café latte.

The rest of the cast is also good, although I couldn’t help but feel Weller was still trying to act his character like he would on stage. The performance is far too theatrical to be completely engaging and I never once believed that Mol’s Jenny could have ever found something worthwhile in Philip to even remotely consider the possibility of marriage, let alone be engaged to him. Weller plays Philip like a caricature, more fit to be in the next American Pie sequel than he does here and every time he’s on screen I was taken completely out of the pic6ture.

Also, LaBute hits a little too hard over the head to really get through, going so far as to literally spell out part of the central conflict at the film’s core. And while I certainly got the central joke of naming his two main protagonists after the biblical first figures of humanity, I think I could have gotten the same idea without it being handed it to me so obviously in the fist couple of frames.

Still, in the end, this movie grabbed me by the throat and refused to let go. LaBute knows how to push my buttons but he also knows how to make me think. He’s an intelligent, unapologetic filmmaker. While films like The Shape of Things are certainly difficult to watch, I’ll take a director and a writer willing to treat me with respect and discernment any day over the corporate produced byproduct slithered out of a Hollywood studio like its industrial waste. But waste my time is all they do, while LaBute and his films make it not only worthwhile, but also a dime well spent in the process.

Rating: 3 out of 4

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