‘Friendship’ Review: A Cringe Comedy Masterpiece
Bolstered by Tim Robinson's amazing talent, Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship is designed to make audiences as uncomfortable as possible during sequences of massive embarrassment that are as aesthetically thrilling as they are painfully hilarious.
After Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie blew up the aesthetics of cringe comedy with one of the greatest television series in history, The Curse, Tim Robinson brings it to the mainstream moviegoing public with the aid of writer/director Andrew DeYoung in Friendship. A24 distributes both and has given a new life to a subgenre of humor that, in recent memory, has gotten a bad reputation for being too crass, vulgar, and with little to no tangible cinematic flair for audiences to enjoy. With Friendship, DeYoung and Robinson achieve something few who specialize in cringe comedy are able to do, which is make a deeply human story that results in one of the decade’s saddest films when one pierces through the multiple layers of impeccably-timed, often surreal humor, it presents at face value.
Describing the out-of-body experience one gets from witnessing the perpetual nightmare of Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson) in words probably won’t do this masterpiece justice, but I’ll try anyway. What makes the movie so special is how little it cares for the audience, which, in lesser hands, probably would’ve been a cardinal mistake. Of course, some will vehemently come out of this and call it a colossal waste of time, and from the mixed reactions the press screening encountered, this is probably how the movie will play at an audience level as well. It introduces a relatively simple scenario, with Craig befriending his neighbor, Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd), who has recently moved to town and is now a local weatherman for the city’s TV station.
The two are actively forming a connection, from their adventure in a sewer system that leads them directly to city hall to a foraging trip as they hunt for wild mushrooms. Austin seems to appreciate Craig for who he is, which few people actually do, including his wife, Tami (Kate Mara), who doesn’t seem content to live in the same household as Craig, and is only there to support their son, Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer). However, after a situation during a house party turns their friendship uncomfortable, Austin decides to cut Craig off from his life, and what happens next is exactly what you think will happen from the mind of I Think You Should Leave.
By that I mean throwing everything that was set up in the first half favor of absolute nonsense, whose stylistic flourishes change every five seconds, from strange crash-zooms whilst Slipknot’s “Wait and Bleed” blares in the background, to irises that appear out of nowhere to mark a transition from one scene to the next (or, at times, one shot to the next) without real logic. It creates a frequently unpredictable sense of comedic tension so visceral that the only natural reaction warranted is extreme laughter. It is, honestly, impressive how Robinson’s character does everything wrong and doubles down on his worst tendencies, almost as if he’s begging to be left alone and ostracized. You’re a miserable human being, but you're doing nothing to improve yourself in the eyes of others. Why should anyone feel any sympathy for this guy?
But that’s exactly what makes this movie so funny. Every time Craig looks at someone the wrong way or doesn’t know how to react, we know it immediately spells disaster for him. Does he take sick pleasure in making a fool out of himself at every turn? Who knows, but the situations that occur always paints him as the biggest of all cretins, no matter what, even when he takes a drug trip to find his true self and see what he can become if he lets his self-centerdness go for a millisecond. That scene itself is the movie’s funniest, because it patiently builds up something genuinely spectacular, where audiences can peer through Craig’s nature for the first time after being exposed to his self-serving, egotistical behavior for the past hour or so.
We think this will be a massive revelation for him – and the audience – but it’s actually one of the best-ever trolls I’ve seen that will likely make or break your enjoyment of this farce. I won’t dare spoil what happens, but it’s worthy of Quentin Dupieux’s patience-testing dream-within-dream-within-dream of Daaaaaali!, where the drug trip rejects him and doesn’t give Craig – or the audience – the answer he wants.
It’s meant to evoke a reaction of pure anger, as if you know your time is being wasted on a movie that will not evolve its characters, nor regress them. Craig will stay the way he is, no matter what, as illustrated in its final sene, where he has a glimpse of the life he can have with Tami (Mara is absolutely terrific in this movie, by the way, and is utterly magnetic during one of the best uses of second-screens you’ll see all year, right next to David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds), but throws it all away over a fruitless friendship he’s still bitter about how it ended.
Truth be told, though, everyone only cares about themselves in DeYoung’s world. Austin hides it well, Tami plays along, but Craig is the most obnoxious of the bunch. He doesn’t care about anyone or anything but himself, and will only be satisfied when people divert their attention to him at all times. When Austin forces him to look into the mirror and see what kind of person he is, he refuses so violently that not even a psychedelic trip will help him in any way, because he’s already resigned himself to never changing who he is. A miserable man who will always live a miserable existence inside a miserable world that will never love him in any conceivable way.
When that realization occurs for the audience, it hits like a punch in the gut. When it happens for Craig, he looks the other way, and will always do so until his time is up…