Friendship is rare

Whenever I had thought about finally seeing the Andrew DeYoung-directed Tim Robinson vehicle Friendship, which has gone through a series of "about to occurs" based on a date we had with another couple to see it that was cancelled several times, I couldn't help but start singing the first few lines of the Tenacious D single "Friendship":

Friendship is rare
Do you know what I'm saying to you?
Friendship is rare
My derriere
When you find out much later that they don't really care

It's rare, to me

Can't you see

It's rare, to me

Can't you see?

I can stop there because I wouldn't usually get that far in the lyrics spontaneously appearing in my head. But I used to love that Tenacious D album, so I'm pretty familiar with the song.

When I finally saw the movie with my wife on Friday night -- a prelude to getting together with this same couple to see a different movie, Good Fortune -- I came to realize how rare the movie truly is.

It's rare because you don't usually see a movie this lacking in formal coventionality getting greenlit. If you're a fan of the Robinson show I Think You Should Leave, which I am, then you know Robinson's thing is to build these three- to five-minute vignettes off twisted versions of recognizable social interactions, usually where there's one insecure or petty party (usually played by Robinson) who violates normal social boundaries in trying to connect to other people. The ideas are wild but at least they are contained to within that short period of time, and you can usually remember them in order to tell your friends about them.

When you expand this to feature length, it's surprising how little you can remember and how little there is to talk about with people later on.

Now, it could be that I was fading in and out after having two beers, which I thought was probably a good way to watch this movie. But I know I didn't miss any significant portion of the film, I just missed the nuggets of crazy weirdness that have such a good showcase in short form. In this elongated form, I couldn't remember wanting to talk about anything afterward except what a slog it had been.

The movie is also rare in the sense that it is undercooked. There is a rigorous version of this material that keeps all the cringe, that goes on wild and fruitful tangents, that doesn't make a huge amount of sense from moment to moment, and yet that still feels like a cohesive whole that understands and incorporates the differing requirements between a feature-length film and a five-minute sketch. I searched in vain for that rigorous version of the material this whole movie. 

What was left to me was raw and limp and uninvolving, and also a poor return on what I hoped was going to be a consideration of male friendships with a fatal power imbalance, something in the vein of my beloved The Cable Guy. But even the title is a bit of a misnomer, because friendship is only a relatively small part of what is explored here, with the Paul Rudd character even disappearing from the movie for ten-minute stretches here and there. This shrimp needed a lot more time on the barbie.

The unfortunate thing about the rareness of this film? It does seem to put a damper on Robinson possibly making this more stringent version of his unique anti-comedy sensibilities at some point in the future.

Then again, maybe it won't. Friendship is a movie a lot of people have talked about this year, and that has obviously not just been, or even mostly been, people bashing it. In fact, although all the conversations I heard were in the context of people recommending it only with a large asterisk -- like, know what you're getting into -- I don't recall hearing anything fundamentally negative about it until my wife reported that her friend, the one we're seeing tonight to see Good Fortune, stopped watching it when she and her partner tried to watch it at home. He finished it but I won't know until tonight what he thought.

And then actually my wife had a different experience of it than I did. She agreed it was probably too odd for its own good, and lacking in a more sound construction that could have gotten more out of it, but she found herself charmed just to be watching something so strange and different. I would have thought this would have been my opinion and my opinion would have been hers, given that I feel like I'm the one who has to push I Think You Should Leave on her and she's a bit more resistant.

The other thing about rare movies, in whatever form they take, is that it can take some time to decide how indeed you do truly feel about them, because they are challenging you in ways where any predetermined potential reaction might be invalidated. Even though I thought I knew what to expect from this movie, and it did contain much of what I did expect from moment to moment, I may not have been prepared for how loosey goosey it would ultimately be from a structural perspective. And maybe that takes some time to sort through and figure out.

I think I'll have to go with my largely negative impression in terms of where Friendship slots in with my 2025 films. I'm not going to watch it again in the next two months. But it may be that I will confront it again some time down the road, meaning its long-term spot in my heart, as encapsulated by my Flickchart rankings, is still up in the air.