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DIRECTED BY: Andrew DeYoung

FEATURING: Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd, Kate Mara

PLOT: A middle-class family man develops a bro-crush on his new neighbor; after a series of faux pas drive a wedge between them, he undertakes increasingly desperate measures to get his friend back.

COMMENTS: Tim Robinson’s comedy speaks to that part of the brain that worries about the men’s room faucet malfunctioning and splashing your pants so it looks like you wet yourself right before you have to deliver a speech in an important business meeting, so you draw attention to it and try to make light of the situation, only to have the joke bomb as you stand there in a silent room in wet slacks. In a way, he’s the perfect guy to take on the trending topic of “male loneliness.”  But then again, if you are interested in a cathartic take on this troubling phenomenon, Tim Robinson is precisely the wrong guy to look to.

Robinson’s Craig seems relatively normal at first, if a bit boring and nerdy, but grows increasingly deranged as the pic progresses. The object of his Platonic affections is a grown-up “cool guy”; new neighbor Austin, a TV weatherman who plays guitar in a rock band on the weekends, knows a secret entrance to City Hall that runs through the sewers, and sports a great head of hair and a mean mustache. Before meeting Austin while dropping off a misdelivered package, Craig seems content to work his corporate gig designing ultra-addictive apps and to stay home in the evenings reading the paper. But there are hints of discontent: his wife, a cancer survivor, confesses to their support group that she hasn’t had an orgasm in months, and she’s constantly ditching Craig to hang out with her ex. (Craig is also disconcerted that his teenage son still kisses mom on the mouth). Craig initially doesn’t think he needs Austin in his life, but he’s almost immediately smitten after hanging out a few times. But when Austin tries to incorporate him into his wider circle of friends, Craig screws things up, and then his behavior grows increasingly deranged as he becomes obsessed with winning his friend back: breaking and entering, literally abandoning his wife, toad-licking. You know, guy stuff.

Friendship sits in a liminal space between mainstream comedy and an absurdist comedy. There is enough structure to ground audiences, but it gets shaggier as it goes along . It’s biggest asset is its unpredictability, but that is also its biggest failure. Craig doesn’t seem real, or like a comic exaggeration of a real person: he’s too biopolar, pathetic and mopey one minute, manic the next as he lashes out in misdirected anger at a big client after being upstaged at a pitch meeting. That inconsistency gives the project the feeling of a bunch of sketches strung together—sketches that might have worked better as isolated bits on Robinson’s Netflix show. Robinson’s persona seems like it would be perfect for a supporting role as the quirky best friend of a film’s protagonist, but he makes for an uncomfortable anti-heroic central presence—which I suppose is the point.

Friendship ultimately has little to say about male friendship; read literally, the movie suggests that men are better off without male friends. Although Craig’s downfall begins with humiliating gaffes—e.g. walking into a patio window—he gradually becomes the victim of his own pride. He becomes less goofy and more narcissistic—he’s not so much upset at missing out on Austin’s companionship as he is offended at being rejected. Rather than being a lament on the pitfalls of male friendship, Friendship becomes more of a character study of a selfish, shallow jerk whose family suffers while he obsessively pursues a pal as the status symbol he thinks he needs to add to his pile of job, wife, son, and house. At first, Craig screws up his chances by missing the proper social cues, but he increasingly turns to perverse self-sabotage. He goes through a lot of pain and disgrace, but ultimately deserves it all. And this is a less interesting direction than what the premise originally promised. When a despairing Craig anxiously decides to take a psychedelic trip, he’s promised an awe-inspiring death and rebirth, but the actual experience is rather a letdown. That’s not quite a metaphor, it’s just a laugh—and that’s the best way to take Friendship. It’s an odd comedy coming from a skewed perspective, but not a particularly incisive or game-changing one. But the laughter in the theater proves that the right audience will want to hang out with it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…he truly odd thing about ‘Friendship’ is that while we may think, at first, that we’re watching a comedy about a sad-sack geek who’s drawn out of his shell, the film always makes sure that Craig, as inhabited by Robinson, is a notch weirder and more off-putting than we expect… the movie, after a while, starts to feel like it’s for Tim Robinson cultists only. Robinson’s brand of middle-class psycho surrealism works perfectly in bite-size sketch-comedy doses. Stretched out to feature length, a character like Craig simply stops making sense.”–Owen Gleiberman, Variety (contemporaneous)

Friendship [Blu-ray]

• Paul Rudd
• Tim Robinson
• Andrew DeYoung
• 2025
• A24

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