Sequel: Part 2 selects for wildcard no.3 Your Friends And Neighbours (1998)."You'd have taken the same steps; common decency dictated the entire thing."
This movie is bleak and rather uneventful; the story is driven entirely by dialogue, taking place in restaurants, at the gym, art galleries, grocery stores, book stores, and parties (I believe there is not a single outdoors scene in the film), and centers around 6 characters and their interactions, and nothing else. It has a razor-sharp script from writer/director Neil Labute (whose other work includes the equally good
In The Company of Men and the more recent
Lakeview Terrace), and it's about relationships, or people looking for love, or meaning, or... it's actually kind of about nothing. But it's a fascinating little movie and is at parts quite funny, and for some reason has drawn me back over and over.
The cast is stellar: Ben Stiller and Aaron Eckhart play against type as, respectively, a sex "talker" lit professor who screws around on his closet lesbian girlfriend (a scathing Catherine Keener) despite being a big wimp, and another wimp, a big overweight schlep whose wife (Amy Brenneman, the only semi-respectable character in the film) screws around on him because he prefers his own right hand to her. Stiller and Eckhart are both fantastic, and fantasically pathetic, but it is Jason Patric who really steals the show as their ultra-nihilistic, mysoginistic friend who at one point calmly recalls the details of raping one of his male gradeschool classmates in the shower. Patric is ruthless and merciless in this role, a truly malevolent human being; the way he tells off Keener near the end of the movie still remains one of the more vile pieces of acting that I have seen. Rounding out the cast is Natassja Kinski - who plays a rather bit part that functions mostly as a clunky plot device.
The draw of this film for me is just watching the interactions among these characters - Labute expertly writes them - and the way the actors bring them to life. The three male leads are mesmerizing and Catherine Keener is at the top of her unwholesome game here. This isn't a movie that will leave you feeling warm or fuzzy - or anything, really; it just plays itself out for an hour and a half and then you move on with your life. Nevertheless, there is plenty going on and the film is no less engrossing. It's just soulless.
This clip seems to have all the best Jason Patric scenes - NSFL