The Shape of Things, Neil LaBute's screen adaptation of his own stageplay, will mean more to you if you subscribe to the line of thinking on modern relationships that suggests men love women for who they are, and women love men for who they could be. The theory gathers strength the more one thinks about it: that certain women repeatedly fall for so-called bad boys not because they especially want to end up in jail or on the floor of a crackhouse in a pool of their own vomit, but because they want to be the one - the sole person - capable of reforming these tearaways, and thus to feel special or unique. (Trust me, this is the generous line: the alternative suggests women only fall for these types of men because these types of men have better abs and deltoids.) It might also explain why women see relationships as ongoing, long-term projects; and why men tend to fall out of love just as quickly as they fall in love, why we struggle when the woman alongside us inevitably changes.
Anyhow, that's the backstory. The main event is another of LaBute's prickly, provocative case studies. Art student Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) picks up nerdy Adam (Paul Rudd) at a museum where she's about to vandalise/intervene upon a statue of a naked figure whose genitals have been covered up. Soon she's reinventing Adam, getting him to lose weight, wear contact lenses, have a haircut and stop biting his fingernails; we know this relationship is getting serious when she starts talking about getting plastic surgery for him. But how does the relationship alter, and what effect do these changes have on Adam's best friends, engaged-to-be-married couple Jenny (Gretchen Mol) and Philip (Frederick Weller)?
On one level, these characters are mere pawns, test dummies in an experiment to demonstrate the effect of art (and the artist) upon a specific relationship. Calling his leads Adam and Eve (Weisz even sports an apple on her top in the film's opening scene, before the fall) would seem to suggest LaBute is interested in how far - or little - male-female relations have come in an age where our techniques of seduction and manipulation are ever more sophisticated and we're all even more likely to succumb to temptation. The two couples serve as a mirror image of one another - one in which the male is the dominant partner, one where the woman is - and there are a couple of explosive, confrontational scenes where Weisz and Weller share the same frame and try to force one another out of the picture. She's a fiercely principled woman; he's the most boorish, loud-mouthed kind of alpha male. (When Adam meekly suggests to Evelyn that Philip might need some form of help, her response is brutal: "the only thing that would help him would be a fucking knife through his throat.")
Despite the fact all the main players struggle to convince as students (in an alternative universe, there's a version of
The Shape of Things with Julia Stiles in the Weisz role and Seann William Scott replacing Weller), taken individually, these are the very fine performances of actors who've played these parts on stage night in night out. Weisz gets a rare role to make full use of the crook in her eyebrows, and that similarly unconventional screen presence: an early scene sees Evelyn wearing quills in her hair, but just about everything else about her is as spiky as a porcupine. Rudd, a versatile actor, always comfortable straddling the nerd/cool divide, gives a transformative performance of quite some complexity: the more attractive Adam becomes physically, the more repulsive his actions start to be. (In terms of LaBute's directorial debut,
in the company of men, Adam is Howard turning into Chad.) The twist in the penultimate minutes, as Evelyn reveals "before" and "after" photos of Adam, makes you realise not only how effective this makeover has been, but also how technically superlative Rudd's performance has been on a scene-by-scene basis. Weller and Mol make very good foils.
Otherwise, the usual LaBute virtues apply: stinging dialogue ("I'm
lovely? Why don't you just come right out and say that I'm
gay?") and at least one twist or U-turn in the middle of each of its scenes. The constant referencing of the material's literary antecedents -
Medea/
Fatal Attraction/
Othello - feels a little didactic, like an English 101 lecture on Possessiveness and The Hysterical Lover, but it can be excused in that these are supposed to be media-savvy college kids. There are even signs that LaBute is becoming a more confident filmmaker: he's still very much of the "set up a plan shot and let the viewer's eyes do the editing" school, but his
mise-en-scène here is more involved and involving than the rather sparse
in the company of men and
Your Friends and Neighbors, and the film assumes the look of a sundappled romantic comedy; another ironic twist, given that this could only pass as a date movie for the passive-aggressive.
In more than just the look of the film, though - and it has to be, given that the material is premised on a critique of surfaces - LaBute appears genuinely to be working toward a cinema (and, one supposes, a theatre) of ideas. It feels significant that the most important lines here - words Adam and Evelyn whisper to one another in bed - are those we don't hear, much as
in the company of men concluded with the sight and sound of broken communication. As perhaps befits a film dealing with the tension that exists between the perfection of surfaces and the human imperfections beneath,
The Shape of Things has its flaws, and sometimes flaunts them: this is, clearly, a more theatrical-seeming piece than either this director's
Nurse Betty or
Possession. But it's one of those occasions where to make a film of a play, and - in particular - a play about our culture's obsession with images and the body beautiful, makes perfect sense: it will have an even greater resonance amongst those who bought a coat to make themselves look more like Keanu Reeves in
The Matrix, or who had their fringe trimmed to resemble Jennifer Aniston in
Friends.
(December 2003)
The Shape of Things screens on Channel 4 this Wednesday at 1.45am.
Bille Woodruff's Honey constitutes a star vehicle for Dark Angel lead Jessica Alba as urban Mother Teresa figure Honey Daniels, nightclub waitress, professional dancer, and vital exponent of adult education: "I teach Head-Pop at the Centre," she says, just so you know. Judging from Miss Alba's extraordinarily compact midriff, Honey could also teach the world how to get one's internal organs into the tiniest space possible, but that's a side issue. Honey believes The Children Are Our Future; that we should teach them well, and let them lead the way. But she faces the unwanted advances of predatory men ("Every guy's a director if he wants some booty") and pressure from an overbearing mother who'd rather her daughter gave up the Head-Pop and took up ballet instead, presumably on the grounds she knows what ballet actually is.
