Would you be into watching a 100-minute I Think You Should Leave sketch? Because that’s basically what Friendship is—a Tim Robinson sketch stretched out way past its welcome. Robinson stars as Craig Waterman, that familiar everyman that Robinson is so good at portraying, a middle-of-the-road dude in literal beige who basically becomes undone by his own squareness. The guest star in this one is Paul Rudd, as hammy as ever as Austin Carmichael, the cheesy-unless-you-don't-know-what's-cheesy weatherman with the hidden hairpiece, the loud band, and the cowboy-kerchief attitude. The premise? Craig seems incapable of making friends while everyone around him—from the jerks at work who can't stop talking about the new Marvel movie he hasn't seen yet, to his wife (straight woman Kate Mara) and son at home with their verging-on-Oedipal closeness—seems to have no trouble. So when cool cat Austin, who has just moved in next door, asks him to hang out, Craig, a man who also seems incapable of modulation (another Robinson staple), basically loses his shit. As the friendship buckles under his weight, he maniacally scrambles to keep it.
If this were a real movie, it would be frustrating to watch Craig flub every opportunity to make a connection with literally anyone. But his narcissism is established from the very first scene during a cancer support group in which his wife describes her anxieties post-treatment, including her inability to orgasm. His subtle look of surprise is peak Robinson, before he says, "I'm orgasming fine!" Throughout the film that self-involvement never wavers, so it becomes a little like watching him hit his head against the wall over and over. It’s almost as frustrating to watch everyone around him fail to react in kind when he does something as bananas as shoving an entire bar of soap in his mouth as penance for sucker-punching Austin during a playfight. It's clear Austin and his buds have a high tolerance for embarrassment—they literally break into song at one point during a heart to heart—so why not just call Craig on his insanity?
There are little punctuations in Friendship that are very I Think You Should Leave: Craig’s tech job that makes products more “habit-forming,” his clothes from a place called Ocean View Dining (“They’re the only ones that fit”), his obsession with the Seal Team 6 meal deal (a 20,000 calorie feast apparently inspired by what the soldiers ate before they killed Osama Bin Laden), and the drug trip that only results in him imagining himself ordering from Subway. These are all fun details, but they are not quite enough to sustain a story that is too one-note, and without enough character development to lean on.
The best parts of Friendship fall in between the set pieces, if you could call something like Craig hitting a speed bump too hard a set piece. Robinson has such a well-tuned ear for absurdity that sometimes it's the most subtle thing next to the most overt thing that hits the hardest. In a scene in which Craig goes on a sewer adventure with his wife—he’s recreating the one Austin took him on to break into City Hall—she asks as they trudge through the wet, "Is this piss?" In passing he says something like, "Most of it." Then there’s the scene where he invites a bunch of the work assholes over, and the next scene has him showing them the tiniest sword that ever existed. (“Why’re you showing us this?”) There are also a few noticeable moments where actors flub their lines (both Rudd and Mara, as far as I can recall), which made me wonder whether they could have pulled at the seams of this whole endeavor in a Nathan Fielder-type of meta-absurdist breakdown. More importantly, there’s a smart little inversion where Craig's fantasy of saving Austin ends up in reality the other way around, which gets at the way friendships can become subverted in ways we don’t expect. It gestures at what could have been a deeper—and by deeper I don’t mean less funny so much as less glib—film about male relationships.
As it is, you could probably watch the first 30 minutes of Friendship and get everything it’s giving. Part of that might be that Robinson does not have the range to sustain an entire film. A bigger part might be that Robinson did not write it, and that it's Andrew DeYoung’s first feature. DeYoung has said he wanted to direct Friendship like P.T. Anderson's The Master, and that he wrote the script specifically for Robinson. Perhaps that yardstick intimidated DeYoung into making something too sedate. The initial impetus for Friendship, one of the director’s own failed friendships, also seems like it was more serious than comical, which might have messed with the tone. "I’ve never seen two grown men’s friendship fall apart in a movie in a certain way," DeYoung told Deadline, "so I just started playing around with that idea, and then it eventually became this."
Or maybe Friendship's inertia simply comes from the fact that DeYoung is more of a TV guy. He has directed episodes of basically every notable niche comedy that has aired in the past few years, from PEN15 to Our Flag Means Death to Shrill to Dave. It makes me think his next project with Robinson has to be better. He will direct him in The Chair Company, a half-hour HBO comedy about a guy (Robinson) investigating a conspiracy after an incident at work. At the very least, that one is written by Robinson and his writing partner, Zach Kanin. Here’s hoping DeYoung doesn’t try to shoot it like There Will Be Blood.
