When Art Wounds
THE SHAPE OF THINGS
A brutal playwright explains himself.
With Paul Rudd, Fred Weller, Gretchen Moll, Rachel Weisz
Written and directed by Neil LaBute
"IT'S ALL SUBJECTIVE," says Evelyn, a graduate student in art at pretty little Mercy College, to Adam, a senior English major and the sole survivor of her master's thesis, which she's just unveiled with a sort of lecture-cum-performance piece. After her prologue in a small auditorium, Evelyn invites her audience to join her for cookies and punch in a sunny gallery, where the bulk of her work awaits them. Only Adam, who has some unfinished business with her, attends.
This happens at the end of The Shape of Things. And while Evelyn's icy exegesis hardly redeems what she's done, her ensuing climactic agon with Adam is one of the most absorbing moments of artistic apologia that I can recall. "Moralists have no place in an art gallery," scream the words (quoting the Chinese woman novelist Han Suyin) written on a wall of Evelyn's installation. To which Evelyn adds, justifying herself: "I don't get off on it. This is my work." To which Adam says: "You're puking up your shitty little neuroses all over people's laps."
I might be exaggerating a bit to say that the brutalist David Mamet is virtually a feminist compared to Neil LaBute. Then again, it's all subjective. In his plays and movies - like In the Company of Men, Bash and Your Friends & Neighbors - LaBute's most mesmerizing characters are putrid, misogynistic, amoral men who genuinely seem to enjoy turning women (or even other men) to dust. Is that how LaBute - who's married and Mormon - truly feels (and if so, then why)? Or is it simply how he interprets the filthy, stinking world we live in? "This is my work…," Evelyn says on behalf of her creator, and there's no place in it for morality.
Jesus Christ! If that doesn't give you something to cogitate, then you must already be dead. What Evelyn "does" for her thesis involves Adam, although to explain further would spoil the movie's ending more than conscience allows. It's a stunning finale in a beautifully acted adaptation of LaBute's own play (written three years ago, when he was 37), and it makes this intriguing, unsettling writer/director - who, at middle age and in mid-career, seems to have taken a moment to explain himself - even more of an enigma.
The Shape of Things opens in a museum, where Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) and Adam (Paul Rudd) "meet cute." She's an iconoclast who steps over the line (broken rule #1) to take a Polaroid (broken rule #2) of a sculpture whose generous penis has been obscured with a fig leaf placed there by a committee of moralists. This offends Evelyn, who's prepared to use a can of spray paint (broken rule #3) to give the stony ancient a scarlet monster member. As Adam tries to talk her down - "You stepped over the line, Miss," to which she replies, "It's Ms." - she recognizes how adorable he is beneath his unruly hair, horn-rimmed glasses, frumpy corduroy jacket and slightly bulbous nose. So she gives him her number (by spray painting it on the jacket), and they begin a mad affair (only his third - ever).
The other two people in LaBute's concise landscape are Phillip (Fred Weller), Adam's prickly best friend, and Jenny (Gretchen Mol), Phillip's timid fiancée (he tells her when she's permitted to express her opinion, which is never). This couple met when Adam had a class with Jenny but never asked her out despite her many hints. So naturally she's still curious about him, and things only get more unrequited when Evelyn begins her epic Adam makeover.
Among its many strokes of artistic arrogance - a phrase that LaBute would probably (and guiltlessly) consider to be redundant - The Shape of Things scarcely attempts to not seem like an adaptation of a play. Its mere dozen scenes have locations and exteriors. But the dialogue is uncompromisingly precise and theatrical, and the actors speak it religiously, as if they're still on stage. LaBute chose obviously 30ish actors to play college seniors because he needed their maturity as performers. He gets it from all four: Weisz, who's vivacious beauty masks Evelyn's thorns; Rudd, a poignant charmer with adroit body language; Mol, the withering, smoldering mouse; and the lanky, elusive, magnetic Weller, who absolutely must do more film work.
The Shape of Things begins with a sort of tribal drumbeat, signaling that we're about to experience another LaButian dose of the rituals between men and women. His characters' names, and their concomitant metaphors, are ridiculously unsubtle: Adam doesn't need to call Evelyn "Eve" for us to get it, and her initials are E.A.T., as in maneater. The opening credits begin the movie's pointed oddness: "Actress - Gretchen Mol," "Actor - Paul Rudd," etc. This is a work of art, LaBute declares, and don't you dare mistake it for anything else. Thus he gives himself the liberty to do whatever he fucking well pleases, just as Evelyn does at her gallery show.
Does Neil LaBute really hate women as much as he seems to in his work? What should we make of a performance artist - mercifully, discussed but not seen - who removes her tampon in front of her audience and then uses her menstrual blood to paint pictures of her daddy? How could anyone think up this stuff if he weren't already a - but no, there are no judgments in art. Funny and tart, provocative and disturbing, Neil LaBute is something to engage, and so is The Shape of Things.