The Absurdity of the Mundane
'Friendship' is another Tim Robinson masterpiece, in which the cruelty of human nature and the impossibility of connection are somehow hilarious.
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Tim Robinson, of Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave fame, has been our unofficial bard of quiet desperation for a few years now, but in Friendship he manages to milk cringe out of the unlikeliest of situations, usually with no volume change required.
I enjoy I Think You Should Leave as much as the next Gen Y male with back problems, but if there’s one valid criticism of the show, it’s that the comedy occasionally relies too heavily on yelling. It’s an understandable tic coming from a live improv guy, especially one who’s so good at loud comedy. The louder you are, the more the audience has no choice but to pay attention. If you’re Tim Robinson, cranking the volume knob probably works every time. Why wouldn’t you go back to the well?
I mention it because Friendship, starring Robinson and Paul Rudd, feels exactly like an I Think You Should Leave sketch extended to an hour and 40 minutes, but is also notably light on the shouting. There’s something a little deeper here, which is why it works.
So many comedy vehicles are essentially high concepts, One Big Idea stories that use a stock premise to maintain narrative momentum while talented performers fill it with as many one-off jokes as it’ll hold. Stepbrothers. Old School. Wedding Crashers. Friendship’s high-wire act is that it’s decidedly not that. It’s the mostly low-stakes tale of one suburban weirdo’s ill-fated attempts to make friends. There’s no big denouement or fast-paced late second act scramble that we’ve come to expect in a movie like this (in the late 80s and early 90s this often involved a pivotal business meeting with the Japanese). It’s just story about a guy who never quite fits in, structured like a comedy that never quite adheres to formula. And it’s probably the hardest I’ve laughed in a theater in ten years.
[If you’re an ITYSL fan reading this, definitely don’t miss my interview with Biff Wiff, aka Detective Crashmore, aka Santa Claus, aka Shirt Brother. RIP.]
On paper, the logline of Friendship sounds a lot like I Love You, Man (2009), another Paul Rudd comedy about a suburban white guy trying to make friends. But where John Hamburg saw sweetness and the potential for a rom-com (with a twist!), Robinson and Friendship writer/director Andrew DeYoung see pathology, mining massive laugh lines out of situations few would think to explore. That it’s willing to plumb a deeper sadness in the heart of suburbia makes it not just more humanistic, but also funnier.
Friendship’s first scene sees Kate Mara’s Tami opening up about her cancer at a Fight Club-style support group meeting. She’s been in remission for a year, she tells the group, and she’s just now trying to relearn how to live her life again. It’s hard to do without the nagging fear, she explains, that the cancer might come back. At which point Tim Robinson’s head leans into frame, playing, as we learn, Tami’s husband Craig. “Babe, it’s not gonna come back,” he urges, the laugh lines around his eyes nearly shredding from the Herculean effort of seeming supportive.
Robinson’s desperation and pathos are so palpable, the transparent impotency of his attempts to try to make everything chill and normal, that the moment is somehow screamingly funny. Tim Robinson’s performance is mostly responsible for that, but the framing, editing, and blocking also maximize the effect. Friendship is not the kind of comedy where the director just lets the camera run and the performers goof around for a while and they use the best take. In a lot of ways, Friendship is the anti-hangout hangout comedy. There’s a care to its construction that shows that it’s attempting to create not just some light laughs, but an indelible portrait of a certain type of guy.
And sure, you could say that the type of guy Friendship portrays isn’t one who’d be unfamiliar to anyone who has seen what Tim Robinson does. He’s mostly doing here the one weird trick that made I Think You Should Leave such a break-out success: playing a desperate, lonely oddball who can never quite connect. But truly no one on Earth can do this trick like Tim Robinson, and Friendship finds a new gear for it by not letting the comedy of a lonely man trying his best to be normal dissemble into immediate absurdity. There’s comedy here, but maybe something more.
A mis-delivered package provides the opening for the relationship that becomes the basis for the entire movie. It’s addressed to “Austin Carmichael,” who lives just down the street from Craig and Tami, so Craig decides to take the walk. Just the fact that he’d do this says a lot about him from the jump.
Big studio comedies usually cheat by giving their characters the easiest lives possible, and where Paul Rudd’s character in I Love You, Man was a successful real estate agent with a beautiful, loving wife and a Nordstrom’s-ready wardrobe living in sunny California, Craig works a kinda crappy job and lives in a little box of a house in a grey snowy place where everything looks hard — Clovis, State Unnamed, though signs point to Colorado (it’s definitely not Clovis, California, a town over from where I live, or Clovis, New Mexico, the two states with towns named Clovis in them). That Robinson wears a big puffy jacket for most of the movie adds to the effect of a little boy doing his best to cosplay adulthood.
Austin turns out to be, in sort of a funhouse mirror version of I Love You, Man, exactly the kind of “cool guy” that Craig wants to be: confident, brimming with apparent self-knowledge, and sporting flowing hair and a thick, manly mustache. Friendship isn’t so much a rip off of I Love You, Man as a kind of parody of it. The same way Las Vegas is kind of a cruel satire of the average working stiff’s dream vacation — bigger boxes! more concrete! waste money! cheap crab! — Austin as the ultimate “cool guy” is kind of a joke about Craig’s limited imagination. Austin’s “dream job?” TV weatherman. Dream hobby? Lead singer of a punk band called “Mayor Nichols Sucks.” Dream life? Having a group of supportive dude friends who hang out in Austin’s garage and break into accapella songs to cheer each other up when they’re feeling down. Friendship is about the absurdity of a mundane existence.