Close Encounters of the Vile Kind

When he was much younger, Woody Allen said that he would most likely have been a sniper on top of a building if he hadn't had his writing career. After seeing 3 of his self-penned movies now, I have come to the conclusion that the same fate might have awaited Neil LaBute if he hadn't gotten his writing 'thingie' off the ground.

"The Company of Men" was vile, "Your Friends and Neighbors" was more subversive about it but vile just the same (even though I actually really liked that one), and now we have "The Shape of Things", a 4-character indulgence which involves a personal betrayal of the vilest nature. Vile can be valid, don't get me wrong, but in LaBute's hands it seems to be more of a way for him to exorcise his own demons rather than attempt to consistently present us with believable situations and thoughtfully well-written characters. Of course he SHOULD exorcise those demons (the Woody Allen statement comes to mind again), but it would be much better if he could start doing it in a more constructive, less indulgent way.

This movie itself is very much like the character LaBute creates in the film (which was a play originally and feels like it, also not good) - the character played by Rachel Weitz, who portrays "EVElyn", a lovely little Gemini sociopath, to Paul Rudd's Adam: this is NOT a spoiler because it's mentioned in the film's synopsis. Weitz' character brutally exploits Rudd's character under the guise of an 'art' project for school, but in reality, her project would have been more appropriate for a psychology class experiment or even more appropriately, for a dissertation in Sadism 101.

The film does the same thing: from the title, it seems like it's some sort of commentary on our society but in reality it's just an excessively mean-spirited indulgence on LaBute's part. There is no truth here, not really, and because of this, the acting isn't very good either, especially in the scenes where Rudd is supposed to be devastated by Weitz' betrayal -- at no time do we actually feel anything resembling reality in his reaction to her cruelty. He doesn't transmit genuine hurt or anger or any combination of those two, and when he sort of acts like he's crying, it's even less believable. Sort of like the film itself.