Andrew DeYoung’s film Friendship stars Tim Robinson as an average suburban dad, a casting choice that should clue you into the movie’s aggressively bizarre tone. Everything Robinson does as a performer is just slightly off. His line readings always start at the wrong pitch. His posture makes him look like he’s uncomfortable in his own body. He flies into fits of violence and rage seemingly at random. He’s the off-key tuning fork, and the movie does its best to match his pitch.
On his cult sketch comedy series I Think You Should Leave, Robinson often plays the agent of childish, rage-filled chaos in a mundane setting — a boardroom or a shopping mall or a fast food restaurant. He’s been exalted as a genius in alt-comedy circles, but I tend to find his shtick more grating than anything else. And yet I found myself laughing a lot at Friendship, although I wasn’t always sure why I was laughing.
Robinson plays a boring guy named Craig. He has a nice house and a teenage son and his own office at work. DeYoung lets us know right away that we’re in a bizarro world with another casting choice: the poised, catalog-ready Kate Mara plays Craig’s wife Tami, who looks as if she’s beamed in from another movie as she casually tells Craig she’s off to get drinks with her firefighter ex-boyfriend.
Then Austin (Paul Rudd) moves in down the street, right as Craig’s family puts their house on the market. With his ’70s mustache and his job at the local TV news station, Austin looks and acts like an extension of Rudd’s character from Anchorman. Craig and Austin hit it off, but only for a little while: Craig doesn’t fit in with Austin’s pre-established friend group, and Austin tells Craig he doesn’t want to hang out with him anymore. Craig is hurt, and it drives him a little mad.
Much of the movie is structured like a string of non-sequiturs, including a nightmarish detour in which Tami goes missing in a maze of sewer tunnels and another involving a toad that secretes psychedelic slime. Friendship is both goofy and oddly unsettling, and it sometimes seems to be making itself up as it goes along. But there’s also a weird kernel of truth in there about the inherent absurdity of making friends as an adult: how strange the rituals of friendship can be, how those friendships can form out of proximity and nothing else, how vulnerable it is to want to be welcomed — and how bruising it is when we’re not.
But what else can I say? I laughed. Not consistently, but sometimes uproariously. I started to become hyper aware and maybe even self conscious of my laughter, and of who else was laughing with me. Sometimes I was the only one. Sometimes I would laugh and keep laughing into the next scene. Other times no one in the theater laughed, so the joke hung there in awkward silence, which would itself make me laugh.
Whatever it is, Friendship is a singular comic experience: so stupid I almost feel ashamed for laughing, so nonsensical I wonder if I hallucinated some of it, so disarmingly perceptive that it’s almost scary. Maybe I’m a Tim Robinson fan now.
Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s “Movies 101” heard Friday evenings at 6:30 here on KPBX.