Review
Review Date: 11-May-03
Spoiler Rating: High
Juju Judgment: Junk
The Shape of Things (2003)
The latest film from the twisted mind of Neil LaBute addresses a lot of Big Issues --- men, women, art, morality --- but more than anything else it addresses how much we value and are influenced by appearances, the shape of things. It's a bit ironic, then, that it falls prey to the very fault it aims to dissect, becoming nothing more than a superficial movie about superficiality. Like its companion piece, LaBute's blistering debut "In the Company of Men," "The Shape of Things" is a cruel tale that directs itself chiefly to the brain and spleen, to the utter exclusion of the heart. But unlike "Company," "The Shape of Things" paints everything in broad, Consider This! strokes, coming off as nothing more than a strained, sick little fantasy instead of a story about real people and the way in which they love, fear, and destroy one another.
The movie revolves around some of the most unsavory people you'd never want to meet. Adam (Paul Rudd) is a pathetic English Lit geek who hooks up with a narcissistic, bohemian art major named Evelyn (Rachel Weisz), to his own surprise and the surprise of his straight-laced friends, Philip and Jenny (Frederick Weller and Gretchen Mol). Over the course of several weeks, Adam proceeds to fall more and more deeply in love with Evelyn, despite the fact that she alienates Philip and Jenny, is prone to snits, and manipulates him into changing his diet, his hair, his wardrobe, and even the shape of his nose. Adam's new look and resulting attitude lead to some complications by stirring up old feelings between Jenny and himself; but this is nothing compared to the horror that awaits him at the end of the semester, when he is publicly unveiled by Evelyn as her thesis project: a man refashioned inside and out by a few cosmetic changes which she instigated purely for the sake of art.
LaBute adapted "The Shape of Things" from his stage play, and it feels more like a play than a movie, with its lack of soundtrack, dialogue-heavy scenes, and small cast (every one of whom overacts, a habit they presumably picked up while performing the play on Broadway so that the people in the back could follow what was going on). This does not, however, create a feeling of intensity or intimacy, because not one of the characters is a believable person. While all of LaBute's movies (except, perhaps, the enigmatic "Nurse Betty") can be criticized for relying on stereotypes and preconceptions, this is the most superficial: Evelyn is so evil that she can only be taken as an overblown metaphor for Art Gone Too Far or, horribly, Woman as Destroyer of Man; Adam is such a moron that he can only be viewed, first, as a classic Nerd (which LaBute clearly thinks is an animal of intrinsic sympathetic value, which is absurd), and, second, as a Woman's Victim/Puppet, an example of what a force like Evelyn can produce.
The problem with taking this road, in addition to creating a very impersonal film, is the same problem that discounts all of the broad generalities people use to explain why life is complicated: it completely ignores the phenomena of personality and individuality. The characters here cannot be more than stereotypes and symbols, because they act only in reaction and exist in a complete moral vacuum. (Philip says, once you start picking out napkins, you kind of have to get married.) The question LaBute seems to be posing isn't "Wouldn't it be horrible/intriguing/shocking if someone really did this to another person?" but rather "In a situation devoid of feeling, sympathy, and conscience, how would a woman dismantle and rebuild a man?" This clinical fascination with how art has freed Evelyn from compassion and how Adam, lacking a strong character, is putty in her hands is purely hypothetical. The fact is, everybody has some form of self which makes them what they are, and morality does exist because people crave it, create it, foster it, and respond to it. If someone like Evelyn really wanted to sacrifice another person in her war against the power of appearances, I doubt she could do so without remorse, or that she would find it so easy truly to change him (though she certainly could wound him deeply). (I'm also strongly doubtful she would feel free to present him as a school project.) "The Shape of Things" asks us to believe that if you give a free thinking woman a motive, she will become a monster, and if you make a nerd good-looking, he will become a lying bastard. As far as I'm concerned, these are shallow concepts, based on banal assumptions about men and women, which don't even begin to scratch the surface of the truth.
Copyright © 2003 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.
