"Friendship" shouldn't be this stressful

Back when the short video platform du jour was a little app named Vine, the wildly popular user Anthony Padilla posted a six-second video that became what we know today as a “load-bearing post,” a video that defines culture so succinctly it has become part of modern vernacular. From his hotel room, Padilla captured two men conversing in a hot tub. The catch? They were sitting so far from one another that they surely had to yell over the roar of the bubbles to hear anything the other person was saying. In the background, Padilla sings, “Two bros, chillin’ in a hot tub, five feet apart ‘cause they’re not gay!”

Aside from the inherent discomfort of filming two total strangers in public, the video’s instant, massive popularity indicated that Padilla captured something in the culture. (Though, something must be said about iPhone camera quality being so bad in 2016 that you can’t make out any faces. Perhaps these hot-tubbing gents were mere conduits for a message that begged to be delivered — vessels of God, if you will!) The fact is: Men have trouble pursuing friendships. And when they do, they fear vulnerability and judgment. Studies have shown that men have far more difficulty than women when it comes to forming close relationships, especially with other men. In 2021, the Survey Center for American Life found that 27% of men say they have six or more close friends, and even more shockingly, 15% of American men say they have no close friendships at all. This problem has been persistent for years. In 2013, friendship scholar Geoffrey Greif told Salon that, if men hang out, they’re more likely to do activities than have conversations; “shoulder-to-shoulder” relationships versus “face-to-face” bonds.

While the male friendship recession is no laughing matter, Andrew DeYoung’s new film “Friendship” explores the phenomenon to reveal all of its anxious, hysterical customs. Starring the brilliant pairing of Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, the movie burrows into a burgeoning friendship between two adult men toiling in suburbia, planting a bundle of “Looney Tunes” dynamite in their dynamic. The explosion happens in slow motion, allowing viewers to gawk at all of DeYoung’s shrewdly constructed, cinematic shrapnel. “Friendship” is as much of a comedy as a horror show, a singular and vital cautionary tale for the modern age designed for real-life implications.

DeYoung wastes no time getting to the root of the issue. From the film’s opening sequence, he establishes that Robinson’s character, Craig, has a strongly entrenched problem with vulnerability. Craig and his wife Tami (Kate Mara) sit in a circle at a support group meeting, where Tami talks about her fear of jumping back into life after a recent battle with cancer. She speaks openly about her worries and how the experience has made her more in-tune with herself and her life, even if it means she's also staring at her anxieties head-on. When she expresses her primary fear, that her cancer will come back, Craig chimes in with a faux-doting reassurance. “It won’t come baaaccccckkkkkk,” he tells Tami. Tami just wants her husband to face the unknown alongside her. Instead, Craig brushes all of their mutual concerns under the rug. If something’s out of sight, it’s out of mind, enabling Craig to keep performing his idea of modern manhood.

Most things in Craig’s life function the same way. Despite fighting the city for months to get a couple of speed bumps in his neighborhood, he still agrees to work on a digital campaign for the mayor, who contracts Craig’s company that specializes in “making apps more addictive” for a re-election campaign. He pleads with Tami to see the new Marvel movie, and whenever anyone begins to talk about it, he chides them for spoilers instead of engaging in conversation. When he talks about getting his own office at work, Craig boasts how it allows him to close the door and eat whatever he wants without being bothered. Like most unwitting victims of the male friendship recession, Craig sees his isolation as a point of pride.

Tim Robinson in "Friendship" (Courtesy of A24). That is, until a package for a neighbor is mistakenly left at Craig’s house. When he goes to return the parcel to its rightful owner, Craig meets Austin (Rudd), the mustachioed, smooth-talking evening weatherman who’s just moved in down the street. In their first meeting, Austin disarms Craig’s offense by throwing a few extra details and questions into what would otherwise be a brief interaction. Austin senses something in Craig and vice versa, though neither one quite understands what this feeling could be.

I’ve experienced this in the past, as I’m sure everyone who identifies as a man has. A first-time interaction with another guy is a loaded incident. What are the right things to discuss, and how do you convey a platonic interest in another man without coming on too strong? When you’re a guy in the world, you’re constantly playing a game you never wanted to be part of, but that society demands you play. As someone who considers himself an open book, who likes to put all the cards on the table and zoom past niceties and small talk to defuse a potential new friend’s fears, playing mind-reader is a particularly exhausting task. Throw in being gay on top of that, and I’ve always got to assess how much code switching is necessary when meeting a straight guy for the first time. Other times, I can feel a straight man at a party pulling back from a great conversation because he’s worried the women in the room might think he’s not straight, single and available — or worse, worried what his other friends might think. I want to look them in the eyes and plead, “Open up to me. Just be a person! Why the hell are you acting so weird?” Men constantly wonder if they’re sharing too much or sharing too little. And in those moments, it’s hard to tell what’s worse: possible judgment or eternal loneliness.

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When Austin and Craig start hanging out regularly, Craig thinks he’s escaped that nagging choice. He’s enjoying their shoulder-to-shoulder bonding activities — watching Austin’s band play, or crawling through the city’s aqueduct and breaking into City Hall — but can’t quite figure out the vibe of the face-to-face interactions, especially when external forces are brought into the equation. When Austin introduces his new friend to his circle of buddies, Craig malfunctions. He wants to be aloof yet interesting; cool, but not so try-hard about it. After a few beers with the guys leads to a round of garage boxing, Craig tries his literal hand at impressing the room and sucker punches his new BFF. (Bro Friend Forever.) To his surprise, the boys do not respond by showering him with praise and admiring his strength and fortitude. The night ends early, and Craig is ostracized from the group.

Things go haywire from here, and DeYoung has the rare opportunity to punch as hard as he possibly can. His writing is lean and vigorous, and he packs the script full of outrageous scenarios that are more stressful and strange than any mainstream theatrical comedy in recent memory. For those who know Robinson from his Netflix sketch series “I Think You Should Leave,” the turns “Friendship” takes will prove familiar, but not monotonous. Robinson is extraordinarily adept at pushing bits to their limit and then skating past that boundary line. He yells, plots, spills coffee, turns dad jokes into gut-punch guffaws, and makes the entire auditorium fold itself into a ball, shaking with laughter as much as they shake with anxiety. And though DeYoung said that he wrote the film specifically for Robinson, it feels more in line with his years of work with comedians Kate Berlant and John Early, whose brand of comedy has been similarly heightened by DeYoung’s thoughtful direction and writing in short films and sketches. “Friendship” may be DeYoung’s feature debut, but you’d hardly know it from how confident he is in his vision. And though he’s tackling an extremely relevant topic, he does so with such outsized imagination and granular directorial precision that “Friendship” arrives as an instantly evergreen comedy classic.

All great comedy rings with truth, after all. And there’s no denying that we’ll all be burdened with a certain level of narcissism when approaching new friendships in a digital world. We focus more on how people perceive us than on our interest in others. How often have you zoned out of a conversation, wondering if the person you’re talking to is enjoying spending time with you? In real, close friendships, this should rarely, if ever, be a question we ask ourselves. But we live in a time that commodifies attention, where actively choosing to spend time with someone, away from a phone, means so much more than it used to. Friendships can often feel like a competition between ourselves and a cellular device. “What if they get bored with me because I can’t always offer the same endless stream of dopamine that the phone in their pocket provides?” It’s never been so easy to get trapped feeling like a burden, and the worry that fear might become a reality keeps so many people as isolated as Craig.

Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd in "Friendship" (Courtesy of A24). While this brand of male isolation is amplified for the sake of “Friendship,” it has real-life effects and potentially lethal consequences. Right now, Nathan Fielder is doing groundbreaking, career-defining work over on HBO’s “The Rehearsal,” exploring one of the number one causes of airplane crash fatalities that no one has successfully addressed yet: antisocial behavior. In his thoughtful, rigorous testing process — hinged on high-concept recreations of real-life scenarios — Fielder has pointed to several instances where pilots actively avoid conversation, or settle for basic pilot jargon before dopily standing in silence together at a social function. When the male friendship recession is transformed from theorizing and studies and crafted into familiar situations like these, which DeYoung also does so skillfully in his film, it becomes horrifyingly recognizable.

And, of course, we eventually learn how much of a narcissist Rudd’s Austin is, too. He’s not the perfect friend, or the ideal man. He’s another person struggling to appear faultless to maintain some societally manufactured idea of male coolness. His seemingly approachable masculinity is an amalgamation of characteristics chosen to give off an air of friendliness. It’s all a sham — even more than that: It’s a waste of time. And though “Friendship” is a completely unique, unforgettable comedy, it’s even more impressive that DeYoung can reach through the screen and shake the viewer by the shoulders. As rare as a great comedy is these days, it’s even rarer that anything besides a few one-liners will stay with the audience after the movie’s over. With “Friendship,” DeYoung hasn’t just called his audience to look at how they approach their own relationships; he’s created a film that men can see together that demands a discussion afterward. “Friendship” is a shoulder-to-shoulder activity that begets a face-to-face interaction, preferably not five feet apart.