THE SHAPE OF THINGS (2003, Neil LaBute) R

Reviewed: May 10th, 2003

(Warning: The following opinion might be of exceedingly little use to you if you haven't -- like me -- seen The Shape of Things performed live with the same cast as the film. My negative criticisms are tainted, I cannot be trusted, etc. Long story short: I recommend this flick, complaints and all.)

"Written for the screen and directed by Neil LaBute" reads an opening title card, but no, this is a blatant lie; far as I can tell LaBute hasn't changed one word of The Shape of Things: The Play!'s text and all he did to create The Shape of Things: The Movie! is place a 35mm camera on stage during one of The Shape of Things: The Play!'s many performances, hire a good cinematographer to expertly light the stage conducive to said 35mm camera (particularly in one of the final scenes when the lush reds and blues burst off the screen), and replace The Smashing Pumpkins soundtrack with an Elvis Costello one. Which is theoretically cool by me -- in all honesty, I've long been a proponent of taping plays right off the stage so the millions of people who couldn't make it to NYC or London's West End to, say, see Kidman deliver a knock-out performance (sans clothes) in Sam Mendes's production of The Blue Room or the people who weren't alive to see Jason Robards tear down the roof in A Long Day's Journey Into Night however many decades ago, are at least able to experience a simulacrum of the original entity. I still stand by this idea because better something preserved than nothing, but now that I've gotten the chance to be on both sides of the fence, now that I've gotten a chance to experience the implications of my idea in action -- having seen the actual play before the "tape" -- you can imagine why LaBute's The Shape of Things: The Movie! is inherently disappointing to me.

To complicate matters, my sarcasm aside, LaBute has not literally put a camera on stage and instead made a feeble attempt to transmogrify the play into a movie, an attempt which ends up backfiring due to its very half-assed nature: The performances -- while great on stage (particularly the awesome work by Rudd and especially Weisz, a tight, tense little firecracker waiting to explode) -- have not been fully tempered for film and have the tendency to come off somewhat stilted (Frederick Weller fares the worst of the foursome; astonishingly, the normally worthless Gretchen Mol -- who has, by far, the easiest of the four roles -- fares the best in this department). Plus LaBute -- despite ostensibly making a film (that is, he did go to real locations to shoot and is releasing this thing in movie theaters) -- adamantly refuses to open the play up and by that I don't mean editing the text so the scenes are chopped up and now take place on the tops of lighthouses or some such nonsense, but simply that he refuses to veer away from a drab master-close-up-master-close-up-shot-reaction-shot pattern that provides these longass scenes with all the forward momentum of a broken down trolley. What's most exasperating is that on rare occasions LaBute tantalizingly allows a brief tease of what could have been -- an effectively placed long shot here (I'm thinking of the moment during the penultimate scene when we suddenly see just how big the auditorium Weisz is presenting in really is), a slightly tweaked, skewed angle there (I'm thinking of Weisz's and Rudd's final scene), a dolly move to begin each scene here, a medium, isolated shot of an object in a room there; why is there so little of this stuff, though? Don't try and have it both ways: either be truly rigorous with the presentation, enforcing a formal control that never veers into remotely enticing visuals (and mimics a stage verbatim while enhancing the performance art thematic undercurrents), or turn the damn thing into a freakin' movie for real (and again, this does not mean one word of the text has to be altered).

Caveats aside, LaBute's writing is still provocative and blistering and (often) truthful enough to make The Shape of Things worth seeing, exploring here the impulse in lovers to mold each other into the idealized people they want each other to be, rather than always loving each other simply for what they are (and presumably, what was attractive initially). The Shape of Things also tackles nothing less than the very nature and definition of art itself, a discussion which I personally feel has been exhausted beyond all reasonable interest and I have little patience for indulging in these days (don't mind me, though). I also have to note that LaBute's unrelenting cynicism -- his unwavering vision of gender interactions as deadly warfare -- can grow tiresome after awhile and that on second viewing, The Shape of Things' script feels much more schematic than first. Luckily LaBute had taken a two film break from his grim worldview, and I pray the day is not far off when he finally makes a motion picture which combines the (occasionally) sweet, touching and satisfying romantic comedy and visual splendor of Nurse Betty's Possession with the anger and bluntness of In the Company of Friends and Neighbors Who Tell You About the Shape of Things.

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