In order to understand “Friends with Kids,” think of it as “Friends” with kids. The place is the same—a pocket of New York—and the math is identical. Six long-standing pals: three women, three of the opposite flavor. Four of them divided into two pairs of two: Ben (Jon Hamm) and his wife, Missy (Kristen Wiig), plus Alex (Chris O’Dowd) and his wife, Leslie (Maya Rudolph). Finally, the odd couple—peas in a pod, but never an item, preferring to try other pods and sleep with hotter peas. Such is the companionship of Jason (Adam Scott) and Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt), who live in the same building, get the same jokes, and adore each other so much that, without actually wanting to be together, they decide to have a baby. Imagine Phoebe conceiving with Joey. Gross.
Before you know it, the days are accomplished that Julie should be delivered. And she brings forth her firstborn son, and wraps him in cute slings, and shares him in joint custody with Jason, because there is no room for them in the conventional. And thus the movie dives, head first, into the melee of motives and lunging social experiments that now constitute the world of romantic comedy. You can, pausing only to change a single word, slip straight from “Friends with Kids” to last year’s “Friends with Benefits,” which wondered whether it was possible, in lieu of love, to have sex, the whole sex, and nothing but the sex. The same attempt was made in “No Strings Attached,” while “The Switch” raised the question, hitherto unexplored, of whether you can donate sperm to someone who doesn’t know (a) that it’s yours and (b) that you love her, any more than you know it yourself. Got that? If it was tough for the characters to follow their hearts, just think of what it was like for the poor sperm, who were left chasing their own tails.
All of which is a far cry from, say, “Pillow Talk,” in which Doris Day was divided from Rock Hudson by nothing worse than a split screen. The opening of “Friends with Kids” toys nicely with the ghost of that film, as Julie and Jason talk on the phone while each is in bed with somebody else. Whether you find the scene sly and winning or, in terms of boudoir etiquette, plain rude, it’s clearly fired by the belief that, because the end product of standard romance—heterosexual marriage, followed by children—is in such patent flux, the chemistry of the intervening process must be no less radically changed. Thus, when Jason, in the park with his son, meets Mary Jane (Megan Fox), out for a stroll with a dog, he is not only tempted but allowed, under the terms of his non-marriage, to hit on her. On Fox, that is, not the dog.
Westfeldt doesn’t just star in “Friends with Kids”; she also wrote, directed, and co-produced it. This film is her baby, and her theme, like her character, could not be more fertile, though she is hardly the first to till it; think of screwball comedy, and the endlessly rising sap of desire that bred all that marrying, peeling apart, and marrying again. The sexual dynamic of “Friends with Kids”—like that of “Bridesmaids,” with which it shares no fewer than four performers—may feel more louche and liberated than earlier varieties, but we should take care not to mistake crudity for audacity. When a movie ends, as this one does, with the line “Fuck the shit out of me,” does it really offer a candid modern rebuke to emotional mush, or might it be an old-school declaration of love, dressed up with dirt?
Maybe that’s inevitable. Maybe romance, of whatever age, can only flirt with hip alternatives before landing in the lap of conservatism—a passage smoothed, in the case of “Friends with Kids,” by its devotion to the parochial. Julie and Jason make sport of anyone who is forced to move to Brooklyn, but that truly does mark their horizon; brief ski trips aside, the movie locks us into a landscape of pleasantly salaried white professionals, whose careers (which are seldom identified) afford them the luxury to muse and prattle about nothing but relationships. I’m not asking that they suddenly hold emergency talks on Syrian intervention or the future of upstate fracking, but some sign of mental reach would have been welcome, even if it extended only as far as their children. Indeed, given the title, it’s remarkable how little space is granted to the offspring, who are introduced as excretory machines, sex-blocking irritants, and occasional simpering angels, but never as beings unto themselves. Any parents who see this movie should be warned about the final score: Friends 6, Kids 0.
What kinds of movies, if any, will spring from the turbulence of Greece? How do you give shape to entropy—to incessant fables of grievance and collapse? The greatest of Greek directors, Theo Angelopoulos, who died on January 24th, was undaunted by this conundrum. His finest hour (closer to four hours, in fact) remains “The Travelling Players” (1975), which traces his country’s tribulations from 1939 to 1952. Few places could boast a more fissile narrative, yet Angelopoulos devised a tranquil overview, wreathed in myth; some of the takes went on as long as a song.
There is another way—less lofty, more mischievous, and doubtless more infuriating to some viewers, yet possessed of its own bizarre integrity. Such was the way of “Dogtooth” (2009), the deadpan tale of a disconnected family, and one of its producers, Athina Rachel Tsangari, has now directed “Attenberg.” The film was made just as the Greek economy was entering the whirlpool, and it sets itself deliberately adrift from political affairs, with one figure describing the twentieth century as “overrated”; yet in that isolation, and in the marooned hopelessness of the protagonists, there is a hint that normal life may have become too much to cope with, and that its rules of engagement need to be learned afresh. The action starts with a kiss, like a love story in reverse, except that what impels the kissers is not passion but a sluggish technical curiosity. “How do people do it?” one of them asks.
The setting is a nondescript town, graced by a large factory. In the background lie a mountain and an indifferent sea, their beauty reduced to a supporting role. We meet two friends, Marina (Ariane Labed) and Bella (Evangelia Randou), although their friendship is a spiky one, its patches of tenderness scarred with spitting and snarling. Bella works in a bar, while Marina spends most of her time with her father, Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis), who is being treated for cancer. In contrast to many sickness movies, “Attenberg” turns not to the drama of suffering (there is no howling here, and not a drop of tears) but to its tedium—the time-stretching blankness of hospital stays, and the laziness of post-medication fatigue. Life becomes a waiting room: hushed but unpeaceful, because you never know when you will be called.
The title is a mispronunciation. Marina loves to watch the wildlife documentaries of David Attenborough; we see her gazing at his most famous coup, in which he gained admittance among gorillas in their jungle habitat, somehow maintaining the presence of mind to whisper, to the camera, “If ever there was a possibility of escaping the human condition and living imaginatively in another creature’s world, it must be with the gorilla.” That is Tsangari’s cue. Her own feat of imagination is to enter the human habitat, as if from outside, and to witness our own peculiar rituals and romps. Thus, Marina and Bella walk either with exaggerated strides, like students of Monty Python, or with skipping, kicks, and birdlike, stuttering trots.
You could argue that the strangeness is too loaded, and that Tsangari is upping it purely to meet her own anthropological needs. Most folk manage to walk in a straight and steady line. But what could be more naturally strange than plucking bones from your mouth, as Marina and Spyros do over bowls of fish soup? Also, bear in mind the pressure of mortality, guaranteed, in “Attenberg” as elsewhere, to warp behavior and tauten the pull of lust. That is why Marina keeps reverting to the topic of breasts and penises, not in the snickering, jockeying, size-means-everything tone adopted by the primates of “Friends with Kids” but with forensic fascination, as if bewildered that mere physical appendages should warm and tantalize our feelings. How can she not be bewildered, when Spyros—her own flesh and blood—will soon be, on his specific instructions, reduced to ash? The father’s resignation to that fate is, on balance, the most compelling aspect of the film, and I will not readily forget the sight of him staring out over the town and mourning the long history of his homeland. “We built an industrial colony on top of sheep pens,” he says, “and thought we were making a revolution.” Maybe “Attenberg” is topical, after all. ♦
