Paul Rudd’s latest comedy Friendship has been a box office hit. While senses of humor differ among people as much as taste in food, the audience in the fairly packed theater where I saw it laughed together throughout, which was refreshing.
The movie made a point about community and modern life that I haven’t seen picked up on in the mostly positive reviews I have read. Many have focused on the “bromance” that is the center of the film or how the film is a commentary on male loneliness. It is.
But my mind went straight to Robert Nisbet and a song by the legendary alternative rock band The Replacements.
Tim Robinson (Saturday Night Live, I Think You Should Leave) plays Craig Waterman, a marketing executive who on paper should have a fulfilling, middle-class life in suburban Clovis, Colorado with his wife, Tami (Kate Mara), and their son, Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer).
When a package for his neighbor mistakenly arrives at his home, Craig delivers it to its rightful owner, his cool and confident neighbor, local celebrity weatherman Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd). That exchange kicks off a brief friendship, in which Craig bonds not only with Austin but also his extended group of friends, until it eventually goes wrong and Craig is shunned by the group.
This breaks Craig’s heart. He’s definitely a moron, but his feelings have been hurt.
Craig spent his short time of grace with Austin trying to impress him, even copying him. When Austin reveals that he’s in a “punk” band, Craig rocks out to the theatrical heavy-metal band Slipknot in his own family kitchen, with his wife being surprised that he likes that kind of music and his equally surprised son thinking Dad has become cool overnight.
Slipknot’s music is aggressive, but it’s not punk. Rudd told The Hollywood Reporter, “Slipknot wasn’t even in the script; it was just an editing thing. I knew that there would be a ‘punk song,’ but I always imagined it being something that’s not quite punk.”
“It speaks to the character of Craig,” he added. “He’s trying to get into what Austin likes, but he isn’t doing it quite right.”
Craig buys himself a set of drums for his garage. That’s a big deal to him. He even hauls them to Austin’s house first to show him, like a little boy. It is also very important to Craig that no one spoil a new Marvel movie he’s eager to see. He’s dead serious about that.
When Austin tries to show Craig something, Craig asks first if it’s a porn mag with a grin. These are two middle-aged, married men. Yet these are things Craig cares about, and he hopes that in showing his interests to Austin they will make him look cool somehow, too.
What Craig clearly cares much less about is his wife and his son. We learn early on that his wife Tami has just survived some form of cancer. She was also becoming friends again with an old boyfriend. These developments are not at the forefront of Craig’s mind, if they’re on it at all.
From a “bro” perspective (in keeping with the movie’s theme), his wife is out of his league physically, and certainly mentally, showing moments of frustration with her husband but also a general curiosity about life and the world. Tami also has more compassion for Craig’s immaturity and narcissism than other women might. Even their sixteen-year-old son, who understands well that his father is a mess, still shows him a warmth that many parents might not expect from a high schooler. Yet the love is there, even as Craig gets worse. Much worse.
He is clearly looking for some sense of belonging. This review is not the place to explain the entirety of Robert Nisbet’s classic book The Quest for Community, but the late Lee Edwards summarized the conservative sociologist’s thought well in Modern Age last August: “Man’s desire for community, Nisbet wrote, springs from some of the most powerful needs of human nature, including ‘a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity.’”
Edwards added, “Nisbet noted that the traditional sources of community included the family, the church, the neighborhood, and the civic association.”
Craig doesn’t appear to have any real community where he lives. His family doesn’t seem to attend church. His son brings home different girls that Craig meets for the first time; Craig is uninterested in them, his son, his wife or anyone else besides himself, and, of course, Austin.
Craig would walk over broken glass for Austin. Their relationship reminded me of The Replacements’s 1985 song “Bastards of Young” and this lyric, “The ones love us least are the ones we’ll die to please / If it’s any consolation, I don’t begin to understand them.”
That’s Friendship in a nutshell. Craig will do anything to please his new “friend” Austin.
Craig’s own family? The people who actually love and care about him? He has no time for that. It is hard to understand why his family puts up with him for as long as they do, but that’s the degree of loyalty that marriage and kinship can deliver and why families are the bedrock of any real community.
A normal person might look at Craig Waterman and imagine that his deep need for belonging could begin to be satisfied if he’d just try to be a good husband and father. The head of his family. A good man.
Instead Craig Waterman is getting into Slipknot, Marvel movies, and making lame jokes about pornography in a miserably failing mission to be “cool” in his forties. Is that the “community” he seeks and is trying to foster with the local weatherman and his buddies?
It is, and it’s as stupid and empty as it sounds. Which makes for an amusing movie, though a troubling one, too.
