In Review: 'Friendship,' 'Caught by the Tides'

Friendship
Dir. Andrew DeYoung
97 min.

Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson) doesn’t seem too unhappy with his life in the opening scenes of Friendship, the feature debut of writer-director Andrew DeYoung. His wife Tami (Kate Mara) has recently beaten cancer and though she worries about it recurring, he reassures her with a tone that suggests he’s gotten used to a life in which nothing truly horrible can happen to him. Craig’s not a bad guy but his sphere of empathy doesn’t extend very far; when Tami confesses to a support group that she hasn’t had an orgasm since developing cancer, he notes that he’s doing just fine on that front. He’s got a solid job making digital products more addictive and a pretty nice teenage son named Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer). He can pass the evenings playing around on his phone, and there’s even a new Marvel out that Craig hears is literally driving people crazy, which sounds like fun. Who needs friends when they have all that?

It turns out Craig does. Or at least he wants a friend after meeting Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd), a new neighbor who works as a local weatherman. (Austin does evenings but he has a “cherry” car picked out if he ever gets promoted to mornings.) Fortunately, the two quickly hit it off. Austin even invites Craig along to hunt for mushrooms and explore the hidden tunnels that connect all their city’s buildings. But after an awkward evening with Austin’s extended friend group, the weatherman cuts Craig loose, initiating a spiral that seemingly has no bottom.

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That’s a solid set-up for a dark comedy, but the description doesn’t fully capture the bleak absurdity of Friendship, which DeYoung has built around Robinson’s unique, unnerving presence. Here, as in his sketch series I Think You Should Leave, Robinson immediately registers as a man who doesn't quite understand how the world works so he’s doing his best to fake it. That the world of the film feels equally off compounds this queasy quality, almost bringing Craig full circle to the point where he starts to resemble an everyman.

Friendship’s individual scenes sometimes play like sketch ideas and one scene doesn’t always logically follow another, but that feels like a conscious choice; recurring gags and thematic consistency help keep it knit together. Friendship is extremely funny, but also filled with dark undercurrents that intensify over the course of the film, as Craig’s desperation mounts and his attempts to recover his footing prove alternately short-lived and disastrous. (DeYoung’s choice to fill the film with moody lighting and foreboding zooms and Rudd’s cryptic, funny performance as Craig’s obscure object of platonic desire don’t hurt.) If the film is ultimately a series of variations on the same grim joke, the variations are clever and the joke’s a good one: Craig wants a little more out of life than he already has. The cosmos deems him unworthy and metes out one seemingly disproportionate punishment after another. —Keith Phipps

Friendship opens in limited release tonight before expanding.

Caught by the Tides
Dir. Jia Zhangke
111 min. 

To have watched the films of Jia Zhangke, the undisputed leader of China’s “Sixth Generation” of directors, is to have witnessed a significant piece of the country’s transformation during the 21st century. Though a couple of works fall outside that time frame—2000’s Platform opens in 1979, with young performers facing uncertain futures after the Cultural Revolution, and 2008’s 24 City contends with decades of change to a building in Chengdu—Jia’s films are generally about ordinary people contending with massive upheaval. The title of his new semi-experimental film, Caught By the Tides, could have been applied to any of his previous efforts. 

Jia’s fervent admirers have placed him among the most revered filmmakers in the world, but with only a few exceptions, like 2004’s gorgeous The World and his surprising 2013 genre anthology A Touch of Sin, chief among them, I’ve been stuck by a foreground/background problem: It seems like the story that compels him (and us) the most is in the background, which has the tendency to leave the foreground business undernourished. In 2006, Jia seemed to embrace his own tendency toward hybridization by producing two films about the Three Gorges Dam, the fiction feature Still Life and the hour-long documentary Dong, that approached the same dramatic upheaval from different angles. 

It would be glib to call Caught by the Tides a fan’s-only proposition, but it certainly wouldn’t be the ideal entry point into Jia’s work, because it speaks in a kind of shorthand, drawing directly from past films and jettisoning the narrative tissue that would make it more cohesive as a standalone project. Prompted by restrictions around the COVID-19 pandemic, Jia has constructed the film around 22 years’ worth of past material, with some scenes and outtakes lifted directly from 2002’s Unknown Pleasures and Still Life, and others images he captured impulsively by his own camera over the years. It’s an odds and sods production, like a B-sides compilation that a band might put out between albums. Less than half the footage appears to be new. 

Jia does solve one problem that tends to hamper films that take place over multiple decades: He doesn’t have to age his lead character. His longtime collaborator Zhao Tao stars as Qiao Qiao, a singer and club girl who lives in the northern industrial city of Datong in 2001, the same setting of Unknown Pleasures. Though she carries on a romantic relationship with her manager Guao Bin (Li Zhubin), he seems alternately indifferent and abusive to her, and ultimately skips town via text, promising that he’ll send for her when he has money. He never returns her calls and messages, but still nonetheless decides to hit the road to find him, winding up in Fengje City in 2006, the same setting of Still Life and Dong. 

None of the relationship business makes much sense psychologically, and the interactions that Qiao and Bin have with various criminal elements are haphazardly established and resolved. (Qiao is fortunate to have kept a taser on hand.) Yet Jia has cherry-picked some revelatory nuggets from his past work and his DV camera, and the sheer temporal scope of Caught by the Tides leaves the powerful impression of a country whose dynamism is also massively destabilizing. It feels, at best, like an amplification of Jia’s longstanding themes, because the conceit allows him to pack so much change into a single film. But there’s still something to be said for packing a single film into a single film. — Scott Tobias

Caught by the Tides opens this week in limited release.