"Friendship" Mocks What It Portends to Be About
"The new movie stars Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd in a duddy buddy "comedy"
Should we take this new A24 Studios’ movie’s title seriously — Friendship — we might assume it articulates something thorough or grandiose about one of philosophy’s great topics.
But this movie doesn’t have that agenda.
It mocks its main character, a total middle-aged douchebag. It puts him in situations that make him as unpleasant as the sewer he loses his wife in.
If he’s your friend, you too might abandon him, as Paul Rudd’s character does.
Rudd plays Austin, a weatherman and neighbor to Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson), this movie’s version of the dumbass sitcom dad.
Austin invites Craig over to hang, then invites him on an “adventure” — into the woods to find wild mushrooms, then into the sewers through which they sneak into City Hall. Later, Craig gets his fantasy experience of hanging out with Austin’s fellow middle-aged bros at Austin’s house. He has never felt cooler.
But this scenario goes the way of sitcoms, with Craig acting so nonsensically around Austin’s friends that any thinking audience should be wondering why they are subjected to such stupidity.
Craig feels empowered, however, by Austin’s attention. He drools over Austin’s manlier approach to life. He begins to do the things that sycophants do — latch onto “cooler” hosts, imitate them poorly, and annoy them incessantly.
In one dumb scene, Craig takes his teenage son to the forest to show him wild mushrooms, as Austin did to Craig. Craig attempts to ape Austin by claiming knowledge of a wild mushroom he finds and then eating it. Predictably, he later vomits.
Craig becomes so annoying that Austin tells Craig that they can no longer be friends. The plot thereby veers into the main problem of The Banshees of Inisherin, American-style and unfortunately much less sophisticated than Martin McDonaugh’s great film.
Craig feels rejected, hated, scorned by his dude neighbor friend. Austin had provided the inscrutable feeling to Craig that Austin’s prized object does, a supposed 400,000 year-old hand axe that makes Craig seem to sense the ancient bonds of humanity.
But he has no humanity, and no self. He is a classic movie douchebag. (The movie stereotypically signals this by giving him nosebleeds. I thought we were done with stupid stereotypes like this, but alas.)
Mr. Robinson, jelling with no other actor in this film, plays his character as nothing but a douche. Imagine Craig as the son of the principal in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, though lacking humor entirely.
That Ferris Bueller reference is not far off, since Craig ends up breaking into Austin’s house twice, ala the principal after Ferris. Mean dogs too will growl at Craig’s burglary.
Friendship tries to juxtapose Craig’s family life against his sycophantic admiration for his male neighbor. Obviously, he longs for the latter too much. Thus we get a sad portrait of the American male who never grew up, a classic American story that’s been done orders of magnitude better in all artistic mediums.
It’s impossible to figure out how the character that Robinson plays even has the lovely wife that he does, or how he has gotten to his present station of life. Robinson’s acting couldn’t be more incongruous with the other actors’ choices. I have no sense that anybody in the movie wanted to present as realistic, besides Kate Mara as Craig’s wife, despite the relatively realistic setting and scenario.
The movie’s a mess of tones. As an A24 movie, the registers in this run the gamut from mock-hipster, to wink-wink college humor, to sensationalistic stupidity ala Saturday Night Live.
I found none of it particularly funny. Granted, I have never seen Robinson in anything before, though he’s an SNL alum. There’s no John-Candy loveableness to him, as there needs to be for his character. His Craig needs to be the Michael-Scott of the latter seasons of The Office, and not the mean and dumb Michael-Scott of Season 1.
We’re left with enduring Robinson’s Craig as a fool whom we have no reason to root for.
The lack of human pathos in this character upends the film’s possible attempts to saying anything meaningful about the title in its topic.
Craig vainly longs for human community that he can’t possibly belong to, primarily because of his lack of “cool enough.” He’s the hanger-on in eighth grade who sits on the outskirts of a clique, accepted just barely by them and always mocked by them.
Is that worthy of the title Friendship? Of course not.
I find the title as offensive as anything. It presents as a lack of inventiveness on the part of writer-director Andrew DeYoung, who really is remaking an ‘80s Boomer comedy with the extra crassness of a 2025 sensibility.