‘Friendship’ Lets Tim Robinson Redefine How Off-Putting A Feature-Film Leading Man Can Be
I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson has presented its titular creator and star to us in some of the most humiliating situations ever conceived. Characters he’s played have asked a restaurant server to intervene with a date he thinks is being too greedy with the toppings on a shared plate of nachos, tried to pull off a perm like an Irish setter’s ears, gotten disruptively dirty with questions on an “adult” ghost tour and of course, driven a hot dog-shaped car through a store window and loudly disclaimed responsibility — while wearing a hot dog costume.
If our era has a living avatar of social anxiety, Robinson is it. Now, with Friendship, Robinson is making his début as a feature-film headliner, and I have no higher compliment than to say he’s doing it in an extremely Tim Robinson way.
Robinson plays Craig Waterman. He has a wife, Tami (Kate Mara), who is running her florist business out of the home; her repeated requests that they invest in a larger vehicle so that she can use it to make deliveries are evidently something Craig can’t hear. He has a teen son, Stevie (Jack Dylan Grazer), whose way of kissing Tami on the lips seems to alarm Craig. He has a job at a company that develops strategies to make phone apps more “habit-forming” (not addictive). He has an affinity for Marvel movies. What he doesn’t have, it seems, are friends. That changes when his letter carrier delivers Craig a parcel addressed to his new neighbor, Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd).
Don't Miss
After their brief initial meeting, Austin calls the Waterman house, and Tami accepts an invitation, on Craig’s behalf, for a drink. Craig is offended at first that Tami thinks she knows his schedule, but she’s right, he is free. This turns out to be one of the most consequential chill hangs of his life: Austin is a local TV weatherman and clearly the coolest person Craig has ever met, taking him on a forbidden adventure, inviting Craig to come see his band play and showing him how to forage for wild mushrooms. Austin’s so cool he doesn’t even have a cell phone!
Things are going great until Austin invites Craig to a casual get-together with some of his other friends. Finding out he doesn’t mesh with the guys in Austin’s circle sends Craig on an increasingly desperate quest to get back what his off-putting personality has lost him.
Cringe comedies are so common that this isn’t even Rudd’s first — or fourth. (An incomplete list: The 40-Year Old Virgin, I Love You, Man, My Idiot Brother, The Chateau and Dinner for Schmucks). But whereas some performers playing comedic anti-heroes seem to hold a little something back so they still seem appealing, or get a moment of redemption to keep them likeable, Robinson inhabits the role of Craig with a complete lack of vanity. Not since Mike White in Chuck & Buck have I seen someone so determined to make screen situations as awkward as possible.
A social comedy of manners like this can’t work if there isn’t escalation, and we definitely get it here. Craig is weird straight from the start — we meet him as he’s supporting Tami in a therapy group of her fellow cancer survivors, responding to her tentative admission that she’s scared of a recurrence with a baselessly confident “It’s naaaaaht coming baaaack” — but in his scenes with Austin, we can see him straining to be the kind of friend he thinks Austin wants. It’s obvious that the Marvel-loving nerd who tried to shoo his co-workers out of the way as he carried an overfull cup of coffee to a meeting and then struggled to drink it without spilling isn’t naturally an amateur boxer, dad band drummer or explorer of his town’s secret places, but the allure of Austin’s friendship is too enticing.
When things fall apart, Craig’s efforts to heal the rift start out on a recognizably human, possibly even relatable way. He manufactures a pretext to “run into” Austin at work. He puts his brand-new drum kit in a wagon and pulls it over to Austin’s house. When these gambits fail, he tries making friends with guys at work the way Austin friend-seduced him and taking Tami on the same potentially dangerous adventure Craig enjoyed with Austin on their first night together. I won’t say how we get from there to Craig hitting up the 18-year-old cell phone store clerk for boutique hallucinogens, but trust me: the progression is illogically logical.
That said, while Craig is just the movie’s biggest freak, he’s not its only freak. Frequent Robinson collaborator Connor O’Malley makes a late appearance to show Craig isn’t alone in grinding a party to a halt with a speech that makes everyone uncomfortable. The guys Craig works with and tries to befriend — including one played by comic and musician Whitmer Thomas — have obviously been waiting for Craig’s status to drop low enough for them to unleash their bullying tendencies on him. Even Austin, Craig’s idol, has a shameful secret he’s concealing until, in a moment of Craig-ian ignominy, it’s revealed.
Friendship actually does take its titular topic seriously. The male loneliness epidemic is real. Craig — someone who, before we met him, had to reckon with the possibility of losing his wife — clearly gets something important and meaningful from his time with Austin. He just pursues it with a myopic intensity that ruins his whole life. It’s what we count on Tim Robinson to do.
