The Shape Of Things (2003)

The movie--based on LaBute's play of the same name and starring the same four actors from the play--is a uniquely contemporary story of love, sex, and art set in a college town, which follows the steadily intensifying relationship between Evelyn (the wonderful Rachel Weisz) and Adam (the charming Paul Rudd). As Evelyn strengthens her hold on Adam, his emotional and physical evolution discomforts his friends Jenny (Gretchen Mol back in top form) and Philip (well-acted by Frederick Weller), with unexpected consequences for all. The quartet of college-age characters deal with the conflicting human desires for autonomy and connection, truth and love, and the notion that seduction is an art, making for a clever and mean-spirited satire on life and friendship.

The material is a sort of throwback to LaBute's first two movies, "In the Company of Men" and "Your Friends & Neighbors," after the bigger-budgeted, broader-canvassed "Nurse Betty" (in which he directed someone else's screenplay) and "Possession" (in which he adapted A.S. Byatt's novel). Like the first pair of films, LaBute once again homes in on an intimate group of men and women and the razor-edged sexual politics among them.

Some of the behavior in "The Shape of Things" is every bit as nasty as in the other films, once again reaching the point of getting a tad bit 'uncomfortable.'

Adam and Evelyn - the symbolic names are no accident - meet while he's working as a school museum guard and she literally crosses the line to spray-paint a sculpture that has had its genitalia covered. "You're cute. I don't like your hair," she tells him, and a romance is begun. Soon she's suggesting wardrobe and styling fixes and taking him to graphic performance-art happenings. She's of the art-equals-provocation-equals-truth school and butts heads with Philip, who's more of a regular-guy philistine.

LaBute doesn't pretend that his source material is anything other than a play. He keeps the action divided into 10 discrete scenes, with snippets of Elvis Costello's poisoned-romance songs (the musical equivalent of velvet-sheathed knives) serving as the links between them.

You must accept a certain theatricality to the material, as much of the action occurs off screen, and what's there hasn't been "opened up" so that conversations take place over multiple locations. The performances are scaled down from what they must have been in the theater, but LaBute's dialogue has its own particular rhythms that aren't entirely "realistic." And that's fine. The writing is smart, so you stick with the story on its own terms.

The movie ultimately lies on Weisz's shoulders, though, as she has to convince you that Adam would give in to Evelyn's manipulations, her obvious beauty notwithstanding. And she does, her performance balancing seduction and the sense that she's one eye twinkle away from being a whack job. Evelyn is the character who would be most at home in the take-no-prisoners world of LaBute's earlier works, yet you suspect the director's sympathies might lie closest with her, or at least her inclination to shake things up.

Any meaningful dissection of "The Shape of Things" must revolve around the ending, yet revealing it would be a crime against art. Suffice it to say that LaBute is interested in the way that surfaces affect our perceptions of content, and how those perceptions can, in turn, become our reality. It's harsh and mean but LaBute never loses sight of what shape he wishes this crafty story to take. In the end, his aim is true.

I dare anyone to not come out of this film a different person that the one who started to watch it. It will not only blow you away but floor you as well with it's ending.

Thank you Neil Labute and Rachel Weisz for such breathtaking and powerful movie.