Review by: Jared Sapolin

THE SHAPE OF THINGS (2003, Neil LaBute)

Reviewed: May 10th, 2003

(Warning: The following opinion might be of exceedingly little use to you if you haven't -- like me -- seen The Shape of Things performed live with the same cast as the film. My negative criticisms are tainted, I cannot be trusted, etc. Long story short: I recommend this flick, complaints and all.)

"Written for the screen and directed by Neil LaBute" reads an opening title card, but no, this is a blatant lie; far as I can tell LaBute hasn't changed one word of The Shape of Things: The Play!'s text and all he did to create The Shape of Things: The Movie! is place a 35mm camera on stage during one of The Shape of Things: The Play!'s many performances, hire a good cinematographer to expertly light the stage conducive to said 35mm camera (particularly in one of the final scenes when the lush reds and blues burst off the screen), and replace The Smashing Pumpkins soundtrack with an Elvis Costello one. Which is theoretically cool by me -- in all honesty, I've long been a proponent of taping plays right off the stage so the millions of people who couldn't make it to NYC or London's West End to, say, see Kidman deliver a knock-out performance (sans clothes) in Sam Mendes's production of The Blue Room or the people who weren't alive to see Jason Robards tear down the roof in A Long Day's Journey Into Night however many decades ago, are at least able to experience a simulacrum of the original entity. I still stand by this idea because better something preserved than nothing, but now that I've gotten the chance to be on both sides of the fence, now that I've gotten a chance to experience the implications of my idea in action -- having seen the actual play before the "tape" -- you can imagine why LaBute's The Shape of Things: The Movie! is inherently disappointing to me.

To complicate matters, my sarcasm aside, LaBute has not literally put a camera on stage and instead made a feeble attempt to transmogrify the play into a movie, an attempt which ends up backfiring due to its very half-assed nature: The performances -- while great on stage (particularly the awesome work by Rudd and especially Weisz, a tight, tense little firecracker waiting to explode) -- have not been fully tempered for film and have the tendency to come off somewhat stilted (Frederick Weller fares the worst of the foursome; astonishingly, the normally worthless Gretchen Mol -- who has, by far, the easiest of the four roles -- fares the best in this department). Plus LaBute -- despite ostensibly making a film (that is, he did go to real locations to shoot and is releasing this thing in movie theaters) -- adamantly refuses to open the play up and by that I don't mean editing the text so the scenes are chopped up and now take place on the tops of lighthouses or some such nonsense, but simply that he refuses to veer away from a drab master-close-up-master-close-up-shot-reaction-shot pattern that provides these longass scenes with all the forward momentum of a broken down trolley. What's most exasperating is that on rare occasions LaBute tantalizingly allows a brief tease of what could have been -- an effectively placed long shot here (I'm thinking of the moment during the penultimate scene when we suddenly see just how big the auditorium Weisz is presenting in really is), a slightly tweaked, skewed angle there (I'm thinking of Weisz's and Rudd's final scene), a dolly move to begin each scene here, a medium, isolated shot of an object in a room there; why is there so little of this stuff, though? Don't try and have it both ways: either be truly rigorous with the presentation, enforcing a formal control that never veers into remotely enticing visuals (and mimics a stage verbatim while enhancing the performance art thematic undercurrents), or turn the damn thing into a freakin' movie for real (and again, this does not mean one word of the text has to be altered).

Caveats aside, LaBute's writing is still provocative and blistering and (often) truthful enough to make The Shape of Things worth seeing, exploring here the impulse in lovers to mold each other into the idealized people they want each other to be, rather than always loving each other simply for what they are (and presumably, what was attractive initially). The Shape of Things also tackles nothing less than the very nature and definition of art itself, a discussion which I personally feel has been exhausted beyond all reasonable interest and I have little patience for indulging in these days (don't mind me, though). I also have to note that LaBute's unrelenting cynicism -- his unwavering vision of gender interactions as deadly warfare -- can grow tiresome after awhile and that on second viewing, The Shape of Things' script feels much more schematic than first. Luckily LaBute had taken a two film break from his grim worldview, and I pray the day is not far off when he finally makes a motion picture which combines the (occasionally) sweet, touching and satisfying romantic comedy and visual splendor of Nurse Betty's Possession with the anger and bluntness of In the Company of Friends and Neighbors Who Tell You About the Shape of Things.

The Toronto Star

May. 16, 2003. 01:00 AM The Shape Of Things

GEOFF PEVERE
MOVIE CRITIC

*** [3 out of 5]

Neil LaBute's adaptation of his stage play The Shape Of Things begins with two characters named Adam and Evelyn engaged in the discussion of a fig leaf: He (Paul Rudd) is a socially maladroit, dowdily-dressed college student who works part-time as a museum security guard, and she (Rachel Weisz) is a gorgeous, grad school-boho art student prepared to spraypaint the offending fig leaf, imposed on a statue in the name of censorious good taste, as an act of aesthetic provocation.

Inexplicably, they hit it off. Inevitably, disaster ensues.

A jaundiced contemporary meet-cute Pygmalion tale that commences toward the emotionally scorched heterosexual terrain of early Edward Albee, The Shape Of Things plays out on a universe of peculiar but arresting contradictions.

The story of two couples, Adam and Evelyn, and friends Philip (Frederick Weller) and Jenny (Gretchen Mol), whose inner toxins are brought to the surface by Adam's physical transformation under Evelyn's spell: He morphs from dorky to more adorable with each boldly-demarcated scene. The movie addresses intense interpersonal conflict with an arch theatricality that occasionally makes you feel like you're watching a play performed entirely by animatronic robots.

From the first scene in the strangely depopulated museum, which will be revealed to exist in a similarly depopulated and unnamed college town, the characters in LaBute's film speak to each other with a kind of metonymic rhythmic punctuation that sounds like a conversation between computer programs observed through binoculars.

While this is possibly attributable to the fact that LaBute made the movie with the same cast that had just come off a several-month run of the play in London and New York, there's more to it than that.

The overriding artificiality also suggests an unmistakable deliberation on the writer-director's part to render this movie, about the cruel and systematic emotional manipulation, as weirdly formal as possible.

As he grows more deeply involved with Eve, Adam's systematic transformation (re-programming?) suggests the sad malleability of someone being willingly reworked like a piece of sculpture.

To make the point even more barbed, as Adam grows more TV-cute, LaBute emphasizes how much happier he is and popular. This is a world where appearances - the shapes of things - count. This would seem to be the play's point: That vanity and weakness are defining characteristics of the human condition, except that LaBute's characters exhibit such unconvincing humanity.

Although set in a present that refers to designer clothes, state-of-the-art coffee, current forms of academic aesthetic theory and oral sex, the dramatic exchanges in the movie, which is comprised of long, uncut conversational sequences, occasionally approaches the powdered and postured stiffness of Barry Lyndon.

The facial jewellery, Elvis Costello music and cell phones notwithstanding, you keep expecting these people to challenge each other to duels with rapiers at dawn.

If the preserved-in-aspic quality of The Shape Of Things is what makes it fascinating to watch, it also tends to undercut whatever sense of moral outrage the material would otherwise seem to wish to convey.

As the movie inches toward its unrevelatory climactic revelation, where the extent of Evelyn's designs over the hapless Adam are hyper-theatrically revealed, it's increasingly difficult to buy LaBute's take on the spiritual hollowness of our cosmetically-obsessed age. While the dramatic content of the movie seems to suggest a determination to drive us from the theatre in a state of shocked outrage over Adam's exploitation, the mannered method which has delivered us there leaves you feeling significantly less unsettled than disoriented.

If we're meant to be appalled by the things that people do to one another, where are the people?

by Audrey Rock-Richardson, Tooele Transcript-Bulletin (Utah)

The Shape of Things shows, yet again, what a singularly talented artist LaBute is--and how his penchant for excessive ugliness can nearly ruin a good thing.

It's not really The Shape of Things that confounds me. It's the man behind the camera that at once amazes and angers, piques and provokes, lures and disgusts with his envelope-pushing films.

The man is an anomoly. He is both a devout practicing Mormon, educated at what is arguably the most conservative university in the nation (Brigham Young University), and is currently making a living as a shockingly brutal filmmaker whose work is likely to make even Tarantino blush. Those who know anything about Mormonism, or have seen LaBute's films, can truly understand what a profound conflict of interest this represents.

But on some level, you have to respect a man who is unafraid to craft his art the way he wants, while living the way he chooses. That doesn't mean I'm a huge fan of his art; but on some level, I'm a fan of LaBute himself.

He has a knack for inspiring anger in his audiences. He's done it to me, as a matter of fact. I've left the theater feeling LaBute is a bitter, woman-hating sellout who has nothing better to do that make people feel sick to their stomachs.

In any case, apathy is the last thing you'll be feeling after viewing a LaBrute--er, LaBute film. He uses any and every visual and verbal assault to get his audience's attention. And some of these scenes are so brutal, it feels wrong even to write or recount them.

I suspect it's an emotional tactic meant to intensify whatever it is he wants them to feel. But there's a line crossed in nearly every one of his films and plays--and that line, which ventures into unspeakable territory, gives the films an ugliness and a dirtiness that doesn't wash off after you've left the theater.

The Shape of Things shows, yet again, what a singularly talented artist LaBute is--and how his excessive ugliness can nearly ruin a good thing.

The story, adapted from the stage play, begins with gorgeous art graduate student Evelyn (Rachel Weisz), flirting with pudgy nerd Adam (Paul Rudd). Such an unlikely matchup isn't lost on poor Adam, but he finds himself falling hopelessly in love.

In spite of warnings from his best friends (Gretchen Mol and Frederick Weller), who are about to be married, Adam continues to see Evelyn, who is slowly getting her claws deeper and deeper into his very being. His clothes change, his hair changes, and he loses weight.

Could it be that, in the flush of true love, Adam is coming out of his shell and finally realizing his potential?

If LaBute wanted to fit in with the rest of Hollywood, that's exactly what would have happened. But it's nothing as sweet and romantic as that. And no matter what you think you've figured out during the run of the film, you'll never be remotely prepared for the jarring impact of the final scenes. It's completely shocking in the most acute sense.

So, what we have here is a film that has to make you wonder what kind of awful issues LaBute is working out in his own life, and why it is that he has such a bleak view of romance. It's a remarkably well-written, sharply witty, and darkly foreboding piece of work. It is, truly, a work of art. But you can't help but get the feeling that LaBute smeared his own canvas with cow dung, in an effort to somehow make it more shocking.

It doesn't work. It feels like "highbrow" smut, but it's still hardly less childish than the gross-out smut we saw last year in Austin Powers in Goldmember.

A dear friend once shared that he hated the work of Quentin Tarantino. Why? Not because it makes you laugh at dark, awful things you feel you shouldn't be laughing at, or because it explores unpopular themes. But because his work is, in a word, "vile."

And I truly respect that opinion. When a movie gets vile, it loses it's impact. It becomes a cheap, manipulative way to evoke emotion; but instead, you mostly just feel shame and disgust, and those two emotions drown out other messages the movie might be attempting to send. Instead of viewing Rodin's beautiful nudes in a museum, you are hiding in a dingy club watching low-rent strippers.

And it's really a shame--especially given that LaBute's films drip with literary genius and misdirected talent. What else can you say about a film that you truly recognize is well crafted, but that sabotages itself with spectacular obscenity?

LaBute just needs to learn how to channel all that incredible creative energy into something that doesn't abuse the gross-out factor. And when he does that, I truly believe he will be among the greatest writer/directors of his time.

Grade: C-.

Rediff.com

The shape of nothing

Review by: Jeet Thayil

May 20, 2003

The Shape of Things, Neil LaBute's film version of his 2001 play, builds up to a supposedly shocking finale. Except that it is more tedious than shocking. The message? Women can be as unlikable as men. If you don't need to go to a movie to figure that one out, give Shape a miss.

LaBute's most interesting work, The Company of Men, was relentlessly misanthropic. With his latest, he seems to have expanded his range. He is now misogynistic as well. Which can be fun, if you're in the mood for woman bashing.

Unfortunately, this film is anything but fun. It is little more than a clever undergrad thesis gone awfully wrong.

"There is only art," says Evelyn, Rachel Weisz's character, an angry artist with a grudge against cute men. That line should tip you off: there is something very clever coming up. Unfortunately, it did not tip me off, or not enough.

Evelyn proceeds to transform Adam (Paul Rudd), a wimpy, fat boy, into a certified hunk. In the process, she turns his life upside down.

But if you think this is one of those romantic comedies in which love transforms a wimp into a hunk and all turns out well, you are completely mistaken.

The film chronicles an art project gone awry. Evelyn looks at all of life as a sort of terminal work of art, and people as so many lumps of clay waiting to be remade.

It is very obvious that this movie began its life as a play. There are only four characters, the same four actors who appeared in the stage version. And most of the dialogue-heavy sequences are shot indoors.

Ever so often, LaBute takes his camera into the streets and parks of California, but those occasions do little to lighten the air of claustrophobia the rest of the film concocts.

Rudd's character is rarely engaging -- his upper lip quivers too much and even though he gets a nose job, a haircut and loses 20 pounds it doesn't really change his essential nature.

Weisz, on the other hand, is so engaging, you want to yell at her. This is a woman who is convinced nothing is real, whose art for art's sake philosophy and eccentric personality is supposed to excuse her heartlessness and manipulation.

Gretchen Moll, as Jenny, a friend Adam must jettison to keep his new girlfriend happy, is fetching though never compelling.

LaBute intended The Shape of Things to be a though-provoking satire on men and women. It was supposed to be the kind of movie that, at its end, would make you re-think everything you have seen.

The only thing I had second thoughts about was the impulse that made me waste a perfectly fine Saturday evening.

NOTE: D.K. Holm, who also regularly offers up DVD Diatribe for the 'Shoot is starting a new weekly as well, where he takes an in-depth look at a new movie release.

May 9, 2003

By D.K. Holm

The Shape of Thingys

[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]

What has Neil LaBute got against nerds? He seems to hate them more than the star athletes and BMOCs who picked on them in school. His perpetual abuse of the Nerd Figure in movies seems like a continuation of the war against Louis Skolnick by other means.

Or a weird act of masochism. LaBute makes the kind of self-lacerating movies that literary high school nerds always imagine they might write later, works they tearfully compose to right emotional injustices and make the world feel sorry for them -- that is, when they are not imagining themselves as bulgingly-uniformed studs engaged in intergalactic heroics on behalf of Vampirella-suited damsels. It is hard to tell if LaBute is a Spokane-raised nerd turned artist or a former frat boy turned nerd-avenger. Does he identify with the nerd? Or does he see into the nerd's soul and realize that they really, truly are inferior people: lying, nervous, inappropriate wastelands of DNA that should never have been born? In any case, in LaBute's "LaBute" movies -- THE COMPANY OF MEN and YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS, as opposed to NURSE BETTY and POSSESSION -- he leaves the nerd characters in much worse shape at the end of the films than the cynical, using, successful, angry, and bitter alpha males who seem to be the nerds' constant companions and betrayers.

The same holds true for LaBute's latest film, yet another "LaBute" movie after two quasi-feel good endeavors. THE SHAPE OF THINGS consists of 10 scenes that take place over 18 weeks at a college unsubtly called Mercy ("Clarkson College" in the play), set somewhere near the sea). The tale begins when Adam (Paul Rudd) meets Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) in the college museum. He is a work-study guard just getting off shift; she is an art student about to deface a huge statue of a Zeus-like figure (sculpted by "Fornecelli," whom I couldn't find in either the WORLD BOOK or the BRITANNICA, but whose name suspiciously sounds like "fornicate"). She wants to deface the sculpture as an act of aesthetic protest.

Somehow, amid their badinage, the nerd manages to ask her out on a date. Then he leaves her alone and, as we learn later, she proceeds to deface the statue, spray-painting a penis on the throw-rug sized leaf covering its genitals, a coverlet that was added on to the statue by a college art committee when prudish city fathers complained. The leaf offends her because she "doesn't like art that isn't true."

Over the next several weeks the overweight sartorially-challenged boy and the bohemian anger stick date, and practically move in together. She meets his best friends Jenny (Gretchen Mol) and Jenny's fiance Phillip (Frederick Weller); we see the new couple have their first fight; and we also see her subtly trying to change Adam into a less nerdy guy, while trying to enslave him further into devotion to her -- not that he needs much encouragement. The self-effacing nerd is only too happy to subsume his identity into hers. Meanwhile, she likes to videotape their lovemaking sessions.

Of course, like most movies released these days, the narrative masks a big trick or a surprise ending -- and just those few little words I just typed probably spoil the surprise. But LaBute doesn't exactly fail to foreshadow Evelyn's dark cunning. Less an Eve to his Adam than a human being taking on God's power to transform, she tidies him up, gets his hair restyled, makes him throw out his favorite jacket, and even talks him into getting a nose job, all for her own secret purposes.

His friends are appalled at him, Phillip because Evelyn is an aggressive feminist art chick who offends his conservative views on society, and because she got Adam to throw out the ugly jacket Phillip had been complaining about for years, and Jenny because she appears to be trapped in a relationship with an imperfect guy and seems fondly to wish that Adam were her boyfriend. Jenny, it turns out, is also the true love of Adam's life, but also a girl who actually had the hots for nerd Adam when he was too shy to ask her out. Phillip pounced first. Now she and the brutish stud are engaged (they plan to get married underwater), and Adam is rather overbearing with his public displays of affection with Evelyn (a practice mentioned as banned on the campus). Adam embraces PDA's with all the enthusiasm of a nerd who never had a girlfriend and can only imitate nervously and with gross exaggeration what he has seen his competent and relaxed friends do.

Just as the film begins with Adam and Evelyn standing around a piece of "old" art, it ends with the same characters standing around a installation of "new" art. However, that installation piece is supposed to come as a big surprise. It's not hard to guess at it, but it is an act of cruel (and in the movie version, illegal) invasion. In fact, it reminds me of Adam Sandler's recent hit ANGER MANAGEMENT, which also turns on a girlfriend's act of subterfuge, though for supposedly benign purposes.

Did Evelyn seek out Adam, like the stalker in SWIMFAN or like the prescient Matty Walker in BODY HEAT? In the play, yes, she sought him out; in the movie, their encounter appears to be by chance. In any case, the nerd falls for the campus radical, and under her regimen starts to do things like exercise that he would never have done on his own. This culminates during the second sequence in a First Kiss that is truly horrible. He's in Jerry Lewis mode and she's the vamp. It looks like Berry Page trying to kiss a duck.

And boy is Paul Rudd's Adam a nerd! With his inevitable glasses (were there nerds before the invention of eyewear?), his shapeless sweaters, and a worn out green corduroy jacket that you can almost smell, he is the template for nerdiness. He also moves like a nerd. Awkward. Overreacting. When he tries to make a joke or do shtick, he comes across more like Tom Hulce's retarded brother in DOMINICK AND EUGENE.

A Mormon moralist, LaBute seems to hate nerds more than the bullies who pick on them and use them. What he seems to be particularly unable to abide is the fact that they lie. The nerd's greatest sin, it appears, is lying: he may be lying to avoid embarrassment, or hurting other peoples' feelings, but it is still lying. If nerds would only always tell the truth, he moralizes, their lives would be better. Lonelier, maybe, but morally tiptop.

But within the film itself it is clear that Adam's friends won't let him, as it were, be a man. His attempts to step out of himself, to be like them, are met with a combination of shock and resentment. They seem to want him to remain a nerd, a pet, a "thing."

THE SHAPE OF THINGS began as a play, which had its premiere at the Almeida Theatre in London in May 2001 with the same cast. LaBute has changed the script slightly; Adam makes fewer p-whipped statements in scene four; their first fight seems to be added on; Evelyn's final "performance art" speech is different, shorter and, if you can believe it, less cruel; and the last scene is slightly different.

Being a play, language is obviously important. The dialogue is keyed to both reveal and conceal what people are thinking, but also to reveal to the audience things that the characters themselves don't perceive (but if we can hear it...). The title, by the way, refers to the statue's penis. At first, anyway. By the end it refers to human beings as things to other people "shaped," as Evelyn says, by the palette of manipulation.

LaBute makes it clear that the two are mismatched by their Tarantinoesque cultural references. He doesn't get her reference to KUNG FU, she doesn't get his citations of OTHELLO and Dickens. But the KUNG FU reference (she calls him "Grasshopper") and his citation of Shaw (he calls her 'enry 'iggins) are both highly apt. But at the same time, in dread foreshadowing, she is also adept at the withering remark. She decries his "fucking insecurity" in a way guaranteed to soft-boil a hard-on, to make an insecure guy feel even more insecure and grovelingly apologetic.

(Audience members who identify with Adam are likely to leave the audience furious: check out this great little interview with the director.)

LaBute, who seems to be a disciple of Mamet, likes repetition, overlapping chat, the cliches we use for shorthand, and the language is specific in its vagueness. The word "thingy" because an all purpose noun with about 47 different meanings. This approach makes his characters sound more "realistic," I suppose, but as in Mamet the dialogue can also sound mannered.

But unlike Mamet's testosterone fueled guy films, LaBute's movies are at least cinematic, with a carefully crafted surface affect, what these days they call a "classical style," with careful framing, subtle camera movements, and precise set design. In fact, the cleanliness gets out of hand a little, to the point where LaBute's intentions seem to show. One of the last shots shows Adam standing in front of a wall. He is wearing a beautiful blue shirt (she made him acquire it), and the wall behind him is bisected by a red painted panel on one side, and a white panel on the other. Is LaBute making some statement about Adam, the first man, representing the derailing of the American dream? That we have gone from Natty Bumpo and the Founding Fathers to this bumbling, self-conflicted, self-destructive penis tailpipe?

LaBute's surface isn't always perfect. It seems like there are too many people at Evelyn's art show at the film's end (was she that popular? Are the kids on campus that bored?), and LaBute and/or his DP seem to have a problem photographing women: Moll actually looks cross-eyed a couple of times (unless that's intentional for some reason).

But back to Mamet. It's actually more interesting to compare LaBute to Woody Allen. Both share an interest in the Superfluous Man, in the downtrodden, self-conscious outcast. And in both men's work, "evil" has a tendency to win (at least in Allen's serious comedies, such as CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS). But in Allen's films, the characters are embedded in a real society. They dwell on populated city streets, or crowded parties or gatherings, where they encounter a wealth of people. They have intricate sets of friends and families. These settings serve to humanize the nerd characters in Allen's films. LaBute's films tend to condemn them to a deeper, vaster aloneness than even the Kierkegaard quoting Allen could imagine.

The film actually has a curious aftermath. When the pieces of the film's tenuous social structures have fallen to the floor after this moral-tron bomb has gone off, what are the results? One guy has been embarrassed, but got a little more action that has "matured" him. A couple that shouldn't be together has broken up. In the end in a weird way, Evelyn ("evil?") has done some -- unintentional -- good. I kinda hope that's not LaBute's point.

May 28, 2003, 9:40 a.m.

The Shape of Truth

Critics have issues with The Shape of Things.

By Edward Hudgins

Moral principles are at the heart of life and art. Choosing the right ones leads to happiness and beauty. Choosing the wrong ones leads to misery and ugliness -- spiritual ugliness most of all. In his thoughtful film The Shape of Things, writer/director Neil LaBute demonstrates these truths masterfully through the choices and fates of his characters.

Adam is a nerdy, awkward English major working part time in a museum as a security guard. He encounters Evelyn, an art student working on her thesis project, about to vandalize a classical nude statue because it sports a fig leaf placed by community prudes. She doesn't like art that isn't "true." As he tries to persuade her to step away from the statue, she tells him he's cute. Rather than giving the would-be vandal the boot, he finds her intriguing and asks for her phone number, which she spray paints on the inside of his favorite corduroy jacket. He then leaves her to do has she pleases.

In the following months, at her suggestion, Adam looses 20 pounds, gets a better haircut, and dumps the corduroy for more hip attire. He's really looking good and has more self-confidence -- changes noticed by Phillip, his boorish friend, and Phillip's fiancee Jenny, who years before had an unrequited crush on clueless Adam. But the couple also senses that Evelyn is more than a loving girl trying to improve her man.

Adam senses this too when he expresses surprise that Evelyn could like a guy like him. Rather than listing shared interests, values, or dreams, she simply points out that she seems to like him and that that should be enough for him.

But Evelyn at times sports a Mao Zedong button or Che Guevara T-shirt, not apparel conservative Adam would appreciate. Adam initially is uncomfortable and nervous with public displays of affection. Certain things should be kept private, he believes. Who cares? she replies; so Adam drops his principles and dives right in.

Evelyn takes Adam to see a modern "performance artist" who uses a bloody tampon to draw pictures of her father. The display disgusts Adam. Evelyn, the vandal in the name of "truth," thinks it's an amazing expression of self. He maintains that there's a fundamental difference between therapy and theater.

But rather than recognizing that they are not soul mates, Adam continues the relationship, allowing himself to be manipulated by Evelyn, who plays to his insecurities. He allows her to videotape their private bed-play, and allows her to convince him to get an unneeded nose job. When Phillip presses him about the bandage on his nose, he keeps insisting that he fell. Adam more and more must deceive others and, most tragically, himself.

When Jenny meets Adam privately to discuss her misgivings about her upcoming marriage, Adam is faced with his honest feelings for this caring and unpretentious woman. Jenny, attracted to the real Adam, on the spur of the moment begins kissing him. The two recognize that their authentic selves do not belong with their respective partners. But both decide to lie to and stay with their partners. Evelyn finds out by reading Adam's diary and has a kissing session with Phillip to make things "even"

I will not reveal the movie's powerful ending, which involves Evelyn's art thesis project. Suffice it to say that filmmaker LaBute throws in a twist that shows that in art and real life, principles have consequences.

Adam is an everyman, generally a good guy who could use some improvements. But his superficial changes are at the expense of his real happiness as bit by bit he abandons his authenticity and integrity for a false sense of self-esteem. Although Evelyn manipulates his flesh and his will, he ultimately is responsible for his choices. Evelyn maintains that love is subjective; if Adam feels love, even if she only pretends to reciprocate, that is reality. Too late he realizes that fooling himself into love doesn't work. Love is a deep and private thing. As Evelyn destroys the private world, she destroys the chance for real love.

Evelyn and her art represent the logical consequences -- in art and in the artist's soul -- of the rejection of all objective moral standards, to say nothing of standards of beauty. On the wall of Evelyn's exhibit is the phrase, "Moralists have no place in an art gallery." For Evelyn and purveyors of such "art," this does not merely mean a rejection of silly censorship, like fig leafs. Evelyn's thesis adviser tells her, "Strive to make art but change the world." But to what, and by what standard? Bloody dictators change the world. Evelyn the sociopath, ruining statues and souls -- including her own -- for a faux principle, has no moral qualms or remorse. The nihilistic art establishment would ruin the culture but for the fact that few, aside from themselves and government bureaucrats passing out grants, take them seriously.

LaBute's film has been trashed by elite critics. No wonder. Many in the American arts community will be extremely uncomfortable watching this film because it holds up a mirror to them. Too many of them will not like what they see.

Adam Mast Movie Reviews

By: Adam Mast

Neil LaBute can be one twisted son of a bitch. He's also one of the most compelling writer/directors working in film today. While his dialogue writing style reminds me of David Mamet, most of his plot lines feel very personalized. He was either dumped on in his youth or was close to someone who experienced much heartache. Of course as of late, LaBute has changed direction with broader fare like Nurse Betty and the exquisite Possession.

The Shape of Things (based on LaBute's play) is a return to the brutal, dysfunctional realm of In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors.

The story focuses on a shy college student (hilariously played by Paul Rudd) who strikes up an unexpected relationship with a free spirited art lover (played by Rachel Weisz). Rudd spends a big portion of the film questioning Weisz's love for him rather than just living for the moment, but before long, his new love has him comfortable in his shoes. Things become somewhat complicated when Rudd's best friend (played by beauty Gretchen Mol) begins to doubt her own relationship with her cocky fiancee (played by Fred Weller). This makes for interesting drama and some unexpected surprises.

LaBute is an absolute genius. I had no idea where this movie was headed even though I really should have. His set up is perfect and his characters are very real and extremely interesting.

And just when I thought I had this thing figured out, LaBute drops the bomb and crushes me with brutal honesty and a shrewd twist.

The Shape of Things is about a lot of things; Love, sex, friendship, being yourself, perception etc. But mostly it's about manipulation. And that's something that most of us can relate to because we've all been manipulated at one time or another.

With it's fantastic ensemble acting, LaBute's sure handed, simplistic direction, and a truly twisted screenplay, The Shape of Things emerges as a thought provoking masterpiece that continues to play over and over in my head.

Grade: B+