The evil that men do - Neil LaBute's new film 'In the Company of Men' - Column

Interview, August, 1997 by Graham Fuller

The postcard flyers touting Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men at this January's Sundance Film Festival bore a multiple image of the neutered, faceless stick man who usually indicates that we're standing outside a men's washroom. The movie takes us right into a men's washroom, both literally and in the metaphoric sense that it occupies the toilet of one especially callous male mind. Neither is a pleasant place to be. But the movie is transfixing - as, paradoxically, repellent things often are.

Set in the fluorescent-lit desert of corporate America, In the Company of Men is a movie at the end of all hope for honorable relationships between men and women - and, as it transpires, between men and men. The story follows two white-shirted junior executives, Howard (Matt Malloy) and Chad (Aaron Eckhart), traveling on assignment to a midwestern branch of their company. Howard is a small, balding, wormy whiner. Somehow he's senior to Chad, a tall, breezily confident, handsome Aryan blond, whose penchant for sexist jokes conceals a deep-seated rage. Embittered about their relations with women, these major assholes conspire to choose a woman - any woman - in order to destroy her by seducing and abandoning her. The idea is Chad's, but Howard meekly goes along with it.

In their new office, they fall upon Christine (Stacy Edwards), a pretty typist whose vulnerability is emphasized by her deafness (a serious lapse of judgment by LaBute, since it tips the balance of power between Christine and the men). Chad romances Christine and easily gets her into bed, and she falls in love with him. At one point, Chad reports his progress to Howard while the latter is sitting on a john; we do not see, but we sense how humiliatingly exposed he is to his predatory partner.

Howard also dates Christine, and she learns to trust him as a friend - but he falls in love with her. Chad moves in for the kill. He discards Christine and usurps Howard's position in the firm, the latter having bungled his job due to emotional distress. The last shot of Chad shows him as the gloating recipient of oral sex from another woman. In a movie of ironic twists, there is no final ironic twist: The white corporate male aggressor has successfully carried out his search-and-destroy mission. "Why?" asks the broken Howard. Simply, Chad admits, because he could.

People had been talking heatedly but inconclusively about In the Company of Men all week at Sundance before I got to see it. The predominantly female audience I finally saw it with left the theater in stunned silence, but not one question put to LaBute in the postscreening Q&A had addressed the subject of misogyny or sexual harassment, and he hadn't invited any. When I saw the film again, at the New Directors/New Films festival in New York City, the audience I saw it with wasn't so much stunned as in a fog, and had little to offer LaBute by way of complaint or congratulation.

That fog seems pervasive right now, and In the Company of Men jibes with the current climate of moral uncertainty - in the workplace, the military, and, presumably, the Oval Office. At first glance, it seems to be a dispassionate study of man's inhumanity to woman, although some people I spoke to at Sundance condemned it - erroneously, I think - as a mean-spirited endorsement of that creed, even a revenge trip. Proceed with caution: When Howard tells Christine that Chad is toying with her and then Chad admits it to her himself, we share her outrage - he told her he loved her, how could he treat her this way? - but the scene is not quite as devastating as we anticipated. Sure, Chad is a spiteful jerk; Christine will have learned not to trust men like him, but that's soap opera stuff. The movie doesn't deliver its sting until the burden of victimhood is shifted to Howard: It emerges that Chad's seduction of Christine was merely a ruse to emasculate his colleague, leaving him as castrated as one of those toilet-door stick men. That castration is the name of the game has already been revealed in a chilling, horribly comic scene in which Chad orders a black intern to drop his pants and show him what he's got inside them.

In the Company of Men may unfold in the moral maelstrom of mid-'90s American sexual politics - supplying the film with its polemical context - but it invokes ancient shibboleths like "Dog eat dog" and "The law of the jungle," where regardless of sex, color, or conscience, the weak go to the wall. Deliberately impersonal and cold in tone - as cold as corporatism - it's a movie with a primal tug that will leave some women feeling sick and angry and some men covering their balls.