At first glance, Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things might not seem like much of a movie. It’s not the most visual film ever made. In fact, it’s only marginally more visual that LaBute’s first film In The Company of Men, which is played out almost entirely in static master shots. The Shape of Things only has four speaking parts, a handful of scenes and features little action beyond dialogue.
Really, The Shape of Things is little more than a filmed version of the play upon which it was based. Fortunately, the material is so compelling and the acting is so good that even though it may not be the most cinematic film released this year, it’s easily one of the best.
Shape tells the story of Adam (Paul Rudd, Wet Hot American Summer), a chubby college student who works as a guard at an art museum. While on duty he encounters a feisty art student named Evelyn (Rachel Weisz, About a Boy), who tries to deface one of the statues. Evelyn gives Adam her number, the two start going out and almost immediately, she starts to change things about him. She gets him to lose weight, change the way he dresses and even get a nose job. She even starts to disapprove of Philip (Frederick Weller, The Business of Strangers), Adam’s best friend, and Jenny (Gretchen Mol, Rounders), Philip’s fiancè, and Adam’s long-time crush.
The tone of Shape has more in common with LaBute’s first two films, In The Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, than his subsequent efforts, Nurse Betty and Possession. What at first seems like a cute romantic comedy quickly turns into a wonderfully mean spirited commentary on relationships, art and society’s expectations of beauty.
‘One of the little nougats we look at is the way we objectify beauty as a culture. It was interesting for me to talk about it from the male perspective because we hear so much about it from the female perspective ‘Oh, women are objectified’ and this and that,’ LaBute said during a recent Boston interview. In adapting his play, LaBute didn’t feel much pressure to alter his material for the screen.
‘This case was unique,’ LaBute said. ‘We were given a freedom to not go through that little dance to pretend that it came from nowhere and didn’t exist on the stage. The idea for making it into a film started in rehearsal just getting together [with the cast] and having a great experience. I was looking for a way to kind of extend that and there was the suggestion of making a movie out of it. Working Title and Focus were kind enough to say, ‘Do it as you’ve done it. Don’t feel obligated to add shots of Paul walking across campus. Don’t try and find was to bring more extras into it and hoodwink the audience into thinking it’s bigger than it is. Revel in the theatricality rather than try to hide it.’ So, for the most part it was a film representation of what we were doing on the stage.’
‘It was great from the personal standpoint of just having a document of a thing I’d done for the past year,’ said Rudd. ‘Selfishly, it will be nice to be able to own it on DVD. It was probably the only chance I will ever have to just work on a play for so many months and then shoot a film right afterwards. With film you rarely get any rehearsal time, and in a sense this was almost like having ten month rehearsal for a film.’
Working on the film also allowed Rudd the chance to go through a physical change that could only be implied on stage.
‘There’s obviously this huge physical transformation that my character goes through,’ he said. ‘We couldn’t do it on stage, there were too many scene changes and I didn’t have a fat suit. We tried to do whatever we could with clothes and what I couldn’t do, I tried to make up for with some physicality. When we did the movie I could obviously gain weight and lose weight. But after doing the play 200-odd times it becomes engrained so to try and strip that was a challenge.’
Shooting on a lower budget in just 19 days provided a welcome change of pace for LaBute who had just helmed two much higher profile films.
‘I really enjoy what we just did,’ he said, ‘and what I enjoy about it most is that anything that has less pressure, I’m all for. Film has a constant pressure when you’re making it. When you’re shooting you hear money pouring through the camera, and if it’s 25 thousand dollars or 25 million dollars you always feel like you’re a day short and you’re behind and you need a little more money. The last two films I did, I really enjoyed. They were either projects that surprised me like Nurse Betty or Possession, which I had really loved as a book and to get the change to do it was great. That said, those were bigger productions and there were more eyes and more hands on my shoulder all the time. So this was a very welcome return to a smaller production.’
Though The Shape of Things bears some strong similarities, it is more than just In The Company of Men with the genders reversed. While this film does tell the story of a man being manipulated by a woman, LaBute has much more going on than just rehashing his earlier film. The Shape of Things shows LaBute at his cruelest and also his funniest. With fantastic performances by all four leads and a great little zinger at the end, Shape is a great dark comedy about art, manipulation and beauty. Sure, it may be a filmed play but with a play this good, it’s hard to complain.
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