Chad, a nice-looking fellow with the soul of Satan, sits next to Christine, the deaf secretary he has bogusly courted for the sole pleasure of dumping her. As she registers the enormity of his betrayal, Chad stares at her and says, "So how does it feel?" This moment in Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men packs such a sick smack that at a showing at the Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion in West Los Angeles last week, a woman gasped and shook her head in disgust; another, supplying a retort for Christine, said, "I feel like cutting your cojones off."
In the Company of Men is cool, shiny, handsomely made and, in its compelling-repelling way, mordantly funny--imagine an atrocity tale told with Noel Coward insouciance. But the most interesting part of the film comes after it's over. That's when the real knives come out. At the Sundance Film Festival, where this pitch-black comedy was an award winner, LaBute was widely rebuked by the sensitivity patrol. After a Manhattan screening, a male publicist was punched. Well, he was a guy. Probably deserved it.
Aaron Eckhart, the 29-year-old actor who plays Chad, has yet to be slapped by any female moviegoers (it's early; be patient). But he says, "I've had women come really close. The right hand is back, and they go, 'I just want to slap you.' And I go, 'All right.' They don't, and then they laugh. But I'm sure if I demonstrated any Chadness while they were in mid-swing, they'd go all the way."
For LaBute, 34, a playwright making his debut as screen auteur, the flush of anger is a careermaking dream. "I'm more than happy that people are polarized," he says. "I'd much rather have somebody hate my movie than be indifferent about it." He would get his wish if he listened to TIME film critic Richard Schickel: "Other pictures that have broken out on the basis of sociological buzz, like Thelma & Louise, had appealing characters confronting interesting issues in suspenseful or comic fashion. But here all we are dealing with is sociopathic behavior that has no real-world resonance. The movie's sheer grimness militates against anyone other than a masochist volunteering to pay money to see it."
There must be a lot of masochists in New York City and L.A.: the film (which cost a preposterously meager $25,000, and which Sony Pictures Classics bought for less than $50,000) earned $196,157 its first week on just eight screens. And if tickets could be sold for discussion groups after the show, it would have made even more. "Women love the movie," says Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Classics. "It shows men behaving badly, and women feel like a fly on the wall watching the things men do." Stacy Edwards, the Juliette Binoche look-alike who beautifully embodies Christine, says, "I've had men come up to me and say it was really uncomfortable for them. It profoundly moved them; they had tears in their eyes." This is the first hate story that could become a big date movie.
Chad and Howard (Matt Malloy) are two thirtyish corporate types on a six-week assignment in a new city. Howard has been dumped by the fiance he adored. Chad, who tells Howard he too has been abandoned, proposes an elaborate scheme of gender revenge. They will choose a vulnerable woman, begin dating demurely, get her to fall in love. And then drop her. "Let's do it," Chad says. "Let's hurt somebody."