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LaBute says there is a moral: "Be careful about whom you pretend to be, because that is often the person you turn into." But the movie is careful not to give Chad his comeuppance, and the audience must fish for any lessons the story offers. Men are welcome to X-ray their hearts for a hint of Howard or an edge of Chad. Women can take a peek at--and, if they wish, confirm their suspicions of--that dangerous and perplexing house pest, the modern middle-class male. The camera lingers in elegantly immobile, anthropological medium shot--a distance that respects the danger of the creature it is photographing. Chad prowls and roars and claws for us in his cage, separated not by bars but by our final appreciation that this is, after all, fiction. It's all right, the mother says to her panicked child at the end of a bedtime fairy tale; it was just a story. And still the child cries deep into the night.
"The tendency today," says LaBute, "is for movies to rush over you with everything but thought. A wave of stimuli rather than the most important thing, which is something to take home in your head." In the Company of Men is the toxic antidote to such disposable entertainment. Love it or loathe it, the picture sticks to you like guilt sweat after adulterous sex. It leaves a little spoor trail. Food for thought? No, a banquet for debate and denial.
--Reported by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles and Georgia Harbison/New York