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Published on 5/13/08
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Blood is thicker and all that, but what keeps friends together? Parity of interest, income, age? Closeness of neighborhoods? Habit? Itamar Moses’s extremely clever and enjoyable study of friendship, The Four of Us, doesn’t provide answers, but it does offer a funny and touching display of male-buddy dynamics in broken sequence.
Moses’s first first scene, set in an Indian restaurant, establishes the stakes: Benjamin (Banner) reluctantly reveals to struggling playwright David (Esper) that he sold his first novel, plus movie rights, for $2 million. This prompts a outsize spit-take from David, then subtle waves of envy and classic underminer tactics. David hopes that Benjamin’s windfall doesn’t end up being “totally spiritually corrupting,” but David is the one who will face mental collapse. Through a series of disjointed and juxtaposed scenes, Moses charts the pals’ career vicissitudes over several years: In college, and after Benjamin is an anointed literary superstar. Along the way, he pitches self-referential curves: Are we watching a play or a play within a play?
As in his impressive 2005 debut, the metahistorical farce Bach at Leipzig, Moses proves himself a dizzyingly apt pupil of structure and genre. If there’s a drawback to this writer’s ease with form, though, it’s an unwillingness to dig too deep. There are tantalizing glimpses of pain and rage in these frenemies (sharply portrayed by the two highly charismatic performers), but they remain glib and amusing ciphers (a fact Moses coyly admits at one point). This dramatist plays a wickedly smart game, but it’s fixed.
—David Cote
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