Friendship and the Cringe of Connection

Why do men struggle to make friends? Friendship offers a funny, flawed look at the loneliness epidemic

This film review is a guest contribution from Joseph Holmes.

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I’m always happy when movies try to tackle issues that are part of the cultural zeitgeist. Movies have a special power to take issues that feel abstract and make them real by making them about characters we care about. That’s one reason I was excited when I saw the trailer for the new film Friendship, which looked like it was directly tackling the much-discussed modern “male loneliness epidemic”. And while the film’s handling of the topic is a mixed bag, the power of the story and the conversations it starts are deeply important and worthwhile.

Friendship follows Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson), an unhappy suburban dad who gets a big man-crush on his charismatic new neighbor, Austin Carmichael. But when Craig's character flaws sabotage the friendship and Austin ends it, Craig goes into a spiral that threatens to ruin both of their lives.

Purely as a moviegoer, Friendship is one of the best dark comedies I’ve seen in a long time. The film deftly balances a relatable realism with a gradually unfurling, unhinged sense of humor that never quite jumps the shark. The humor is based around Craig Waterman’s severe social arrested development, causing him to constantly self-sabotage from having the male community he craves. This results in a near-constant stream of cringe moments we can all relate to. It instantly brings to mind every embarrassing thing you’ve ever done in your life, like seeing a group of people laughing in a group and sneaking into the group and trying to laugh like you’re already best buds with them.

The camerawork and editing are consciously used to amplify these effects as well. The camera will stay on shots as long as necessary to capture the performances without commentary and let the silences and people’s reactions increase the tension without letting you look away. Cuts will be used self-consciously to draw parallels between moments or to emphasize a joke.

A lot of credit has to be given to the actors. Tim Robinson flawlessly juggles the deeply relatable and deeply flawed sides of Craig in ways that horrify us without causing us to stop identifying with or rooting for him. This means that our laughter and horror at the choices Craig increasingly makes causes us to reflect inward rather than distance ourselves from him. Likewise, Paul Rudd gives one of the best performances of his career. Austin Carmichael could have easily been a one-dimensional good guy or a fake, manipulative friend. But the writing and Rudd’s performance solidify him as a normal, halfway-decent guy who is completely justified in setting boundaries with Craig. And yet he’s also a mirror version of Craig: someone who’s built his life on being liked by “playing the game” socially in ways that Craig simply hasn’t figured out how to do. Kate Mara deserves props too as Craig’s wife Tami Waterman, who seamlessly juggles her role as a simultaneously loving and exasperated wife with believability.

What’s particularly interesting is where the film places the blame and responsibility for Craig’s inability to make friends: on Craig. Craig loses his wife because he is continually selfish and fails to prioritize her or her needs. Craig is invited into Austin’s circle and the circle of friends at work. But he sabotages these friendships as well. (Spoilers) The most heartbreaking moment of the film is at the end when he’s about to reconcile with his family, and he has a clear choice between staying with them and self-sabotaging again, and he chooses the latter.

There is something positive and even inspiring about this. By placing the blame on Craig for his lack of male friendships, it tacitly shows any of us who struggle with loneliness that there is a way for us to get out of it. Craig didn’t, be we can choose to not be like Craig.

But there is a darker side to this. It’s curious that the film never really digs into why Craig has such a hard time making friends. Why did he never learn the skills of building community growing up the way Austin did? What did he lack in his childhood and adolescence that made him miss this crucial part of his development? The film never even hints at an explanation for this. This is odd in an age where empathy and understanding are so prized. Even the most monstrous villains like The Joker and Maleficent get sympathetic back stories, yet Friendship shows little interest in exploring the reasons behind Craig’s struggles.

I went to see an early screening of Friendship with a male friend of mine. After the screening, we both spent a lot of time unpacking it. It turns out, both of us deeply related to the experience of Craig having trouble making friends, due to different life circumstances. Both of us had to fight to learn how to make friends in adulthood, and we both feel like we’ve succeeded. I even wrote an article about it, sharing with other people what I learned.

But watching the film, both of us also felt that same gnawing itch: the film brilliantly articulated our experiences, but it was either claiming we didn’t have sympathetic reasons for having a hard time with friends, or it didn’t care. There was a tacit cruelty involved in this. When you care about someone, you want to understand them. But the film doesn’t try to understand the “why” behind Craig’s flaws. This made us feel less like the film was laughing with us, and more like they were laughing at us. This upset the delicate balance of the film’s reliability and cringe that made the film so good. It also made it feel like it didn’t know us as well as it claimed, and therefore its advice was less credible.

Unfortunately, this reflects some of the conversations around the male loneliness epidemic. While both men and women have fewer friends than they used to, it’s widely known that this phenomenon has hit men harder than women. According to Survey Center on American Life, “Thirty years ago, a majority of men (55 percent) reported having at least six close friends. Today, that number has been cut in half. Slightly more than one in four (27 percent) men have six or more close friends today. Fifteen percent of men have no close friendships at all, a fivefold increase since 1990. Women have witnessed a friendship decline too, but it has been far less pronounced. In 1990, roughly four in ten (41 percent) women said they had six or more close friends, compared to 24 percent today. Ten percent of women reporting having no close friends.” This is a big deal, as fewer close friends means greater loneliness, and loneliness is a major health risk as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes daily.

Many people see this and place the blame squarely on men. Whether that’s the rather harsh “men deserve to be lonely” meme or the (more measured) argument that men can’t make friends because they refuse to break out of gendered stereotypes about how men should behave, leaving room for expressions of love and affection that build greater social bonds. The more sympathetic framings of this assign responsibility to society for socializing men this way, but still attribute this on male culture. This is similar to the way that the controversial Netflix hit Adolescence handled the issue of toxic masculinity leading to male violence.

And yet, there are problems with this view that many men are quick to point out. Firstly, the male loneliness epidemic has increased at the same time that gender roles have relaxed. Further, one of the biggest predictors of men having pro-social behavior and positive life outcomes is having more influence from their father, specifically because the father had a more stereotypically “masculine” approach to parenting. This parenting style emphasized risk-taking and problem-solving. This creates the kind of mental toughness in both men and women as they get older to confidently navigate friendships.

This is borne out by Jonathan Haidt’s research in The Anxious Generation, which finds the source of rising depression in both men and women to be the lack of in-person friendships built by having risk-taking adventures when they were young kids. Many of these changes are just as much (if not more) driven by women driving the parenting and schooling cultures as any other social forces that can be blamed on men. This affects men’s friendships more than women’s, since men rely upon this kind of “rough and trouble” or “bonding through adventures” style of building friendships than women. But ironically, women are the ones becoming the most depressed and anxious with fewer opportunities to build mental toughness in the real world, creating an even greater fear of risk-taking than boys had.

Like with most things, the truth is almost definitely somewhere in the middle. There are good reasons why men have a harder time making friends than they used to. And not all of them are men’s fault. But men still have the ability–and therefore the responsibility–to overcome those setbacks to develop the community they need. Even so, if you want someone to listen to your advice, you need that person to feel like you see them and hear them. And if you don’t seem curious about them, they likely won’t.

Friendship does a brilliant job of expressing the experience of being too awkward to make friends, and the responsibility we have to change that in our own lives. If it had a bit more curiosity to understand the why behind the struggle, the results could have been truly sublime.