Ah, yes, the middle-class midlife crisis, or a white cinema of ennui, if you will. It used to be a favorite subgenre of mine, perfected in films such as Fight Club, Adaptation, American Beauty, The Weather Man, Lost in Translation, Sideways, and Hannah and Her Sisters (along with pretty much everything Woody Allen has done since Annie Hall). I was a teenager having a pre-life crisis when I enjoyed those movies, and while they’re all still great in different ways, I view that genre with a little more skepticism these days. Perhaps I’ve seen too many movies about financially comfortable white guys who are bored with their lives, but I’ve become disillusioned by it all. That’s possibly why I like the new Apple TV+ series Your Friends and Neighbors a bit less than other people.
That’s not to say it’s a bad show. The casting is perfect, the production is top-notch, the story unravels in interesting ways, there are some good lines and interesting characters, and the incorporation (and occasional subversion) of classic film noir ideas is a nice addition. It’s actually a great series if you’re still interested in watching unlikable privileged people complain about their lives in ways which reveal that — shock! — the white picket fences and Porsches of the country club community hide sadder, darker truths about unfulfilled lives and withered loves. If you’re like me and you’ve seen this all before (and have begun to find the subgenre childish in a very “First World” kind of way), then you won’t find much of anything new in Your Friends and Neighbors.
Jon Hamm Is a Perfectly Cast Man
Jon Hamm is a very funny and talented actor with a wide range, but it makes sense that he’s typecast most of the time. He’s just perfect at playing the smart, handsome, successful guy who is just a little past his prime, whose wit, good looks, and success are fading; he’s one disaster away from shedding the artifice of competence and just losing it. Mad Men, Landsman, The Morning Show, and now Your Friends and Neighbors capitalize on this quality of Hamm in one way or another.
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After a prologue, we meet Hamm post-disaster as Andrew Cooper (or “Coop”), but he’s still clinging to that cool, casual artifice. Coop’s wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), cheated on him with Coop’s friend, Nick (Mark Tallman), so he’s gone through a divorce and has lost his house and tons of money, despite Nick and Mel being wealthy themselves. It’s one of several ways in which Your Friends and Neighbors possibly panders to the “men’s rights” crowd who rage over family court and child support.
Nick lives in his own, smaller house and has just lost his fancy job as a hedge fund manager. He was fired for sleeping with a 28-year-old woman in a different department, a woman who was then promoted. It’s another instance where Your Friends and Neighbors seems to align with the right-wing “manosphere.” The series begins with this queasy kind of misogyny in how Andrew is presented as a good guy but a victim to supposedly gold-digging women and a culture which cares more about political correctness and DEI. The only women in the show so far have ruined the lead cuckold’s life.
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Fortunately, things become a bit more complex than that, and several women characters develop into interesting three-dimensional people. Nonetheless, that lingering discomfort remains, which makes sense; gender resentment and sexism are significant elements in most midlife crisis movies.
Pride Cometh Before the Crime… and the Fall
Andrew is too proud to tell anyone that he’s been fired — not Mel, who continues to ask for money thinking that he’s rolling in it; not Sam (Olivia Munn), another recently divorced person in their friend group who was cheated on and now hooks up for one-night stands with Coop; not his sister Ali (Lena Hall), who has mental health issues and has to move in with Coop when he can no longer afford the apartment he pays for her to live in. The only person Coop tells is the one he has to, his business manager, Barney (Hoon Lee). Ironically, Coop was Barney’s biggest client, so the new financial situation affects him as well. He may need to sell his Rolls-Royce.
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Coop’s friend group is full of Rolls-Royce cars, Richard Mille watches, Tom Ford suits, and all kinds of excessive commodity fetishism. Coop sees it all differently now that he’s desperate. His bitterness, resentment, and envy grows as he watches his friends continue their lavish lifestyles while he hides the reality of his own. When he learns that one family will be traveling to Belize, he sneaks into their house while they’re on vacation and steals a $200,000 watch and a roll of cash. He eventually finds a shady pawnbroker, Jules (Jennifer Mudge), who will buy the watch without its papers of authentication, which is the catalyst for even more acts of crime (and a tense criminal relationship). You know what happens with crime — things escalate.
The Aesthetic of ‘Your Friends and Neighbors’
While that plot point sounds sudden and arbitrary, it develops in a surprisingly smooth and natural way throughout these one-hour episodes. In retrospect, it’s pretty unbelievable; if Coop is stealing from one small community of “friends,” you’d think they would connect the dots. It’s also kind of random and unbelievable that Coop has some kind of high-tech camera jammer that shuts down everyone’s cameras perfectly. There are quite a few ridiculous moments like this — Coop steals an extremely expensive bottle of wine and then literally brings it to a party attended by the bottle’s owner.
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So yes, Coop isn’t a mastermind and Your Friends and Neighbors is no Ocean’s 11. It’s clumsy in many ways, and extremely unsubtle in others. It’s so unsubtle that Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” plays while Jon Hamm drives out of suburbia in the first episode. But this series doesn’t exactly need subtlety — you know from the start that it’s the same midlife crisis story we’ve seen so many times before. But hey, it’s a really well-made one.
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