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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Labute Finds Good Company

Many of us spend our childhoods steeped in fantasy.

A back yard becomes a beachhead. A lumber pile becomes a fortress. A neighbor becomes a murderer.

Most of us drift one day into reality. We put away childish things, find a job and get on with our lives.

Neil LaBute found a way to both live out his fantasy and forge a real life by becoming a filmmaker.

An award-winning filmmaker.

“A brilliant black comedy,” said Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers of LaBute’s first film, “In the Company of Men” (which opens Friday at the Lincoln Heights Cinemas).

Echoed Oliver Jones of Details magazine, “Neil LaBute’s debut feature is remarkable on every artistic front: brilliantly conceived, smartly photographed and filled with stinging dialogue that bristles with intelligence.”

“A terrific black comedy about the male ego run amok,” wrote Jeane Macintosh of the New York Post.

Hear that? “Brilliant,” “brilliant” and “terrific.”

Not bad for a kid who spent his childhood running around the shores of Liberty Lake.

“I was always a big fan of Spokane,” LaBute said in a recent phone interview from New York. “I liked the blend of old and new. I was always charmed by that city.”

A 1979 graduate of Central Valley High School, LaBute now lives in Fort Wayne, Ind. In fact, it was in Fort Wayne - a town that, he says, “reminds me of Spokane” - that he filmed “In the Company of Men.” He did it on a shoestring budget and with actors he met mostly while attending Brigham Young University (including co-star Aaron Eckhart).

A veteran playwright, having gone on to study in New York and to write plays with such titles as “Filthy Talk in Troubled Times,” “Lepers” and “A Gaggle of Saints,” LaBute received his first rave review as a filmmaker last January from the jury at the Sundance Film Festival.

It was at that distinguished festival that “In the Company of Men” was named one of two films to receive a Filmmakers Trophy.

The opening line of the jury’s statement reads like this: “Although the film was made on a limited budget, nothing was scrimped on the most valuable element of ‘In the Company of Men’: a wonderfully original script.”

Of course, it is exactly that spirit of originality that has made “In the Company of Men” one of the most controversial movies now making its way across mainstream America.

Audiences that saw it during last summer’s Seattle International Film Festival hotly debated the film’s plot, which involves two men (played by Eckhart and Matt Malloy) who hatch a cold and calculated plan: They decide to see who can be the first to romance a stranger, to get her to fall in love and then, when she is most vulnerable, to dump her.

Just for the fun of it.

To make matters worse, Eckhart’s character gets away with it.

LaBute, naturally enough, has felt the wrath of those who don’t see the humor, black or otherwise, of such a plotline. He’s become a target, specifically of women’s groups, who say that he has made a hateful, sexist film.

But he stands his ground. “In the Company of Men,” he said, is far from a simple exercise in sexism. Instead, it is a look at “emotional abuse.” As such, it is being wrongfully condemned by people who don’t see the hypocrisy in a society that rewards directors who flaunt sex and violence and condemns directors of such films as “In the Company of Men,” which has neither.

“Jack Nicholson once made a hilarious comment about if you saw off a woman’s breast, you get a PG rating, but if you kiss it, you get an X,” LaBute said.

The mistake most people make, he says, is to see the film only as a study in sexual abuse. LaBute wants people to make up their own minds, which is one reason why he left the film’s climax open-ended. But he will say that the character played by Eckhart is, generally speaking, an equal-opportunity offender.

Which means he’ll step on anyone who gets in his way, man or woman.

“Two men plot to hurt a woman: Granted, it’s a misogynistic premise,” LaBute said. “There’s no question about it. But the movie is not (misogynistic). People have done their darndest to tell me it is, and I’m open to listening to them. But that doesn’t mean I change my opinion.”

The groundwork for those opinions were formed in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when LaBute and his brother helped work his trucker/farmer father’s land.

“I spent a lot of time sitting on a tractor or cleaning out barns,” LaBute said. “But it was the place where I let my imagination roam. It was the place where I became a storyteller. I enjoyed the solitude, and I enjoyed fabricating.”

His mother, Marian (who, divorced from his father, still lives in Spokane; his father lives in Michigan), became his movie companion, taking him to the Dishman when it was still a revival theater. It was there that he first saw “Gone With the Wind.”

“It’s one of the first memories I have, of kind of waking up and seeing those red stairs and him carrying Scarlett up them,” he said. “It’s so vivid.”

He would study theater at CV under teacher Terry Parker, whom LaBute’s classmate Jim Haney remembers as being “very, very, very serious about drama and theater.”

And even now, as he enjoys the fame of having his first movie open across the country, watching his play “Bash” open in New York and as he prepares to begin shooting his second film in October, LaBute credits the town of his youth for helping him develop the attributes that still fuel his artistic drive.

“Growing up where I did in Liberty Lake was like off the pages of Boy’s Life,” he said. “It was such an idyllic sort of thing. We ran the hills, swam in the lake, and it created a very kind of singular sense about myself that I was never daunted by someone saying no.”

Pausing for a second, he added, “I think I got my philosophy from Spokane of making your own fun.”

Which translates, he said, to “Wherever you are, make the most of it.”

, DataTimes