CAUTION: MALE FRAUD

By RICHARD CORLISS

Chad, a nice-looking fellow with the soul of Satan, sits next to Christine, the deaf secretary he has bogusly courted for the sole pleasure of dumping her. As she registers the enormity of his betrayal, Chad stares at her and says, "So how does it feel?" This moment in Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men packs such a sick smack that at a showing at the Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion in West Los Angeles last week, a woman gasped and shook her head in disgust; another, supplying a retort for Christine, said, "I feel like cutting your cojones off."

In the Company of Men is cool, shiny, handsomely made and, in its compelling-repelling way, mordantly funny--imagine an atrocity tale told with Noel Coward insouciance. But the most interesting part of the film comes after it's over. That's when the real knives come out. At the Sundance Film Festival, where this pitch-black comedy was an award winner, LaBute was widely rebuked by the sensitivity patrol. After a Manhattan screening, a male publicist was punched. Well, he was a guy. Probably deserved it.

Aaron Eckhart, the 29-year-old actor who plays Chad, has yet to be slapped by any female moviegoers (it's early; be patient). But he says, "I've had women come really close. The right hand is back, and they go, 'I just want to slap you.' And I go, 'All right.' They don't, and then they laugh. But I'm sure if I demonstrated any Chadness while they were in mid-swing, they'd go all the way."

For LaBute, 34, a playwright making his debut as screen auteur, the flush of anger is a careermaking dream. "I'm more than happy that people are polarized," he says. "I'd much rather have somebody hate my movie than be indifferent about it." He would get his wish if he listened to TIME film critic Richard Schickel: "Other pictures that have broken out on the basis of sociological buzz, like Thelma & Louise, had appealing characters confronting interesting issues in suspenseful or comic fashion. But here all we are dealing with is sociopathic behavior that has no real-world resonance. The movie's sheer grimness militates against anyone other than a masochist volunteering to pay money to see it."

There must be a lot of masochists in New York City and L.A.: the film (which cost a preposterously meager $25,000, and which Sony Pictures Classics bought for less than $50,000) earned $196,157 its first week on just eight screens. And if tickets could be sold for discussion groups after the show, it would have made even more. "Women love the movie," says Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Classics. "It shows men behaving badly, and women feel like a fly on the wall watching the things men do." Stacy Edwards, the Juliette Binoche look-alike who beautifully embodies Christine, says, "I've had men come up to me and say it was really uncomfortable for them. It profoundly moved them; they had tears in their eyes." This is the first hate story that could become a big date movie.

Chad and Howard (Matt Malloy) are two thirtyish corporate types on a six-week assignment in a new city. Howard has been dumped by the fiance he adored. Chad, who tells Howard he too has been abandoned, proposes an elaborate scheme of gender revenge. They will choose a vulnerable woman, begin dating demurely, get her to fall in love. And then drop her. "Let's do it," Chad says. "Let's hurt somebody."

Their designated victim is Christine, winsome and delicate, her eyes signaling sweet intensity and a ladylike itch for passionate release. In her presence Chad is darling; he has the shy-guy, sensitive-man patter down pat. He convinces Christine, and perhaps the audience, that he is falling for her. To Howard, though, he says he despises Christine (he even makes fun of the way she reads lips) and her entire sex. "Women--nice ones or the most frigid of the race; it doesn't matter in the end--inside, they're all the same. Meat and gristle and hatred, just simmering. And I for one have had it with their s___."

Says LaBute, a Mormon married to a family therapist: "I was drawn to the idea of a lover's triangle and to the theme of betrayal, which I find a very intimate, devastating thing. The template was Restoration comedy; I love that kind of gamesmanship, the verbal wit." Chad's surname is Piercewell, its rapier malice nicely echoing Congrevean namesmanship. "I saw a parallel from the 1690s in the 1990s in the tendency not to fight with fists but instead to tear and devastate with words." That's Chad's forte. With just a flick of a phrase, he can devastate his boss, an intern or the woman who's come to love him.

Few will be rooting for Chad, but he does have a way about him: the purring amorality, the artist's attention to detail, the born salesman's blinding self-assurance. He is, in short, a perfect Chad--a winner at any cost. Howard is perfect only as Chad's opposite and victim. All the women he loves dump him. But who wouldn't? His devotion is a pillow that doesn't comfort but smothers; he's forever tripping over his big dopey heart. His clumsy pursuit of Christine will have the decent guys in the audience replaying their dankest romantic humiliations. Says LaBute: "I despise the things about him that are most like me." Chad is the super-Nazi, Howard the "good German."

Chad is also a prototype and a throwback: the streamlined 1997 model of caveman. He's not a sexist so much as he's an inhumanist, for he is contemptuous of other guys as well. "Working in the company of men," he says of his colleagues, "they still want their mommies to wipe their bottoms every time they go potty." By taking the title from this harangue, LaBute clarifies his intentions. The true arena of this extreme game is business, not sex, and the person Chad wants to screw, so to speak, is not the secretary but his old friend and current boss. Christine is just a means to Howard's end.

"You got the balls for this?" Chad asks a young black intern whom he orders to pull down his pants in the film's most humiliating scene. "You need the big brass ones for the task... That's what business is all about: who's sporting the nastiest sac of venom, and who's willing to use it." Ultimately there are two kinds of men: predator and prey. A few millenniums of civilization have refined man's hunter instinct; we now see a subtle but lethal damage that man can inflict on the competition. Male or female, for business or pleasure--doesn't really matter.

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

With reporting by PATRICK E. COLE/LOS ANGELES AND GEORGIA HARBISON/NEW YORK