REVIEW BY STEVE RAMOS

Racehl Weisz and Paul Rudd play a pair of college students who start dating in writer/director Neil laBute's relationship drama The Shape of Things.

Playwright and filmmaker Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, Possession) reunites his stage actors Paul Rudd, Rachel Weisz, Gretchen Mol and Fred Weller for a film adaptation of his hit 2001 Off Broadway play, The Shape of Things, a brutal story about a college love affair gone awry. Intentionally political and unabashedly contemporary, The Shape of Things has its share of dramatic stumbles simply because LaBute strives for an adult level of dialogue unusual in American film. You forgive LaBute's missteps because he's trying to say something serious. Actually, you forgive LaBute because he's often dead-on.

More importantly, The Shape of Things is not adult in a racy, sexy way, although the film revolves around relationships. The Shape of Things is mature, serious, earnest storytelling. As always, LaBute has a lot to say about men, women and the lives we attempt to make together. You might not agree with his outlook on sexual politics. You might even challenge the intellectual validity of his ideas. Still, his stories, whether pap or not, grab you just the same.

Rudd's All-American looks and boyish smile is put to good use as Adam, the nebbish English major who's happy to remake his appearance for the sake of his new girlfriend, Evelyn (Weisz). Adam is the willing object of Evelyn's Pygmalion agenda. More fashionable clothes quickly replace Adam's corduroy jacket and clunky glasses, and that's just for starters. The whole situation would be unnerving if not for Rudd's steady performance. He is easygoing, likable and eager-to-please as Adam. He's believable as a nice guy who receives little attention from anyone, especially women. Rudd makes understandable Adam's polite desperation for love. Thanks to Rudd, everything else about The Shape of Things, including LaBute's trademark surprises, makes more sense.

Fred Weller is appropriately droll as Adam's preppy friend Philip. He's a jock-turned-devil's advocate who rails against Evelyn's pseudo-feminist ideas about art, sex and relationships. Basically, Weller plays Philip like a smirking, average Joe. What the character lacks in charisma, Weller compensates with surprising complexity and a dollop of emotional depth. LaBute may have created Philip as nothing more than a sarcastic observer, but Weller manages to bring him to life.

Gretchen Mol enjoys the best role of her screen career as Jenny, Philip's fiancée. For the first time, Mol's baby face, girl-next-door looks and blonde curls are assets to her character. She balances her pretty looks with a sense of longing and heartfelt regret over her to-be life with Philip and her might-have-been time with Adam. Moll makes the most of every one of her scenes, and The Shape of Things would be half as potent without her performance. Moll balances her perky, singsong speech with deep passion. There is heartache beneath the surface of her freckled, sun-burnt complexion. Moll plays Jenny as someone who sees the emotional dilemma behind Adam and Evelyn's love affair. Yet, when she reaches out to Adam, it's for a desperate, needy purpose.

The film's sharpest moments, especially its shocking finale, belong to Weisz. As Evelyn, the eccentric art student who captures Adam's heart only to teach him some hard-knock lessons about life and love, Weisz wraps her pretty looks and girlish curves around a character that's believably complex, quirky and surprisingly brutal. It's funny how LaBute begins his Pygmalion story with one simple line of dialogue: "You're definitely cute, but you should do something with your hair," Evelyn tells a flustered Adam.

Evelyn is one of the most dynamic female characters to emerge from LaBute's mind, and Weisz does the role justice. LaBute makes Weisz's looks an asset to a character and not the sole reason for her existence, which was the case with her role in the recent caper film, Confidence. Weisz's trademark eyebrows arch at all the right moments. She comes off as strong willed, serious and argumentative, even when wearing the cliché artist wardrobe, a Che Guevara T-shirt, and delivering pompous banter like "I'm an artist!" and "There's only art!"

The Shape of Things is as much about its quartet of lead performances as it is about the distinct storytelling trademarks of its writer/director. For a LaBute film, that's saying something, since most of the time his razor-edged stories tend to overwhelm his casts.

LaBute tweaks The Shape of Things subtly, shifting his stage play to a real world college campus, deftly using Elvis Costello songs as blaring punctuation marks to efficiently split the film's scenes apart. LaBute continues to gain technical polish as a filmmaker.

Still, his stories continue to revolve around his scathing use of words more than lenses, editing, costumes or set design. The challenge with many of LaBute's films, especially In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, has been accepting other characters possessing his voice. You think of dialogue as LaBute's words, spoken by other mouths, instead of delivered by real characters. With The Shape of Things, LaBute allows his actors to claim the situations and spoken words as their own, and it's a smart move. This time, there are credible faces behind the anger, and the anger is more meaningful for it.
Citybeat grade: A.

E-mail Steve Ramos

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