Present Company is ostensibly about two young parents in a fading relationship who suffer cohabitation in a parent’s basement for the sake of their toddler, but director Frank Ross tells us what his film is really about in the first scene. The director stars as Buddy, an insensitive, immature twenty-something who is apprenticing in construction. We meet him on the job, where his co-worker has just opened a can of some kind of hazardous chemical. Not wanting to inhale the fumes, Buddy recoils. “I’ve got a long life ahead of me man,” he protests. A few lines later, assessing the work they’ve done, Buddy says, “We kind of glued ourselves into a corner, huh?” “Not me, man–you did it,” his co-worker responds.
This is a movie about a boy stuck in a situation that feels interminable, who instead of taking responsibility for having glued himself in a corner, tries to share the blame with everyone around him. Too on-the-nose? Maybe, but it’s forgivable as a kind of thesis statement for a film that otherwise refuses a black-and-white analysis of its characters and their behavior. Somewhat less concerned with physical space than his last film, Hohokam, Present Company concentrates on making tangible the invisible space between people, and the lying, cheating and play-acting that we do to either transverse the space or willfully ignore it.
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