Richard Linklater's Tape, with a nod to Stephen Soderbergh, could be called Sex, Truths and Audiotape. It's a bilious comedy with bite about friend-ship, betrayal and revenge. All of it happens within four walls, in real time (86 minutes), between three people. But the see-saw balance of power - the emotional hold each in turn exerts on the other - fills the dingy motel room with suspense and surprise and an unexpectedly high content of hurtful humour.
It's a bit like a David Mamet play, notably Oleanna, about a college girl accusing her lecturer of sexual harassment, but happens to be based on a Stephen Belber one - both of them writ-ers with a focus on duplicitous, shifting relationships.
Vince (Ethan Hawke) belongs to Linklater's favourite slacker generation: a thirtysomething who delivers dope to ageing hippies, seems to live in his underwear, swigs beer, then crumples each can in a macho spasm. We know the type, or think we do - until we know him better.
Enter Johnny (Robert Sean Leonard), a handsome ex-high-school buddy who seduced Vince's girl years ago, and is now an
aspiring film-maker successful enough to patronise him. "You lost your girlfriend," he tells Vince, "because of your unresolved violent tendencies."
"And didn't get her back," snaps Vince, "because there were too many other guys out there with resolved violent tendencies."
Johnny's self-righteousness is no match for Vince's mean streak. It erodes as the other's sneaky, comical, yet deadly comebacks reach further into their shared past and the "incident" with Amy back then.
What incident? Bit by nervous bit, Johnny is forced into a very nasty confession, ending in a raw, one-syllable word; rape. At which Vince, with a whoop, springs his trap.
What we took to be old pals being reunited suddenly acquires an air of old scores being settled. And when Amy (Uma Thurman) drops by - now an assistant district attorney - the emotional advantage changes again until both guys stand convicted of self-incrimination and it looks as if they'll step out of this small motel room into more permanent confinement. Tape is one of those movies of which less said the better, lest it spoil the pleasure of revolving sympathies as each of the trio emerges in his or her true colours.
It makes a human tragi-comedy out of ethical dilemmas about remembered "truth", professed "motives", redemptive "apologies" ... yes, even the semantics of such an act as "date rape" whose legal and moral variables stretch all the way from consent to coercion.
The acting is a spirit-level sensitive to every tilt in the relationships: Hawke's restless physicality suggesting Vince's vindictive entrapment; Leonard's holier-than-thou homilies collapsing into apprehension and shame; and Thurman's cool demeanour surviving this "face-off " with her two transgressors, whom she now has in her legal power.
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Shot in high-definition video, in sequence, over six days (with two weeks' rehearsal), Tape should ride high on the agenda of everyone who loves to see three Hollywood talents revelling in high-risk roles and proving that talk can strip people barer than nudity and hook an audience more effectively than violence.
Tape
Cert: cert15
