Ben Stiller stars as a drama professor trapped in an unfulfilling relationship with a chilly advertising copywriter (Catherine Keener). Looking for a little warmth, Stiller propositions the journalist wife (Amy Brenneman) of his businessman best friend (Aaron Eckhart). Brenneman, unable to express herself sexually (despite her overeager husband), accepts the offer. Meanwhile, Keener finds quiet contentment in the arms of an attractive artist's assistant (Nastassja Kinski). Hovering above the fray is a predatory, aggressive doctor (Jason Patric), who provides a role model of unfettered masculinity to gym buddies Stiller and Eckhart.

The main selling point of LaBute's films is his pungent dialogue, which is as refreshingly blunt in Neighbors as it was in Men. LaBute's characters talk explicitly about their motives and desires, and there's a voyeuristic appeal to hearing Keener talk about her pathological need for silence during sex, or listening to Patric boast about how he humiliated some spiteful ex-lover. LaBute's dialogue has been compared to David Mamet, but it lacks Mamet's musicality, or the multilayered way that Mamet's words conceal more than they reveal. LaBute is more straightforward, and though his characters do use words to hurt, they don't really play games with the language--only with each other.

The real quality that LaBute brings to cinema is his way with actors. The cold heart of In the Company of Men was its star, Aaron Eckhart, whose portrayal of an opportunistic rat was as charismatic as it was oily. This time out, Eckhart plays a doughy schlub, and it's Jason Patric who gets to be the complete prick (almost literally). Ben Stiller's performance, meanwhile, is revelatory; in his other recent movies, he has been honing his on-screen cadence, letting his sentences wither because he can't find an impressive enough word or because he's afraid to say what's on his mind. His character in Your Friends and Neighbors approaches the world with a plaster smile, fumbling for what he imagines to be a normal human connection.

It would be convenient to say that the ultimate failure of Your Friends and Neighbors is LaBute's inability to cover the distaff side with the insight that he brings to the male. Admittedly, Brenneman, Keener, and Kinski play one-dimensional characters (although all three actresses add welcome nuance); but what's more troubling is that LaBute uses them as overly convenient foils, to make his points about the terminal dissatisfaction of long-term sexual partners. As in Men, the plot of Neighbors is disappointingly contrived, with the final couplings of the characters designed for maximum audience shock.

Just last week, I saw Simon Birch, which takes the painful moments of life--adolescence, losing a family member, accepting responsibility--and reduces them to easily digestible, sanitized, crowd-pleasing cuteness. Now there's Your Friends and Neighbors, which takes the mundane activities of life--dinner parties, shopping, working out at the gym--and exaggerates them into intense rounds of scathing psychological warfare. The former approach appeals to mainstream audiences, who generally fear being challenged; the latter approach tickles critics, who often praise such psychodramas as unflinchingly realistic. Both camps are, in their way, deluding themselves. LaBute's shoehorned commentary on modern life is as phony as the cross-stitched sentiments of Simon Birch. (And Simon Birch is as cynical as Neighbors, but that's a topic for another review.)

Still, LaBute has a gift that's too vivid to ignore. Yes, it would be nice if his characters weren't all surfaces--if every now and then we got a hint that his villains had weaknesses, and his heroes had spines. And yes, he'll be a better filmmaker when he can learn to turn his camera away from faces and let some visual details pick up the slack that his dialogue often leaves.

But there are moments in Your Friends and Neighbors of crystalline profundity--a woman sadly putting her rings back on after a disastrous attempt at an affair, a man futilely inquiring "Is it me?" when he's unable to masturbate--that make LaBute's career worth encouraging. Someday he'll relax enough to let his characters find their own way, and when he does, even he may be shocked by what they end up doing.