Growing up is tough, especially if you’re already an adult. Adult Best Friends (now streaming on Max) is a teensy-scale, understated indie comedy about a pair of 30ish women who’ve been tight bros since middle school, but begin recognizing that they’ve grown apart. The film boasts multi-hypenate creatives in Delaney Buffett (offspring of late singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett, which explains some of the needle drops) and Katie Corwin, who play characters named Delaney and Corwin, and co-wrote the film together, with Buffett making her feature directing debut. It all comes down to chemistry between collaborators, which works just enough to keep the movie from floating away on a mild breeze.
The Gist: I just finished watching Adult Best Friends and I held the following sentiment in for more than half of its 90 minutes: JUST F—ING RIP THE BAND-AID OFF AND TELL HER. For crying out loud! This movie runs on frustration fuel more than any other energy source. But my frazzled nerves have me getting ahead of things, so let’s start at the beginning, when teen Delaney and Katie meet in a bathroom, hiding from the rest of the slumber party. Neither is comfortable in these environs, so they escape into an opening-credits montage of the next 20 or so years of all their goof-offs and funzies, good times together as besties, being sweet and silly and cavorting on beaches and singing songs and eating ice cream and all that stuff, well into adulthood. Are they being immature? Let’s leave that question unanswered. They love each other and are inseparable. No judgment. You do you.
Now, in the present day, they play this game where one reads an Instagram caption and the other guesses the name of the person who posted it. They’re deep into a session when the camera suddenly pans to a third person in the room, who we had little inkling was present. This is John (Mason Gooding), Katie’s boyfriend. It’s serious: They live together. But it’s worth noting that there’s a drawer in the dresser they share just for some of Delaney’s stuff. Considering the inseparable nature of the Katie-Delaney alliance, one might believe there’d only be one drawer for John’s stuff, but that would just be silly. Right? Cough.
There are signs of fracture, though. Delaney wants to go to a party. Katie would rather stay in with a blankie and some teevee. Delaney leaves and inhales coke in a bathroom all night. Katie lies next to John and willows between going to be with her pal and going back to sleep. Thus illustrated is the dynamic: Katie is trad and Delaney is free. Neither ideology is wrong – like I said, you do you – but they can be incompatible. The next day, Katie and John are in the park for a picnic. Delaney and her roommate (Cazzie David) slump on the couch in a haze of misanthropy. Delaney calls Katie and she answers and they chat for a bit and when Katie hangs up and turns around John is on one knee with a ring. And Katie is thrilled. Yes! She says yes.
John and Katie start calling people to share the news. But. Delaney? That one might be tough. The BFF situation is destined to change, probably for good and forever. Katie wants to make it special, so she books a weekend away to her and Delaney’s fave beach spot, then she’ll find the right time to tell her. They tangle with their annoying AirBnB renter guy and a few dudes on a bachelor-party excursion they meet at the bar, and Katie’s opportunities to find the perfect moment to tell Delaney the Big News just keep slipping away. Fear of change sure can make a person a procrastinator. But the longer Delaney doesn’t know while the rest of reality does know, the greater the chance of everything going to shit shit shit. Which seems bound to happen. Shit!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Last tight-pals-who-can-finish-each-other’s-sentences-and-sandwiches lady comedy I saw? Babes, although that was about the next step, pregnancy. Adult Best Friends also shares the prickly-old-friends dynamic with Jesse Eisenberg/Kieran Culkin sort-of-two-hander A Real Pain.
Performance Worth Watching: Corwin and Buffett are on pretty equal ground here, but the former gets a grandly sincere third-act speech that tips the film’s scales from middling to modestly winning. So give the nod to Corwin.
Memorable Dialogue: Our protags wrestle with some of the nonsense they have to deal with at this little cottage rental:
Delaney, locking the door: A pedophile has this address.
Katie: OK, well, good thing we’re adults.
Delaney: I look young!
Sex and Skin: Nah.
Our Take: Not a spoiler: The band-aid came off, and please note the passive voice, because it implies things. You can see it coming from Neptune. And so the comedio-dramatic dynamic of the film is summed up in two lines of dialogue: “You lied to me all weekend!” “No, I tried to tell you all weekend!” Now, Katie wasn’t really “lying” – more like “withholding vital information.” The only lie here is that she was “trying” to tell her, when she sure seemed like she was avoiding it, much to our boiling-over exasperated chagrin. Adult Best Friends eventually digs deeper into the hows and whys and wherefores of the rift, how Delaney struggles to find joy in things, and how Katie skews toward dishonesty for fear of upsetting her friend.
So there’s a little something here to sink your teeth into, insights into the complex nature of adult friendships. The people around Delaney and Katie feed the theme while injecting hit-and-miss comedy into the film: The four bachelor bros are led by a groom-to-be who finds he and Katie have mutual anxieties and concerns about marriage. Katie’s older brother (Zachary Quinto) spews therapyspeak, cribbed from his wife’s job as a psychotherapist, into the stew. Delaney video-chats with coworkers who rib her for never turning on her camera (she’s a slob lying in bed) and never “having the bandwidth” to tackle new projects. As for the zany AirBnB guy? He’s a chaos agent. If anything, the rest of the characters could unite against him, giving them all something in common.
Buffett and Corwin’s script and on-screen interactions brim with the you-eat-the-yolk-and-I’ll-eat-the-white lived-in authenticity of besties who know each other inside and out, or at least knew who each other used to be, anyway. As a director, Buffett shoots with an eye more for traditional television than cinema – frankly, the film comes off a bit too slight to warrant the trouble of leaving the house to see it – and nurtures a tone that avoids the twee drollness of Sundance-style indie movies at the same time it sidesteps the big, broad yuks of mainstream comedies. That leaves Adult Best Friends in a nether-zone that’s indistinct but still sincere enough to be meaningful. You might laugh here or there, you might shed a tear at the end, you might see bits of yourself in these characters, and all of this is not nothing.
Our Call: Buffett and Corwin seem to have modest thematic goals for Adult Best Friends, and for the most part, they reach them. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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