Channing is Julie, a successful executive, who fires her assistant Paula (Stiles) when Paula, carrying the presentation materials, shows up 45 minutes late for a sales pitch. The two then find themselves thrown together at the hotel, waiting for their flights back the next morning, and Julie has a change of heart after getting some good news and rehires Paula. They pal around playfully, teasing the horny businessmen who seem to be the only other guests at this particular hotel. Then Paula meets Julie's headhunter, Nick (Frederick Weller -- not, as the IMDB plot summary says, Fred Willard, which gave me really creepy and unpleasant visions, because Fred Willard is a funny guy, but he is so not someone you want to see watching porn or drooling over Julia Stiles), and recognizes him as the man who raped a friend of hers years before. The two women decide to get revenge on him. But they have different ideas of what that revenge should entail.
Both women are strong-willed and independent, so their clashes are intense. Even when they're playing around, you can feel each trying to assert control over the other. Paula is deliberately outrageous and provocative; tattooed and sassy, she brazenly announces things like, "I watch a lot of porn" and shamelessly takes advantage of the older woman's hospitality. Her moods swing faster than a manic depressive on crack. Julie, by contrast, keeps complete control of herself at all times. It's fun to watch their battle for dominance, but it never really seems resolved, despite graphic evidence that Paula thinks herself the winner.
That's my main complaint about the movie as a whole: I don't "get" it. I feel like I completely missed the message, unless the message is that Paula is a sociopath. And I sort of doubt that was the movie's only intent.
Anyway, I enjoyed the movie. I did notice many people walking out, but most of these seemed to be men, and I noticed the walk-outs occurred right after some discussion of rape or some humiliation of a man on-screen. Not that I'm suggesting a correlation or anything.... Let me say that the way men -- or rather, one man in particular -- are treated in this movie is nothing compared to the way women are treated in In the Company of Men. Then again, The Business of Strangers isn't on the same level as In the Company of Men in any sense, except maybe for the performances.
AUDIENCE RANT: While I was waiting in line for the movie, these assholes behind me kept inching closer and closer to me. I had been sitting down -- I was first in line and had to wait for an hour and a half -- but they kept stepping on me and whipping their coats against my head, never once apologizing. So I stood up, and then they kept pushing me, elbowing me, propping their newspapers against my back, and so forth, again showing no sign that they realized I was, in fact, a person and not a potted plant. It was like being in a crowded Metro car, except that we were in an unconfined space and there was no reason for them to be so close. I ended up right up against the velvet rope with no more room to move. I tried pushing back, I tried glaring at them, I tried saying in a pointed voice, "EXCUSE ME," and nothing worked.
So I was already feeling pissy, and then once the movie actually started, there were three couples in front of and next to me, and they all talked continuously through the movie (okay, so the couple next to me didn't talk; they just made sickening kissy noises at each the whole time). One of the men, who had sat down right in front of me, forcing me to move because he was extremely tall, kept blocking my view by leaning his entire upper body into the empty chair in front of me for no apparent reason and lifting his entire arm into my line of vision every time he put popcorn in his mouth (and he had the largest size bag of popcorn, so that was pretty much every five seconds for the duration of the film). I mean, do you really need to raise your elbow to the level of your gargantuan head and stick it out at a 90-degree angle to your body in order to bring food to your mouth? Then, at a very emotional part of the movie, when one character is tearfully admitting she was raped, the tall guy and his girlfriend started making out! I'm still not sure what inner reserves of self-control kept me from kicking them in the head. I mean, what the hell is wrong with people? And yet, if I had kicked those idiots in the head, I would have been the one kicked out the theater! Where's the justice?
People suck.
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