Neil LaButte is a provocative film director. This film based on the play of the same title played better on the stage than on the screen.

Mr. LaButte has changed strategy here by giving the strong role of his tale to Evelyn. Evelyn could stand for Eve enticing the man she has chosen to play with his mind in the story, Adam, an absolute idiot in the hands of this Eve. This Evelyn cast her spell on this man just to prove a point in her thesis.

This is a role reversal for Mr. LaButte since he has told the story with a man's point of view before. Adam plays the role of the handicapped secretary of Mr. LaButte's In the Company of Men, in that he is ridiculed by the all powerful Evelyn and reduced to nothing in the process. Don't ever mess around with a powerful woman who wants to prove a point! This Evelyn doesn't mince words, or fool around, she goes for the jugular.

There are a lot of symbolism hidden in the plot in the form of theater plays presented at, get this, Mercy College. Medea, Hedda Gabler, even Pygmalion are in the background. They reinforce the idea that whatever Eve-lyn wants, Eve-lyn will get. She shows absolutely no mercy on her victims.

The story is static at best. It drags for 90something minutes. A lot of spectators left the screening I attended. They just didn't get it, and oh, most, if not, were men.

Rachel Weisz makes an attractive Evelyn. Paul Rudd is properly bewitched, bothered and bewildered by his lady Eve. Gretchen Mol's role is somewhat of a puzzle. Finally, Frederick Weller plays the confused dude who is made a fool by Evelyn too and ends up losing his sweetheart as well.

Perhaps opening the play in a different way would have helped this film because it just feels as though is filmed theater.

Meek college student Adam Sorenson (Paul Rudd) works at an art museum. He tries to get Evelyn Ann Thompson (Rachel Weisz) to step away from a sculptor but she plans to paint a penis on the 'untrue' covered statue. The cool chick starts making changes with the pathetic loser. It even gets the attention of his best friend Phillip (Frederick Weller)'s girlfriend Jenny (Gretchen Mol). However Evelyn has ulterior motives which leads to a devastating ending.

This is director Neil LaBute's play. It's basically four speaking parts. That can be very odd for the average movie goer. It feels like a play set outside in the world. There is something original about this movie. It's beautifully shot. I like the premise. It has great actors. The reveal is brutal but I do wish for more emotional fireworks. It could be more devastating. Adam claims that he can't show his face on the street. The movie should show some of that between the presentation and the confrontation. It would allow the final confrontation to be even more powerful.

The premise set in large type on the gallery wall of Evelyn's art school installation,"moralists have no place in an art gallery," seems such a blatant contradiction to her stated intentions (and by extension to Neil LaBute's) that it is hard not to suspect that there is some irony (or self-delusion) intended by its conspicuous signing as the backdrop for LaBute's compelling and open-ended denouement. (The quote is attributed to Han Suyin, pen name of the Chinese-born Elizabeth Comber, whose fascinating career, for those interested, is summarized on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Suyin). LaBute's thinly veiled allusion to the Fall played out by Adam and Evelyn, noted by many commentators, is perhaps the most fundamental and complex of morality tales, with Adam and Eve each owning their proper share of responsibility for the outcome. (The premonition of Original Sin is played out in the opening scene, when Evelyn, in her hubristic pursuit of "truth" prepares to spray paint a penis on the monumental, fig-leafed Hercules in the art gallery, to which Adam, by walking away, symptomatically acquiesces). It is difficult, as such, to find in this morality play a clear expression of LaBute's misogyny or misandry. Adam and Evelyn are fundamentally co-conspirators, perhaps true to their fallible, gender-determined natures, who in LaBute's canny postmodern twist on Original Sin, are left to contemplate the harsh realities of their hard-won knowledge. If the ostensible purpose of Evelyn's sophomoric MFA project is to rail against "indifference," surely in the metamorphosis of Adam, who hurls the painful, "potty-mouthed" expletive at Evelyn in the final scene ("F**k you, you heartless c**t"),we find that a greater knowledge has been won, as much about his own weakness as about the putative nature of women. Evelyn, for her part, played with complex ambiguity by Rachel Weisz in this final scene, exits conspicuously diminished by her "triumph." She no longer displays the confidence, and barely a shadow of the former diffidence that is her signature throughout the play. She has sacrificed all for her "art," which is laid bare as a dubious conceit regarding art's moral purposes. If her purpose was to expose Adam's lack of a center, she no less exposed her own. The gallery is empty -- none of the large audience that attended her performance (save Adam) is inspired to explore the installation, and she stands pathetically alone and forsaken, it seems, vulnerably clutching herself in the gallery (the body language seems to acknowledge representations of Eve handed down by Masaccio, Michelangelo, and Rodin). Paradoxically, she asks Adam as she makes her exit: "Are you coming?" The presumption is that in spite of the travesty she has vested upon Adam, they are inexorably linked to each other, each the fulfillment in their way of each other's worst nature. Adam demurs, of course (there is much to be said for knowledge, in spite of its costs). In this morality play, LaBute leaves it to us to sort out the consequences of fallible human behavior, and whether or not we find either of the principal players redeemable, he nevertheless leaves no doubt regarding our need to acknowledge the moral deficiencies of our archetypal ancestors. He is fundamentally a moralist in this regard, deeply rooted in the vague hope that art (in this case his, not Evelyn's) may transform us. In the last analysis, this is a humanistic impulse that transcends the superficial misanthropy suggested by the weaknesses of his all-too human characters.