Present Company is ostensibly about two young parents in a fading relationship who suffer cohabitation in a parent’s basement for the sake of their toddler, but director Frank Ross tells us what his film is really about in the first scene. The director stars as Buddy, an insensitive, immature twenty-something who is apprenticing in construction. We meet him on the job, where his co-worker has just opened a can of some kind of hazardous chemical. Not wanting to inhale the fumes, Buddy recoils. “I’ve got a long life ahead of me man,” he protests. A few lines later, assessing the work they’ve done, Buddy says, “We kind of glued ourselves into a corner, huh?” “Not me, man–you did it,” his co-worker responds.This is a movie about a boy stuck in a situation that feels interminable, who instead of taking responsibility for having glued himself in a corner, tries to share the blame with everyone around him. Too on-the-nose? Maybe, but it’s forgivable as a kind of thesis statement for a film that otherwise refuses a black-and-white analysis of its characters and their behavior. Somewhat less concerned with physical space than his last film, Hohokam, Present Company concentrates on making tangible the invisible space between people, and the lying, cheating and play-acting that we do to either transverse the space or willfully ignore it.

Buddy and Christy (Tamara Fana) have a kid of the age where, even if he’s surrounded by toys, all he seems to want to do is unravel a roll of paper towels. Little Mikey, though pre-verbal, seems to be psychic: he bangs his head against a window when his mother disparages his absent dad, and at the supermarket, when mommy starts flirting with a long-lost friend, he vigorously shakes his head. In each of his films, Ross has privileged performance over aesthetic concerns––and certainly, Present Company isn’t going to win any prizes for art direction or cinematography––but this kind of thing seems less like the product of acting and directing than a miraculous accident. Still, if naturalism is something Ross has never had trouble conjuring, with Present Company he shows a really impressive ability to construct that naturalism around an unknown quantity.

Ross is becoming masterful at depicting the way a conversation gradually changes tone, charting in real time how a light, laughter-lined moment can be eroded by an underlying, un-repressable frustration. Present Company offers a portrait of a relationship that doesn’t work, that can’t work for more than a minute or two before devolving into a round of conversational bumper cars. But fights in a Frank Ross movie aren’t like fights in other movies. They rarely explode, people rarely storm off. Arguments rarely motivate remorse or change. Mostly, the anger peters out. It’s absorbed into the fabric of a relationship, creating a stain that won’t go unnoticed later.

If Present Company is ultimately a bit too easy on Christy in demonizing her baby daddy’s inability to function in the relationship, it fully humanizes Buddy in a scene in which he’s seduced by a younger, prettier model. While Mommy alternates between guilty flirtation and desperate domestic preservation, Daddy is running around town with a burlesque dancer who isn’t aware that her new love interest lives in a basement with the mother of his child. Buddy may be an asshole, but as we see when he’s actually given a physical and emotional outlet for his frustrations, he’s also desperate and afraid, and that’s manifesting itself in explosions of anger and id. It’s clear that, on the road he’s on, any kind of lasting happiness will be elusive. Never one to shy away from stagnation as a fact of life, Ross builds an emotional arc out of the tiny breakthrough that comes from months of flail.
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