Ellis acts out of an innate sense of decency, sympathy and a need for friendship.
The need for friendship and a peer community is basic to our humanity throughout life, at 5, 65 or 95.
Best of all is The Story of the Little Gentleman by Catherine Wheels, a fable about the need for friendship and the challenges it entails.
Sure, Adrien reaches out to Brittany despite her better judgment because of some big void in Adrien's scarred soul that fuels a desperate need for friendship.
Unlike Matt in "Mattland," whose need for friendship gives urgency to his activities, Max is a self-satisfied dreamer, a somewhat odd fellow who doesn't exhibit any real yearning to connect.
When you think of a child's visceral need for friendship and acceptance by peers, it's terrible that this boy is denied those things, and that this combined with his father's violent disciplinarian tendencies pushes him over the edge into his disappearance, I guess I'll say.
Though he sometimes describes himself in the language of therapy (he writes of "filling my tortured need for friendship and affection and acceptance," etc)., the words he more often uses — words like "greed," "cowardice," "opportunism," "careerism," and "narcissism" — are not exactly drawn from the lexicon of moral relativism.
Holofcener's ear is so good that she can suggest an entire way of life with a few remarks, and she has an unusually intimate way with female characters, portraying women's need for friendship better than anyone else now working in film.
"My Friends", which for so sociable and generous a figure as White might have been a book in itself (and might aptly have been the name of one or more of his novels), is really all about himself, about his need for friendship, the way friendship can grow out of lust, and the exhilaration "almost to the point of hysteria" that he feels at the end of an evening spent with friends.
The need for affection, the need for love, the need for friendship, and the need for reflection.
