John Hamburg (2009)
This is John Hamburg’s fourth feature and his first since Along Came Polly in 2004. (Hamburg’s screenwriting credits also include Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers.) Along Came Polly is about a risk analyst, with a personality to match his job; on honeymoon, he discovers his new wife having sex with her scuba diving instructor. He returns to New York to try and get his life back on track and meets up with Polly, a friend from high school and a free spirit: when his wife comes crawling back, he has to choose between the two women. I Love You, Man is the story of Peter, a Los Angeles realtor. He’s trying to find a buyer for the dream house property of Lou Ferrigno (the Incredible Hulk – TV version), although we gather he’s a little way out of his comfort zone: Peter prefers selling more conventional accommodation. At the start of the film, he proposes marriage to Zooey; she delightedly accepts and phones her two best girlfriends to tell them. Peter hasn’t anyone he’d really want to tell except his parents; at a family lunch with them, Zooey and his younger brother Robbie, we learn Peter has never had a good friend of his own sex – there isn’t an obvious candidate to be his best man at the wedding. I Love You, Man concerns Peter’s attempts to make a male pal; and what happens to him, his fiancée and the wedding preparations once he meets and gets friendly with Sydney (who makes a living making investments). Like Polly, Sydney is a free spirit – a decidedly louche and unreconstructed one.
Since 2004, Judd Apatow has broken through to such an extent that a comedy like I Love You, Man now seems to be part of the Apatow ‘dude movie’ genre even though he wasn’t involved in it. In the last four years, Apatow has directed The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. He wrote the first of those, as well as – among others – Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. He produced all of these pictures except Zohan, in addition to – among even more others – Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Paul Rudd, who plays Peter in I Love You, Man, was in the cast of four of those films; I Love You, Man is the third time he and Jason Segel (Sydney), who played the lead in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, have acted together. I’ve not seen Along Came Polly or any Apatow picture except The 40 Year Old Virgin, where most of the stuff involving the main character and his male friends is dumb and dreary but which is enjoyable thanks to the performances and chemistry of Steve Carell and Catherine Keener. I’d not heard of I Love You, Man when I saw a trailer for it at the Odeon a few weeks ago. Some of the jokes included in the trailer (eg a conversation about farting) delighted the audience; others (eg a gay kiss) silenced them. This made me quite interested to see the film, since when I’ve noticed a few, mostly favourable reviews of it.
It may be unfair on John Hamburg and Larry Levin, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay, to see I Love You, Man entirely in the context of Judd Apatow’s product but I suspect this film – which is shallow and surprising, entertaining and depressing – may be overpraised because it modifies some Apatow ingredients and because it seems relatively ambiguous overall. As I understand the Apatow world, the men in it are typically slobby, profane and infantile. They have or want relationships with girls who are not only physically desirable but who are relatively grown up, focused on and successful in their careers. In I Love You, Man, both Peter and Zooey are serious about their work; in the early stages at least, it’s Zooey and her group of friends who talk freely and lewdly about their sex lives (or lack of them). The motor of the story and the primary emotional relationship in the film are Peter’s search for social-platonic friendship with another man rather than a romantic-sexual liaison with a girl. We’re interested in what effect the friendship has on Peter’s relationship with Zooey – but that relationship isn’t of much interest in itself. When Peter sees that the man in his life is jeopardising his future with Zooey, he breaks off from Sydney and says it’s better if he doesn’t even attend the wedding. The climax to I Love You, Man is the marriage ceremony: unknown to Peter, Zooey re-invites Sydney at the last minute and he turns up just as the exchange of vows between Peter and Zooey is about to begin. It’s delayed by a series of I-love-you-man one-liners exchanged by Peter and Sydney before the minister nervously moves to resume the bride-and-groom dialogue.
The script retains enough lively, crude silliness to keep Apatow fans mainly happy – and to obscure what may be the subversive side to the material. In getting to be mates with Sydney, Peter doesn’t seem to find the inner slob in himself. He seems genuinely to have the new experience of making friends with another male – and, to some extent, so does Sydney. The cinema references in the film are instructive. Robbie, who’s gay but more tuned in than his older brother to the cultural credentials of being a real man, advises Peter on ‘man dates’. When Robbie says, ‘I mean, you’re not going to be taking them to see The Devil Wears Prada‘, Peter replies spontaneously, ‘God, I love that movie’, at first unaware of the solecism. Later on, he admits to Sydney that one of his happiest evenings recently was sharing a bottle of wine, making a salad and watching Chocolat with Zooey. After the split with Peter, Sydney – alone in his ‘man cave’ – watches Chocolat too: at the wedding, he lies smilingly and effortfully that he found the film ‘delightful’. But we realise too that Peter’s viewing habits haven’t been changed by the influence of Sydney, that Peter and Zooey will resume their weekly routine of watching HBO on a Sunday evening. It could well be lack of nerve that causes Hamburg to de-emphasise this but it’s a shrewd move on his part. It doesn’t alienate what I’m assuming to be the core audience; it also gives the picture a bit of tension that spelling out the-moral-of-the-story would deprive it of.
As someone who prefers I Love You, Man to Chocolat but likes The Devil Wears Prada better than either, I’m perhaps naturally ambivalent about Hamburg’s film. There’s plenty to enjoy but I felt dispirited throughout by the characters, except for Peter’s parents, and I came out feeling downhearted. (It’s because their lives seem so contentedly trivial and self-absorbed – I know this sounds pompously solemn, given the tone of the material.) What’s enjoyable is provided mainly by Paul Rudd as Peter. Pleasant-looking but physically unremarkable apart from his almost comically short legs, Rudd pitches perfectly Peter’s congenital unease with the words and gestures of macho joshing – the high-fiving, the shoulder-punching. He’s great at Peter’s repeated failed attempts to do funny accents. Big, ungainly Jason Segel complements Rudd not just physically but in the style of his performance: amusing enough, he’s a less technically assured and varied comedian yet that may help to make his presence more expressive – there’s a clumsy neediness about Sydney which is more touching for remaining implicit.
Rashida Jones is proficient and likeable as Zooey, although the part is impersonally written. As her fast-and-loose-talking friend Denise, Jaime Pressly – who is like a crude younger sister of Michelle Pfeiffer – makes a bigger impression. The relaxed, droll J K Simmons does wonders with his few lines as Peter’s father and Jane Curtin is agreeable, if obvious, as his mother. Others include Rob Huebel (as Peter’s rivalrous jerk of a work colleague), Jon Favreau (Denise’s rebarbative husband), Sarah Burns (Zooey’s man-less girlfriend), Andy Samberg (Robbie), and Thomas Lennon (a gay man on a date with Peter who gets the wrong idea about him). Lou Ferrigno plays himself. Mather Zickel – who recently made a good impression in a very different film about wedding preparations (Rachel Getting Married) – does the same here in the small part of a temperamental opponent at Peter’s fencing class.
16 April 2009
