by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Friday night my
husband Charles came home unexpectedly early from work last night and I took
advantage by running a movie, I Love You, Man, a 2009 comedy starring Paul Rudd and Jason Segal
five years after Rudd’s star-making turn in a film called The 40-Year-Old
Virgin. This time Rudd’s
character, real-estate broker Peter Klaven, doesn’t have any trouble attracting
(or bedding) women — he’s gone through a series of girlfriends before finally
getting “serious” with Zooey Rice (Rashida Jones), to the point of proposing to
her and booking the resort where they first had sex (only oral, since she was
having her period at the time —one of the bits of way too much information writers John Hamburg, who
also directed, and Larry Levin feel obliged to give us about the characters’
sex lives). He proposed to Zooey (whose name I imagined throughout the movie
was given the classier spelling “Zoë” — and let’s face it, Rashida Jones looks more like a Zoë than a Zooey) on the site of a
real-estate development he wants to build as soon as he gets the money for it
with his commission on selling “the Ferrigno house.”
“As in Lou Ferrigno?” I
wondered — and not only is it a reference to Lou Ferrigno’s house (though I
suspect what we actually see is the famous Richard Neutra house in Hollywood
commissioned by and built for director Josef von Sternberg, though when his
career fell on hard times he was forced to sell it and the buyer, Ayn Rand,
typically told people she had commissioned it and it had been built especially for her), but
Ferrigno is actually in this movie playing himself. What kicks off the plot of
this film is that, though Peter has a fiancée, a wedding date and a family
consisting of dad Oswald (J. K. Simmons, whom I knew as police psychiatrist Dr.
Emil Skoda from the original Law and Order), mom (Jane Curtin from the original cast of Saturday Night Live) and Gay brother Robbie (played by one of the
film’s producers, Andy Samberg, after the actor they originally got proved so
unsatisfactory they fired him during the first week of production), whom dad
always said he liked best (apparently dad is a good enough liberal he makes a
big show of accepting his Gay son while his straight son gets lost in the
shuffle). At least Robbie, unlike virtually all movie Gay men, is seen in romantic or sexual situations with other
men; he explains to Peter that in his job as a physical fitness trainer, he
likes to cruise his straight clients because “they’re more of a challenge” (and
indeed we see one such man apparently reciprocating Robbie’s flirting).
But
with his wedding date coming up quickly Peter realizes with a start that he
doesn’t have any close male friends he can ask to be his best man, so he sets
about looking for one. Most of I Love You, Man is a one-joke movie, but the one joke is
reasonably funny and sometimes hits surprisingly close to home. The one joke is
that Peter’s attempts to find a male best friend — even though a best friend is
all he’s interested in — comes
off surprisingly like a courtship ritual: the anxieties of meeting someone for
the first time, of wondering whether it’s too soon to call him again and
waiting for him to call you, the dreary attempts at dates, the disappointments (one of Peter’s
friend-dates turns out to be an 89-year-old man named Mel Stein, played by
Murray Gershenz, and when he confesses he used a somewhat younger photo for his
Internet profile we wonder how much younger and whether the original was on daguerreotype or tintype),
the misunderstandings — one O.K. date is with a man named Doug (Thomas Lennon,
who played the basketball coach in the Zac Efron vehicle 17 Again, another silly movie from the backlog I ran
because I wanted a respite from all the depressing news stories), who ends the
evening by planting a big fat kiss on Peter’s mouth. It seems Doug really is
Gay, thought that Peter was too, and is disappointed when Peter breaks off
their budding relationship — so much so that when he runs into Peter and the
new-best-friend he finally ends up with, Doug assumes he’s Peter’s new boyfriend
and says, “I just wish I could take back that kiss … because now I know it was
the taste of betrayal. … It was the taste of betrayal … you fucking whore!”
(Now, how much you want to bet that Doug ends up with Peter’s genuinely Gay
brother Robbie by the end of the movie? Yup, that was a plot twist I saw coming from 100 miles
away.)
The new-best-friend Peter finally ends up with is Sydney Fife (Jason
Segal), whose card says he’s an investment counselor — which could mean
anything from he’s super-rich but likes to slum it to he’s a bottom-feeding
wanna-be with delusions of making tons of money in the market — and whom Peter
meets (meets-cute, really) when Sydney shows up for an open house he’s showing
at the Neutra-Sternberg-Rand-Ferrigno place just to sample the hors d’oeuvres.
Also in the dramatis personae are Zooey’s best friends Hailey (Sarah Burns), who’s single and
man-hungry; and Denise (Jaime Pressly), who’s platinum-haired and married to a
boor named Barry who decides to help Peter learn male-bonding by inviting him
to his weekly poker night (shades of A Streetcar Named Desire, for which Tennessee Williams’ working title was
actually The Poker Night!).
Barry, Peter and the other players end up in a beer-drinking contest (one
wonders if straight guys who party together always end up acting like such total boors) to see who
can drink the most mugs in one swallow, and Peter seems to have “won” when he
suddenly heaves and projectile-vomits all over Barry’s suit-clad chest. So the
writers can cross off the obligatory puke scene for a modern-day comedy — just
as they crossed off the obligatory fart scene at the open house when Sydney
spotted a young straight couple who were there to dream about buying a house
they couldn’t possibly afford and he notices the male half of this couple
clenching his ass cheeks under his white pants trying to repress it. (This is
one of the main reasons I generally don’t like modern-day comedies and yearn
for the days of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Fields, Laurel and Hardy and the Marx
Brothers, who could make us laugh without resorting to gross depictions of
involuntary bodily functions.)
Nonetheless, Peter and Sydney become best buds
largely because Sydney breaks down Peter’s inhibitions; they bond over a common
love of the music of Rush (it had to be a band that was still working together and could be signed to
appear in the film — which they do, at an impromptu bar concert Sydney gets an
invite to and brings Peter and Zooey; the two guys start singing along with the
band while Zooey couldn’t be more bored — without asking for stratospheric fees
that would have broken the budget Paramount and DreamWorks assigned to this
film) and a fun-loving spirit that leads them to do taco dates and drives down
Muscle Beach (and we’re supposed to think Peter doesn’t want people to think he’s Gay?) and other movie
indicia that Sydney is breaking down his inhibitions and giving him a sense of
fun. Meanwhile, Peter’s offensive co-worker Tevin Downey (Rob Huebel) tries to
horn in on the Ferrigno house and grab half of Peter’s potential commission,
and he boasts that he’s a more credible real-estate salesperson because he’s
advertised himself everywhere, even on cakes of toilet-bowl sanitizers — somehow he thinks he can
sell more houses if people remember him as a guy whose picture they’ve peed on.
(So the writers can check off urination along with vomiting and passing gas as
one of the supposedly “funny” ingredients modern-day film comedy makers for
some reason think are obligatory.) So Sydney asks to “borrow” $8,000 from Peter
and says he needs it for an “investment,” but what he really uses it for is a series of ridiculously tasteless
billboards depicting Peter as a beach-blanket stud and as James Bond — and
these have the same effect on Peter as the shot of Jack Benny’s attorney
character stealing candy from a baby in the 1942 “B” The Meanest Man in the
World (a film which could have
been a masterpiece if it had had an “A” budget and Preston Sturges as director)
had on his career: the big-money
offers keep coming in and he easily sells the Ferrigno house and gets the big
commission he needed to start his development project. (Ya remember his development
project?)
At one point Sydney
embarrasses Peter and nearly breaks up him and Zooey by giving explicit details
of Peter’s and Zooey’s sex life Peter told Sydney thinking they’d be kept
confidential, but by the time the film is over Peter and Zooey have reconciled,
as have Peter and Sydney, and the wedding goes off as planned (though I must say I could have wished they could have turned it
into a double wedding and married off Robbie and Doug as well! It’s the
romantic in me). Throughout much of I Love You, Man I saw it as a screwball comedy in modern drag, and
wondered how it might have been done in the 1930’s with Ralph Bellamy as Peter,
Carole Lombard as Zooey and Cary Grant as Sydney — though in that version Zooey
would have decided Peter was terminally boring and would have run off with
Sydney at the end!
