Movies: I love you, man * * *
(16, GENERAL release)
GREAT MATES: Paul Rudd and Jason Segelv deliver the laughs in I Love You, Man
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Friday April 17 2009
Increasingly the go-to guy for anyone casting an off-kilter romantic comedy, Paul Rudd is a talented comic actor with that rare gift of seeming to be the poker-faced everyman while actually providing most of the laughs.
He was one of the few special guests who managed to hold their own with the tightly-knit Friends ensemble (playing Phoebe's boyfriend), and since then he's really come into his own as a comic leading man.
He has a kind of unobtrusive plainness that more overtly clownish actors can bounce off, but is more than capable of milking the slapstick himself when required.
In John Hamburg's I Love You Man he's teamed with up-and-coming funnyman Jason Segel (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) in a story that revives and gently lampoons the conventions of the buddy movie. Rudd is Peter Klaven, a mild-mannered real estate salesman who at the start of the film proposes to, and is enthusiastically accepted by, his lovely fiancée Zooey (Rashida Jones).
She immediately begins phoning her girlfriends, but when she asks Peter if there are any male friends he'd like to call, he realises he doesn't have any. When they go to dinner at Peter's parents' house, Zooey is told that her husband-to-be was always a 'girlfriend guy', and that any childhood buddies he had have long since fallen by the wayside.
When Peter hears Zooey on the phone worrying about his lack of friends, he decides he'd better find some. Initially, he turns to his gay brother, Robbie (Andy Samberg) for advice, but this proves unwise and leads to a series of regrettable 'man-dates'.
And things get worse when Zooey persuades him to join a card game organised by her best friend's husband, and he throws up all over his host. Another man he goes out for a drink with ends the night by planting a 'frenchie' on him, and when he uses the internet to meet another potential buddy, it turns out to be a pensioner.
With time running out before their wedding Peter doesn't even have a best man, but just when he's given up all hope he meets Sydney (Jason Segel).
Peter is trying to sell the Los Angeles home of Lou Ferrigno (who played The Hulk in the 1970s TV show), and when Sydney shows up at a viewing, the two men hit it off.
Tentatively, they meet for drinks, and Peter finds that Sydney is someone he can really talk to. A kind of clever slacker, Sydney says he's an investment broker but dresses like a surfer bum and lives in a shack near the ocean. He's a free spirit, an eternal teenager, and as the weeks pass he and Peter cement their bond by jamming in his garage to the dulcet tones of 1970s rock band, Rush.
But while Zooey is initially delighted by Peter's new friendship, gradually Sydney's freewheeling ways begin to rub off on him, threatening his newfound happiness.
I Love You, Man is not that far from being a very fine comedy. If its subject matter is hardly original, the film provides a thought-provoking enquiry into the whole business of male friendship, its various taboos and conventions, and the extreme difficulties of initiating it.
The terrifying awkwardness of male interaction is excruciatingly examined and for at least the first hour I Love You, Man has plenty of very funny moments. Rudd does the hapless everyman to a T, and he and Segel's contrasting comic styles complement each other well.
Segel has a likeable screen presence, and his casual clowning masks considerable timing and expertise.
The problem is his character is a bit of a symbol, a scarcely believable composite of male freedom and rebelliousness.
The film wears its sentiment on its sleeve, and as it reaches its conclusion its central joke starts to wear thin.
It has its moments, though, some of them genuinely hilarious.
- Paul Whitington
