The movie....."is saved by two things."
Although “I
Love You, Man” is nearly unwatchable, it is saved by two things. First, by an
endearing performance by Paul Rudd as the really nice guy most women want, and
second, by addressing male friendship.
The plot:
Peter proposes, Zoë accepts; they are ecstatic, and the wedding must be planned.
Surrounded by a group of friends with whom she shares everything, Zoë has no
trouble at all picking her bridesmaids. Peter can’t even imagine who he mig ht
ask to be his best man. And so he undertakes a search to make a new friend who
might qualify.
At various
times in my own family I watched five men wrestle with the same predicament.
They make dear husbands, but to get to be a husband they had to find a best man
and ushers to meet the requirements of the contemporary American wedding and
they came up sputtering. All their friends had been girls. Like Peter, their
idea of the heavenly life was to spend evenings with the women they loved,
forget men friends.
So Peter
tries to fill the wedding slots. He begins by doing guy things like playing
poker, swilling beer, and projectile vomiting. Who to pick? Certainly not the
vomit victim who is a beast; nor any of the guys turned up by his gay brother.
Just as he begins to understand that “there are no rules for male friendships,”
he meets Sidney (Jason Segel) who becomes his mentor in such things as the
etiquette of fist bumps, bongs, bicycles, music and women. Trying mightily to be
cool, Peter stumbles on the words and bumbles on the actions of the man world.
This is clearly a man who wants to spend his evenings at home with his head on
Zoë’s shoulder.
If all this
sounds thin, it is. But then there’s saving grace #2: Paul Rudd. He creates a
sweet guy whose love for Zoë is simple and complete. When he says “I want to
spend my life with you,” he means it absolutely. You know he will help with the
kids, watch TV with her in the evenings, and mow the grass on Sundays – if only
he can find a few guys to stand up for him on20June 30th, the wedding day.
That’s the only suspense in the plot. Bear in mind that Sidney’s mentoring of
Peter is soaked in a waterfall of contemporary sex slang and imagery which can
be offensive or quite funny depending on your own attitude and considering the
content is delivered at warp speed.
It’s good to
see Jane Curtin back in the role of Peter’s common sense mother, Joyce. She and
her husband Oz (JK Simmons) are good humored parents, a living explanation of
why their son is who he is. Peter exposes himself to all manner of garbage in
order to like guy stuff before realizing he was right in the first place – home
with Zoë.