I Love You, Man

I Love You, Man

111 Minutes

Let’s forget for a moment everything you already know about this film. Let’s forget for a moment everything you know about Judd Apatow’s little comedy cavalcade altogether. Beneath I Love You, Man’s shiny, sleek exterior lies something a little darker, a little more ferocious. You see, I Love You, Man is really Fight Club for idiots. And I don’t mean that in a bad way; in fact, it’s quite the opposite. The message of Fight Club could stand to be poked and prodded a bit and made into a product a mainstream audience will eat up and love and not even consider that what they’re being sold is slightly different from the norm. At its heart the two films are essentially arguing the same thing: isn’t it time we all grew a spine and became a little more direct?

Of course, I Love You, Man states this a little more subtly. Peter (Paul Rudd) is your typical middle-class office drone a la Edward Norton’s Jack until he meets the mysterious, charismatic Sydney (Jason Segel), who quickly becomes Peter’s own personal Tyler Durden. Peter had just been looking for a single-serving male friend to balance the gender ratio at his upcoming wedding, but it isn’t long before Peter is running into trouble as a result of the new freedom and directness he’s learned to appreciate after being around Sydney. At one point, Sydney even provokes Peter into letting out a real scream by telling him if he doesn’t do it, he’s going to punch him as hard as he can.

Sure, they have a “man cave” where they jam to Rush instead of having underground brawls, and the ending is inevitably happier than what Fight Club has to offer, but I Love You, Man treats it male bonding just as subversively. It’s also more solid than Superbad, funnier than Forgetting Sarah Marshall and smart enough to keep the gross out humor to a minimum and just let the characters speak for themselves.

Rudd and Segel are both especially excellent to watch, with their chemistry being infinitely more entertaining than any poop joke could hope to be. Rudd’s effortless charm and believably hapless persona make him a natural fit for the easygoing but relatively spineless Peter and Segel brings just the right amount of lonely desperation to the outwardly confident Sydney. And with a supporting cast featuring the likes of Jane Curtin, Jon Favreau, Jaime Pressly, Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg, director John Hamburg’s life must have been all that much easier. This is an ensemble without any weak links and unlike other heavily improvised comedies, the film doesn’t feel bloated; Hamburg knows when to reign in the cast and when to let them stretch out.

It doesn’t hurt that the romance at the heart of I Love You, Man doesn’t weigh the film down like the hastily-assembled, poorly-planned relationships at the center of so many comedies. Rudd and Rashida Jones are that rare on-screen couple that are both fun to watch, cute and relatively realistic. The problems they face aren’t too abnormal and they aren’t cleanly resolved, instead they boil to the surface slowly and just as slowly settle down once more.

I Love You, Man is more than just an Apatow-offshoot, it’s a comedy ahead of the pack and willing to take the risk of overestimating its audience rather than dumbing itself down. That faith alone would make it endearing, but the fact that it aims high and hits its target makes it all the more worthwhile. Of course, in a perfect world, keeping fart jokes out of your film and crafting believable characters wouldn’t even be considered aiming “high” in a comedy. But hey, small steps, people.