I Love You, Man

The ad campaign for I Love You, Man, pitches it as a font of quotable dialogue; posters and T-shirts trumpet out-of-context phrases like "Sweet, Sweet Hanging" and "Return the Favor" as instant classic movie lines. This is riduclous for a couple of reason, mostly because you can't just declare movie lines "quotable" by advertising them a such, and also because the actual comedy in I Love You, Man is based on the characters failing to find the right words in social situations. Peter Klaven, played to fussy perfection by Paul Rudd, is a freshly engaged LA real estate agent coming to the realization that he has no male friends after years of concentrating on his girlfriends. In his quest to find a best man for his wedding, Peter discovers that he has lost the ability to relate to other men in an intimate way. The funniest parts of the movie are watching Rudd flail his way through a series of humiliating attempts at dude-speak. Rudd draws out the awkward pauses with masterful timing, his facial expression a mixture of humiliation and incredulity at the words coming out of his mouth.

The plot is standard issue romantic comedy boilerplate with a man-tastic twist. Rudd struggles to find a male friend in a series of humorous montages, starts a tentative friendship with blunt-talking slacker Jason Segal, and, of course, this creates conflict between Rudd and his fiancee Rashida Jones. It's all played in a minor key: the emotional conflicts are muted and there is little in the way of drama. The extremely low stakes are to the film's advantage, because the plot itself is familiar in the extreme, and keeping the proceedings low-key keeps the focus away from the contrived scenario and on the easy, authentic interplay between the characters. Writer-director John Hamburg, veteran of amiable but unambitious comedies like Meet the Parents, has constructed a shambling, unfocused chuckle-fest that annoys when it tries to do any kind of heavy plot lifting, but enchants when the actors are given room to take conversations into absurd territory. There's been some criticism of the post-Apatow tendency of film comedies to compensate for underdeveloped scripts with indiscriminate improvisation, and when the actors don't have the chops. or the director doesn't trust them to create memorable character moments on the fly, improv-heavy comedies can be a sloppy, brutal chore. The presence of ace improvisers like Rudd, Segal and Jones, not to mention ringer supporting actors like Human Giant's Rob Huebel and Reno 911's Thomas Lennon, guarantee laughs. Great performances only go so far, however. What makes I Love You, Man memorable is the way it evokes a real and really painful facet of adult life; the increasingly difficulty of making new friends as you get older.