The American Spectator : I Love You, Man

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I Love You, Man

By James Bowman on 4.3.09 @ 6:02AM

Permanent adolescence cannot be the goal of genuine friendship.

Director John Hamburg's I Love You, Man, which he also co-wrote with Larry Levin, purports to be a movie about male friendships in middle age, but really it is an apologia for our culture's extension of adolescence into middle age. The friendship under consideration here is between 30-something Los Angeles real estate agent Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) and Sydney Fife (Jason Segel), a guy he meets at one of his open houses who cheerfully confesses that he has come only for the food. Recently engaged, Peter has been shamed by overhearing his fiancée, Zooey (Rashida Jones), tell a group of her girlfriends that "I think his mom's his best friend." Even his younger gay brother, Robbie (Andy Samberg), a fitness instructor, seems to know more about male-bonding than he does, while his dad (J.K. Simmons) woundingly says that Robbie is his own best friend. Naturally, Peter turns to Robbie for advice. Hollywood's Magic Gay Guy is today what its Magic Negro was a decade or so ago.

Guided by Robbie, Peter goes on a series of "man-dates" to try to get himself some friends. Like the rest of the movie, these are not nearly so funny as we might have expected them to be. You'd think you would be in howls of laughter when Peter throws up over Barry (Jon Favreau), the husband of one of Zooey's friends, or gets kissed by Doug (Thomas Lennon), who thinks he's gay, but there it is. If you're anything like me, you aren't. Nor are Peter's halting and embarrassing attempts to invent his own cool slang, which come out sounding more like Rob Schneider's photo-copier guy on Saturday Night Live, the hoot you would expect. As a result, neither do you get quite the kick you're supposed to get once Peter, having given up his quest, runs into Sydney.

Besides the fact that he cruises multimillion-dollar open houses for the food and the chance to meet rich divorcées, here are a few things you ought to know about Sydney. He is a huge fan of the aging Canadian rock band, Rush, and he enjoys both trying to play their music on his own electric guitar and acting like a teenager -- which, compared to them, he almost is -- at their concerts. He has a dog named Anwar Sadat (because, supposedly, he looks like the late Egyptian president) whose mess he refuses to pick up, much to the distress of several passers-by. He has a special chair, adjacent to various unguents and embrocations and in front of one of the many TV sets in his "man-cave" that he uses for masturbation. At an engagement party for Peter and Zooey and in the presence of their family and friends, he earnestly instructs the bride-to-be in the advisability of making herself more available for a particular act of oral sex.

If all this makes him sound like a less than attractive character, that's because he is. And if you think that that would be a serious drawback to a movie about friendship, it is. The odd thing is that Messrs. Hamburg and Levin don't know this. Either that, or they are under the impression that Sydney's oafishness and immaturity makes him more lovable. Or, a third possibility, they just don't care, since the point of Sydney is not really for him to be Peter's friend but to be his lifeline back to the comforting world of immaturity and adolescent irresponsibility on the eve of his marriage. And if that seems unlikely, given Peter's comparative maturity, they needn't care about that either, since the lifeline is really for the audience, not for Peter.

The idea here is perhaps that a man needs a friend to supply him with an excuse to stop being a man and regress to adolescence. That's why, at one level, the film is all about manhood. But it is a freelancer's manhood -- manhood cut loose from its social dimension and the honor culture that goes with it and, therefore, something that kids are free to make up as they go along. "I'm a man, Peter. I have an ocean of testosterone flowing through my veins," says Sydney on one occasion when he is confronted by a man who has stepped in his dog's feces, which he leaves to foul the public footways on principle. Turning on the man aggressively and scaring him away, he blames "society" for trying to arrest his aggressive impulses. "The truth is we are animals, and we have to let it out sometimes."

Later, after a similar confrontation with a bodybuilder, Sydney turns tail and runs for his life. So much for his lovingly tended aggressive impulses. There's not even any attempt to hide the fact that his various rationalizations for bad behavior are merely nonsensical excuses for an adolescent delight in bad manners as a token of personal authenticity. In the end, we're meant to think that Peter may have helped Sydney to grow up a little. "You called me on some of my issues," says the latter as prelude to the inevitable, "I love you, man." But the whole weight of both the drama and the comedy goes in the other direction

About the Author

James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (16) | Leave a comment

Crusader| 4.3.09 @ 8:51AM

What do you expect from a society that more and more gives up freedom in search of "security" from the nanny state? We are becoming a bunch of chronological "adults" but emotional teenagers. You see it every day in advertising, TV, movies like this sick piece of garbage. Growing up means having to be responsible.

I call them "kidults." I think it all started with those stupid truck window stickers of Calvin peeing on an opposing truck manufacturer's emblem. You know, having that sticker on your truck might have been cool when you were 16, but now that you're a 40 y/o, balding, fat computer programmer with a wife, a mortgage, and three kids, it's just kinda, well, sad. :(

Grow the eff up!

Daniel H. Fernald, Ph.D.| 4.3.09 @ 10:21AM

As C.S. Lewis might have said of contemporary Western males, we are become "men without chests"--as hollow as those Eliot foresaw.

Bowman's general take on the movie strikes me as correct, although his fastidiousness does get the better of him in his analysis of the cruder side of manliness. Inside every cultured man about town is a pipsqueak Al Bundy who needs "venting" every now and again. That, and not the vain and shallow attempt to extend adolescence (which Bowman rightly condemns), is the true value of "male bonding." I pity the chap who can count on one hand the number of times he's gotten sloppy drunk and swapped incredible lies with some equally intemperate male friends.

Although those days are mostly in the past for me, I am proud to say that I ran out of toes to count on sometime in my early twenties.

Every wife who's managed to remain happily married for more than six months will appreciate the truth of this. She learns to ignore her husband's occasional public farting, an embarrassing friend or two, and his mule-headed stubbornness in the face of her insistence that he pluck that unkempt, bushy "unibrow" of his (or at least let HER do it).

Although she may openly scold him (most often with justice), some part of her will feel secretly relieved that her man--if not always elegant or refined--is at least not a metrosexual "hollow" one.

Cheers!

Daniel

Paramus (NJ) Chapter President
NO MA'AM

Indiana Alex| 4.3.09 @ 11:11AM

I was prepared to really dislike this movie, but i actually laughed a lot.

I probably wouldn't see it again, but i thought it was funny.

Alan Brooks| 4.3.09 @ 3:00PM

no one will ever go broke underestimating our immaturity.

Lebowski Jeffrey| 4.3.09 @ 6:51PM

You seem to be a sad sad man.
I laughed and so did the entire audience in my theater. Lighten up a little and enjoy life.
You probably thought George Bush was a smart man too. So sad.

LawhawkSF| 4.4.09 @ 4:21AM

And if you're unfortunate to have a chest, be sure to pluck, shave or wax it lest you look like a man.

Alan Brooks| 4.4.09 @ 8:09PM

no wait, that's no one ever went broke overestimating our immaturity.

David Govett| 4.5.09 @ 4:54AM

A struggle for America's future is underway, so we're way beyond movies.

Alan Brooks| 4.5.09 @ 10:11AM

what was that great piece last week discussing among other things the cellphone generation and the youths who talk about their sex lives in public?
today, sex isnt shocking-- it is just boring. and gays aren't daring anymore, they are just pushing for a piece of the pie

whiterb| 4.5.09 @ 12:09PM

For a long time now, I have not been able to take movies seriously. Then, something comes along and you are pleasantly surprised. The above movie seems to be the basic run of the mill stuff. I certainly will not go to the movie house and sit with the audience. I am officially trying hard not to be a member of the audience. The audience is ruining my nation. But, in the winter I will seek out some movies at the rental place. This past winter, I did not rent any of the previous years academy award winners . At least to the best of my knowledge. I did like " Savages " which I considered kind of a poignant family values movie, but what do I know ? Maybe it did win an academy award ? I have no idea. I try to keep my movie and cable tv expenditures low. Why give those creeps money to destroy the USA. It is sorta like buying German wine in 1939 from my vantage point.

Alan Brooks| 4.5.09 @ 4:12PM

I think it was David Kahane in NR who wrote that they are so anti-American in Hollywood because they hate themselves.

Alan Brooks| 4.5.09 @ 8:02PM

Hollywood is a a vicious meritocracy, which is slightly admirable except they are going way too far in moral relativism of course. "We can do what we want, so why can't everyone else?" So if the talented, autonomous but morally suspect -- not to mention criminal--Michael Jacksons/Roman Polanskis can do their thingies and get away with it; can everybody?
You'd better hope not. Now these two are extreme examples but...

Carol| 4.7.09 @ 3:11AM

Amazing that Whiterb mentioned "Savages"
because that was the only movie I liked out of
20 I rented....Hated "Synedoche, NY", "Rachel
Getting Married", and "Slumdog Millionaire".
French film "Look at Me" was pretty good.
Dickens adaptions: "Bleak House", "Our Mutual
Friend", and "Little Dorritt" were excellent!!