by Daniel Erenberg

I Love You, Man is a good film for only one reason. Its cast is phenomenal. Paul Rudd and Jason Segel carry this movie, completely elevating it beyond the rather uninspired material they are given. The film is also populated with such gifted comedic actors as Rashida Jones, Jon Favreau, Jaime Pressly, J.K. Simmons, Jane Curtin and Andy Samberg in appropriate supporting roles. This exact same script with a completely different cast would have resulted in something completely mediocre and unmemorable. But, dipping into the Judd Apatow casting pool ends up working as well for this film as it did for Role Models back in November, and director John Hamburg has given Rudd and Segel a supporting cast that can completely play off of their brilliance.

The structure of I Love You, Man is a charmer. It’s a romantic comedy about guys. Two guys become best friends, there’s a complication, they “break-up” and they somehow get back together and live happily ever after. And co-screenwriters Hamburg and Larry Levin give these two characters the proper motivations to seek each other out. Rudd plays the newly engaged Peter Klaven, who has always been a relationship guy, choosing to eschew male bonding in favor of coupling up with women. Segel plays Sydney Fife, a perpetual singleton left alone after all his drinking buddies have up and gotten lives and wives. After the set-up, the plot is fairly insignificant because the film becomes an excuse to put Rudd and Segel into situations where they are able to improvise dialogue and play off of each other. One of the best sequences comes when Segel first brings Rudd into his garage, tricked out with an absurd number of instruments, a massive Rush poster and a “masturbation station.” This leads to a long, but fascinatingly realistic scene where the two new bros discuss their masturbation habits. Segel’s disgusted look after Rudd admits to having masturbated to pictures of his own fiancée wearing a bikini is absolutely priceless.

It helps that director John Hamburg used to work on the Apatow series, Undeclared, which Segel was in. He shows that he’s very comfortable letting these actors just go off. Since Undeclared, Hamburg has been floundering in gross-out bullshit like Along Came Polly and, unfortunately, those tendencies come out a few times here, in ham-fisted sight gags involving dog shit, projectile vomit and Lou Ferrigno, but it is the verbal acrobatics of Rudd and Segel that is the whole show here. The two actors recently appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair, along with fellow Apatow actors Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill. The headline was “Legends of Comedy” (which sort of makes me feel bad for Martin Starr, Jay Baruchel, Bill Hader and Danny McBride) and it very well may not turn out to be the hyperbole that it seemingly is. Segel is now two-for-two, following leading roles in this and last year’s absolutely wonderful Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Rudd is on a seemingly endless streak of superb comedies, including lead roles in Role Models, Knocked Up and The 40 Year-Old Virgin (and let’s just ignore Over Her Dead Body, shall we?). “Legends of Comedy” it is, I guess. And I Love You, Man is another positive notch on their IMDB filmographies.

B+

Tags: i love you man paul rudd jason segel apatow
March 9, 2009 at 4:26pm ∞