I Love You, Man

Clever title. See, it’s a movie about male bonding, about how platonic male friendships compare and sometimes compete with sexual male-female relationships.

That doesn’t sound very original, I know, after The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up and Wedding Crashers and Role Models and all the rest. But there’s a twist.

Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) doesn’t have any buddies.

He’s well liked. He has had lots of girlfriends. He’s engaged to the attractive and sociable Zooey (Rashida Jones). But he has no truly close friends to speak of. It’s an omission that only really hits home now that he’s casting around for a best man. Then there’s the conversation he overhears between Zooey and her girlfriends – all of whom are seriously alarmed about the prospect of losing their pal to a husband obsessed with his wife to the exclusion of all else. With his gay brother Robbie (Andy Samberg) as his guide, Peter embarks on that trickiest of pursuits, the best bud.

It’s pretty mechanical, but enough of a new wrinkle to give John Hamburg’s I Love You, Man some legs, and Rudd and Jason Segel run with it – albeit without breaking into a sweat.

First up, inevitably, there’s the blind date with the engaging, intelligent, witty architect who gets the wrong end of stick and leans in for some tonsil hockey at the end of the evening.

Then there’s Peter’s doomed attempt to fit in with his fiancée’s best friend’s husband, Barry (Jon Favreau). But he can’t play poker and he can’t chug his beer, so that’s a bust.

Eventually he bumps into Sydney (Segel, from Forgetting Sarah Marshall), an unusually forthright fellow who doesn’t appear to exhibit any of Peter’s inhibitions around guy-dom, but who doesn’t hold it against his new pal.

It’s not long before this confirmed bachelor is inviting Peter back into the recesses of his “man-cave” to play karaoke-guitar to Rush songs and open up about his life in a way he’s never done before. Here at last is the boy friend he’s been looking for.

Laidback on the surface, but a little scary when you get to know him, Sydney is another subtly screwy comic creation from Segel, a tall, ordinary-looking bloke whose diffidence can flick over into intensity in a moment, but who remains fundamentally likeable despite everything.

From Zooey’s point of view Sydney turns into more competition than she bargained for. His habit of blurting out what he really thinks makes life a little awkward. And she can’t help noticing how her fiancé starts bailing on HBO night to hang out with his prospective best man.

Rudd is very funny and believable as a slightly uptight individual who’s probably too in touch with his feminine side for his own good, a nice guy who will never ever be cool. Peter’s embarrassingly lame attempts to loosen up are the real grist here. There’s a rich running gag about his failure to come up with an appropriate nickname for his new buddy ("Jobin"?!) and the foot-in-mouth disease that strikes whenever he tries to get slangy.

The movie loses some of its freshness in the run-in, caught up in the pretty bow-ties that are mandatory, apparently, in the rom-com world. But there are plenty of laughs along the way, and this Rudd-Segel odd couple combo is a winner. As for the girls, as usual they’re left fighting over scraps.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com