Movie Review: I Love You, Man

If you’ve somehow not yet noticed Paul Rudd’s subtle comic gifts, this is the movie — structured like a romantic comedy but with a friendly, gentle gender-bending twist — that makes them plain to see.

Paul Rudd has made invaluable contributions to a slew of movies (including Clueless, The Object of My Affection, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Role Models), nearly always in an ensemble or supporting role and just as often raising the quality level of the film.

In I Love You, Man, which offers him his showiest lead role yet, he gets to show his impressive light comedy touch. And he’s the real deal.

Rudd plays Peter Klaven, a thirtysomething Los Angeles real estate agent who meets Zooey, a woman who would appear to be his soulmate. When he gets engaged to Zooey, played by The Office’s radiant Rashida Jones, and they start planning the wedding, he suddenly realizes that he has so few if any male friends, he has no one to serve as his best man.

His family — mother Jane Curtin, younger and openly gay brother Andy Samberg, and father J.K. Simmons — confirm this, explaining that Peter has always had girl friends but never boy friends.

So Peter sets out on a slew of man-dates, most of them self-conscious and humiliating, in an effort to find someone with whom he can forge a quick friendship and then ask to be in the wedding party.

Among the candidates is free spirit Sydney Fife, played by Jason Segel (Forgetting Sarah Marshall), an unemployed man’s man who first turns up at one of Peter’s open houses in search of free food and newly divorced women.

The guys bond and start hanging out together, which, ironically, begins to bother Zooey, even though she’s happy that her husband-to-be has finally found a BFF.

Director John Hamburg (Along Came Polly, Safe Men), who also co-wrote the screenplays for Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers, co-wrote the undisciplined but insightful I Love You, Man screenplay with story writer Larry Levin. Their script offers a considerable and consistent number of laughs, and shows enough confidence in its soft and not necessarily convincing premise (Never addressed: Why not just have his brother be his best man?) to trust the audience to stay plugged in despite a minimum of narrative momentum.

Turns out that in a movie this humorous and audience-friendly, we hardly mind the virtual plotlessness. This is an aggressively casual affair — mostly, it’s just Rudd and Segal goofing around: the movie is as lazy as the characters — but spying on their improv-seasoned antics remains oddly entertaining.

Hamburg does stumble a bit in the last reel with one of those public conversations between two major characters while all the guests at a gathering stand there watching and listening: screenwriters seem addicted to this patently phony kind of movie climax.

But it’s Rudd, masterful underplayer that he is, who, in an expert, wonderfully nuanced performance as a nerdy guy trying to change his image, hits it out of the park, especially in his numerous strained attempts to fit in and be cool. He is, in those moments, quietly hilarious.

And he’s complemented effectively by Jason Segel, who contributes an appropriately relaxed turn as Oscar to Rudd’s Felix. And the odd-couple tandem are themselves complemented ably by the supporting cast, including Jon Favreau and Jaime Pressly as a very funny pair of bickering but well-matched spouses.

I Love You, Man is a smart and highly entertaining bromantic comedy. I liked it, man.