Review: I Love You, Man (2009)

You want to know one of the worst feelings in the world? Walking out of the cinema after sitting through the credits gags for Paul Rudd-starrer I Love You, Man and seeing your wife on the floor surrounded by worried people. Yeah, that’s down pretty low in the emotional state rankings.
ILYM is a bromantic (zing!) comedy that carefully hits all the beats of the standard rom-com, but sets them between two guys who may or may not end up being friends (SPOILER: they end up being friends). The cinema was pretty hot, and Cal said she wasn’t feeling well and was going to head for the toilets, so I went to join our other moviegoing buddy, Pearce. He’d had to bail on sitting with us because on his other side was one of those guys you really don’t want to sit next to during a comedy. He laughed a lot at the comedy beats that weren’t really laugh-out-loud funny, and made I-don’t-know-what noises at the comedy beats that were actual LOLers. I don’t blame Pearce for bailing, because this movie was setting the guy off regularly. ILYM delivers some good gags, some real pearlers, but really that’s not the main appeal here. The charm of the movie is, in fact, its charm. Paul Rudd is great, all the more so for wrapping his everyday-guy persona around markers that would normally be signals of deviance in a Hollywood movie – he gets on way better with women than men, he’s not into drinking too much alcohol, and he liked Chocolat. Jason Segel as The Friend is even better, working his trademark overlong bro-hugs and expressive shoulders into a character who is just plain likeable, even when he’s being annoying. (And to its credit, the film knows exactly when he’s being annoying.) So we stayed through the extended gags in the credits, good fun but inessential, and went out of the cinema and I was hoping that Cal would be all right, and then I saw her on the floor, sitting in a bit of a daze, surrounded by people. I tell you what, that’s not a feeling you want. And I still sort of feel that I should have walked her out of the cinema to the toilet when she said she wasn’t feeling well, even though I know that really there was no call to do that, and it wasn’t neglectful of me to sit down and watch the credits and laugh a bit more at Jon Favreau’s minor role as the mean guy, and Andy Samberg as the cool gay younger brother, and to consider how the perfect RomCom ending itself served to highlight the hidden complexities of male friendship.
Cal’s okay – of course she is or this would be a very different blog post – it was just the heat, we figure, she fainted and was still woozy for a while. A nurse and her boyfriend who were also in the cinema had taken charge and called an ambulance so we all waited around until they came, and the officers ran a whole battery of tests and gave her the thumbs up. So that was good. She’s okay. The nurse and her boyfriend, it turned out, were sitting right behind Pearce and the Weird Laughing Guy and when Pearce got up to move they figured he just hated the movie. So did Cal, actually, because he leaned over and said to her “I have to get out of here” or something like that, but he just went and sat up the front. He enjoyed the movie. So did I. It will not rock your world, it isn’t a stunningly clever comedy of manners, but it is some good laughs and good times and it delivers with sincerity, the guy friendship felt genuine and even more surprising the romance between Rudd’s character and his fiancee felt lovely and honest too. It was just a nice film to watch. I recommend it. But if as the credits roll your wife says she isn’t feeling well, go out into the lobby with her, just to make sure she’s okay. The closing gags are good fun but seriously, you don’t want to laugh away and then walk out and realize your wife has been down on the floor without you there to help. That’s a pretty uncool way to end your night watching this three-stars-out-of-five, maybe-three-and-half-stars movie.