Bromance is in the air

Strictly on the basis of genre hybridity, I Love You, Man is both ingenious and inevitable, as it's a shotgun marriage between the Neanderthal buddy movie and chick-flick wedding porn. Were these two genres actual people, they would be the very ones that would steer even hardened human rights activists toward the tenets of eugenics.

I Love You, Man is what's recently been dubbed a "bromance," a film mostly focusing on the stumbling attempts of young, heterosexual males to bond. That the bonding requires all parties to forsake anything remotely connected to adulthood or, for that matter, higher human attainment, is why these films are sure successes with teen boys (they are, after all, granting them permission to never mature) - and why many of us now look forward to swine flu's mutation.

The chick-flick component (glaringly missing from the work of such bromance masters as Ben Stiller and Judd Apatow) is new here, though the women characters are still secondary and left shrilly enthusing over an upcoming wedding. Still, it's a nibble treat for girls in the audience, while their dates kick back and enjoy those things that men can easily connect with: farting and masturbation.

The wretched results of what's to come aside, the idea behind I Love You, Man is not without promise. What would happen if a straight man, who easily makes friends with women, were to try to find a best male friend? How does such a man go about getting a buddy? What must he alter in his own character to be one of the boys?

Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) is this fellow. Women adore him, and his fiancée, Zooey (Rashida Jones), knows full well that she's very fortunate. What woman wouldn't want a kind, considerate, sane, successful, Libran-keeled man to wed? Certainly her best friends - who fluctuate between dispiriting speed dating or being in abusive relationships with over-muscled beer swillers - fully appreciate her good luck. Men like Peter just aren't that plentiful (and this film will do everything in its power to lower the odds further).

It's the question of who will be Peter's best man at the wedding that reveals his lack of masculine grounding. And so Peter goes out to win male friends, which leads him into various misadventures. Either men who have had some introduction to higher thinking will mistake him for a cultured gay man (and will then come on to him, since they, possessing such questionable attributes as charm and intelligence, will, naturally, be queer themselves) or he will force himself to ape the loutish behavior of poker-playing good ol' boys, only to be shown up as a pathetic pantywaist.

What might have been better titled The Infantilization of Peter Klaven will at last be achieved when he meets Sydney Fife (Jason Segel), a bearish investor who routinely objects to the cultural strictures on manhood. These two men finally become bonded to each other after witnessing a third man fart. Could anything be more profoundly shared?

Peter and Sydney then go out on a series of "man dates" to see if they really are compatible. Spaniel-like, Peter is eager to please Sydney, and will try anything at his bidding. Masterfully, Sydney is there to introduce Peter to honest masculinity, one where a man beds any woman he can nab, proudly pounds off to porn (indeed, has a special "jerk-off station" in his lair), and enjoys playing air guitar to Rush songs. Hell is other men.

There is really no meeting of equals. Peter's innate decency will have very little influence on the self-satisfied Sydney. Sydney will certainly come to "love" Peter, though the dynamic will always insist on Peter corrupting the very qualities that raise his head above the lowing bulls. This stripping away of Peter's dignity is what the film celebrates, and is what will have the slack-jawed males in the audience howling like gibbons - that and the two examples of projectile vomiting, the tortured but tired sexual innuendoes and other examples of dialogue ("She's a squirter!") best confined to towel-snapping locker rooms.

What comedy there is in this dump pan comes when Rudd's Peter painfully, inadequately tries to mimic "dude talk." It's a shame that he finally arrives at some mastery.

Rudd is not without talent. Nor, for that matter, is Segel. And they actually have a good rapport onscreen together. Had this film aimed higher than its given audience, had it offered two very different heterosexual men the chance at transformation through a relationship, I Love You, Man might have offered more than the usual juvenile idiocy on stilts that passes, gas-like, as Hollywood entertainment - one, furthermore, that manages to squander Jane Curtin, J.K. Simmons and even Lou Ferrigno.

"Society tells us we're civilized," Sydney complains, "but, the truth is, we're animals." It seems that "society" is rather quiet on such matters currently. And the "truth" is hardly worth fist-bumping over, man.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at
ssilvis@praguepost.com