I Love You, Man

 

 

Jerry Seinfeld once had a routine about how making friends was something that children can do, but not adults: when you're a kid, and another kid walks past your house, you can invite them in to jump up and down on your parents' bed and that means they're your friend. But once you're through college, making friends from scratch is a nightmare, and you can't seek them out the way you can spouses.

The problem is particularly acute for men. There seem to be no circumstances in which a man can invite another man to be his straight friend. This dilemma forms the wobblingly high concept on which I Love You, Man is based, a film about a nice estate agent called Peter with a geeky office persona somewhere on the Steve Carell-Ricky Gervais spectrum. He has recently got engaged, but realises he has no male friends and desperately needs to find a best man for the ceremony. Peter is played by buddy-comedy stalwart Paul Rudd, whose non-threatening Peter-Pannishly youthful chops have made him a plausible romantic support since the days of Clueless.

After various uproariously uncomfortable "man dates" with various candidates, leading to gay misunderstandings (Peter has a gay brother, played by Andy Samberg, to rule out homophobia), he chances upon an amiable guy called Sydney, gobbling down free nibbles at one of the "open house" events he's hosting to sell the house belonging to Hulk star Lou Ferrigno - an actor-celebrity who is of course given an adoringly respectful cameo. Sydney's laid-back, slackerish charm makes him the perfect friend. He is played by Jason Segel, a goofy everyguy who, in my view, wasn't particularly funny in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and isn't particularly funny here. But it could be that, like Kevin James or Adam Sandler, his doughy face might strike a mysteriously sweet chord at the American box office and so we will be seeing it again and again for some years to come.

So Sydney and Peter have the right friend chemistry, and under Sydney's exuberant influence, uptight Peter starts enjoying himself and kicking back as never before. Peter's fiancee Zooey - an all-too-predictably bland and joke-free role for Rashida Jones - starts resenting this interloper. And the path of guy-intimacy does not run smooth: Sydney and Peter's relationship is under pressure, at least partly because they cannot admit their red-blooded heterosexual feelings for each other, and cannot say the magic words that make up the title. There are one or two decent lines, but after the initial setup, things flag and all I felt like confessing was my feelings of manly indifference to the pair of them.

acute - dotkliwy, bolesny

bland - mdły

cameo - mała rólka znanego aktora

doughy - nalany

exuberant - entuzjastyczny, radosny, pełen życia

flag - tracić siły, opadać z sił

from scratch - od zera, od początku

geeky - nudny, ofermowaty

gobble down - pochłaniać, pożerać

goofy - głupi

interloper - natręt, intruz

laid-back - wyluzowany

nibble - mały posiłek

routine - rutyna; zwyczaj

slackerish - niedbały

stalwart - wierny zwolennik

straight - tu: heteroseksualny

uproariously - hucznie, przezabawnie, hałaśliwie

wobblingly - chybotliwie, niestabilnie

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