Jason Segel and Paul Rudd in I Love You, Man
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I Love You, Man adheres to the current R-rated farce structure and strictures: it's got fart jokes, a couple of fist fights and a scene of turbo-puke of an intensity not seen since Linda Blair went all demonic in The Exorcist. Its agenda is that Peter can't be a man until he has a soul-dude. But this is essentially a comedy of social embarrassment; the laughs come at the expense of Rudd and any male who squeamishly sees some of himself in Peter. Rudd's performance is an acutely off-key symphony of lame rejoinders, wildly inappropriate ethnic accents and pathetic attempts at bonhomie. If the movie wants its audience to laugh and cringe simultaneously, as I think it does, then it's the signature film of what could be the post-Apatow era. (Read "Who Killed the Love Story?")
Or maybe it's proof that the pre-Apatow age of movie comedy is officially over. There's a reason Peter seems so... so very odd. He's an avatar of traditional Hollywood romantic comedy, where the male tries to be suave and caring, to be the man women love. But that form of movie romance is anachronistic, when most pictures insist that the crucial relationship is guy-guy. Peter has honed the wrong skills; in this movie he doesn't have to get the girl; he already has her. He has to become a supporter of Guy Marriage. And he needs another guy, someone who lives in the modern movie world, to teach him. Peter and Sydney represent old and new movie men as sure as Vivien Leigh's Blanche duBois and Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire cued the collision of old-movie refinement and the new brutalism.
After Knocked Up (a purportedly heterosexual romance where the closest connection is between Rogen and Rudd) and Superbad (where the two high-school chums end up together in a sleeping bag) and another Apatow-produced comedy, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (where two straight firefighters solder their emotional bond by getting married), the bromance may have reached its logical conclusion: guys going on man-dates. Without ever being gay, of course. The love in I Love You, Man is agape, not eros — but still a higher form of communion, the film says, than those tired old guy-gal relationships. (See pictures of Seth Rogen.)
To step off my familiar soapbox for a second, I do think the picture is worth catching for the delicate and toxic nuances of Rudd's performance. And one of its funniest corollaries is that it shows how hilarious and instructive a star this perennial supporting player can be. See, Judd, he can carry a movie. And he might carry the rest of us not-as-funny-as-we-think-we-are guys along with him. Why, if I Love You, Man is a hit, Paul Rudd could make gauche the new cool.