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| Unrequited love. |
…because one might argue that Stephen Belber’s directorial debut is just another run-of-the-mill rom-com; ready and willing to join the rest of last year’s valentine’s detritus on the opposite bank of Styx. And in a lot of ways it is. Yet that doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t bring anything to the table.
We start things off with Mike (Zahn), a lonely night manager working at a ma-and-pa motel in Arizona. Suddenly he’s graced with the presence of a tightly-wound travelling saleswoman named Sue (Aniston) and it proves to be a game-changer in his humdrum life. After a casual fling in a laundry room and a trip back to home in Maryland, Sue of course assumes things will resume their normal pace. That is until Mike, hopelessly and awkwardly infatuated, follows her.
Yeah, I know, it sounds creepy but I can promise you it’s actually not as creepy as it sounds. And because Mr. Zahn seems to be so damn loveable no matter what he’s doing—playing either a honeymooner running for his life or a prisoner of war—I suppose the best comparison for his role in “Management” would be Norman Bates without the whole, you know, murderous Oedipus thing going on.
Of course, you can expect some corniness. A little bit of raunchy humor there, a few nuggets of wisdom there. A few tender moments there. Yet the movie falls prey to the classic flaw of many modern romantic comedies, whereby reality is hedged by fantasies so unbelievable, that it proves hard to take what notable things it has to say seriously.
To analogize with safety equipment---if something like, say, Joan Micklin Silver’s “Chilly Scenes of Winter”* or the more recent “500 Days of Summer” were a helmet, that all-important contraption that keeps you from losing your brains in a spill, then by comparison, “Management” would probably be akin to those brightly-colored knee-pads you might have seen on roller-bladers in the 90s.
And while those films are by no means “reality” in any sense, it zeroes in on the way romance and selfishness can distort our perception of pursuits. Belber is just trying to shield the lonely and the awkward from the pain and turmoil inherent in the process.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie for what it was. But make no mistake, in the end, it’s all comfort food. Sweet sweet, sugar-coated, deep-fried, sautéed, beer-battered comfort food.
(*:The wiki article for this film is pitiful and the DVD is somewhat hard to find. The trailers on Youtube suck as well. I'd recommend dropping by Scarecrow if you're in town and curious.)
***
Directed & Written by:
Stephen Belber
Produced by:
Jennifer Aniston
Marty Bowen
Jordana Glick-Franzheim
Wyck Godfrey
William Horberg
Sidney Kimmel
Nan Morales
Jim Tauber
Bruce Toll
Cast:
Jennifer Aniston ... Sue
Steve Zahn ... Mike
Margo Martindale ... Trish
Fred Ward ... Jerry
James Hiroyuki Liao ... Al
Woody Harrelson ... Jango
Katie O'Grady ... Corporate Bliss Receptionist
Yolanda Suarez ... Marissa
Kevin Heffernan ... Jed
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