I Love You, Man

Saw I Love You Man, a very cute bromantic comedy. The idea is this dude is getting married but has no male friends. The bride's wine-swilling friends dub this as "weird" and indeed, he does need a best man, so the groom goes off in search of a male friend. This is a premise that is in serious danger of becoming homoerotic (as opposed to homo-just-good-friends-actually,) so the film does its best to defuse the situation by making jokes at the long-suffering protagonist's expense about him looking for a "boy friend" and running into gay people who he has to turn down. By making him likeable and having him suffer under the misunderstandings of other characters, we are forced to understand lest we too become intolerant and cruel. It's a nice device they use.

I don't know first-hand of course, but I understand masculinity is kind of a fragile thing. Men are not allowed to dress or act in certain ways, not allowed to enjoy (or admit to enjoying) certain music or shows, not allowed to drink alcohol that doesn't taste like paint thinner, etc etc. How straight guys become friends and stay friends is beyond me. I feel like they have to thread the needle of publicly liking each other without falling into appearing to love each other. How exhausting. So this film is refreshing. I honestly would have preferred a gay romance, but this is important, I feel, for society as a whole to see (including women, by the way. Society as a whole polices these mores, not just straight men.)

Anyway (now that I've talked about the thing that I actually wanted to talk about which is not this film...) the film itself is a fun, silly romp. The bride is not (as I feared) some shrew or nag, but an almost cartoonishly likeable and affable woman. This film is not really about her, so she's not given a real character. She's the nice girlfriend who, alas, is not a dude-friend. There's also an explicitly gay brother who they include to provide more look-see-this-is-not-gay messaging and who is some kind of socially-acceptable, straight-acting ghoul who oh-so-relatably spurns the advances of other gay men. Bleh. I wish he weren't quite so outrageous. It would have been interesting if he interpreted his brother's friend-hunt as a secret coming-out. The politics would be way trickier but much more provocative.