In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. This week, Favreau takes a backseat for someone else’s nonsense.
Back in my piece on The Break-Up, I said we would be skirting around the whole Frat Pack/”rom-coms for bros” era of comedy. I had completely forgotten I Love You, Man even existed, let alone that it should be on the docket for this series.
Revisiting it for this piece, I kinda feel like my earlier assessment of the era was dead-on. What began as a trend of bro-comedies built around the framework of a traditional romantic comedy eventually morphed into rom-coms about bros, and the girls found themselves almost completely sidelined. As it turns out, that’s kinda the exact plot of I Love You, Man. Paul Rudd’s affable everyman in a stable, loving relationship shirks his duties to his spouse to go bro out with one of the guys. It’s not even that ridiculous of a premise; I’m sure it happens all the time. As a comedy, I Love You, Man is likable enough, even if it’s wholly emblematic of this entire era of dumb, improv-heavy dude comedy.
As the film opens, we meet realtor Peter (Paul Rudd) proposing to his girlfriend Zooey (Rashida Jones). Upon hearing the news, her girlfriends observe that the wedding party will be pretty lopsided, given that Peter doesn’t actually have any friends. He takes this to heart and starts going on a series of bro-dates to find himself a best man. It’s a fun little montage of mild-mannered Paul Rudd dealing with a series of increasingly weird individuals (among them Thomas Lennon and Joe Lo Truglio, both veterans of The State, more on that in a bit.) Peter then meets Sydney (Jason Segel) while hosting an open house to sell the home of bodybuilder/TV star Lou Ferrigno. Sydney is Peter’s exact opposite: Independently wealthy, lives alone, spends most of his time in a garage-turned-man-cave, drives around Santa Monica on a Vespa scooter. Sydney is the broiest bro to ever fall off the back of the bro truck. So naturally, the two hit it off immediately, and a bromance begins to bloom.
Most of the absolute worst comedy in the film stems from their casual conversation. Sydney is so fucking cool; just this aggressively casual six-foot toddler wearing a blazer and shorts. He’s got his own personal lingo that just flows naturally, and Peter wants to be that cool so badly, but most of his attempts at sounding cool land like a wet fart. Paul Rudd is an expert improviser, so Peter’s utter inability to sound cool is a feature, not a bug. That doesn’t stop them from beating that joke into the ground in pretty much every scene. It eventually pays off in a bit where Peter tries to say something cool before leaving a room, ultimately giving up and just exiting the scene without a word. Makes you wonder whether that was scripted or if that was a desperation move on the twentieth take. With this style of comedy it’s really hard to tell.
This whole little era of comedies represents the convergence of two comedic forces: Judd Apatow and his crew (which we’ve talked about before), and also the former stars of the MTV sketch troupe The State. Right around this time, all those folks started popping up in big studio comedies together. (Many of them, as well as Paul Rudd, first made a name for themselves in 2000’s Wet Hot American Summer.) I Love You, Man feels representative of this entire era of studio comedies, when the comedy nerds finally got their hands on the steering wheel and felt bound and determined to get weird with it. I suppose the 2007 Writer’s Guild strike also had a hand in all this, as many productions became improv-fests purely out of necessity1. And if you want to see this style of anti-rom-com achieve its final form, I recommend David Wain’s They Came Together, which once again stars Paul Rudd, but this time seems hellbent on breaking the genre any way that it can. (See below.)
Also worth noting is that Peter and Sydney immediately bond over a shared love of the band Rush. Director John Hamburg, himself a huge Rush fan, convinced the band to appear as themselves in concert, where Rudd and Segel ham it up play-acting the songs to each other. To my knowledge, that makes this the one and only film to feature the band, so that’s pretty cool. It also lends the film a little bit more authenticity, because if there’s one thing I know about Gen-X dudes, it’s that every last one of them loves Rush. If it’s possible for a person to have too much fun, the Rush concert captures that vibe perfectly. The cringe factor goes off the charts midway through the film, and this scene’s kinda the tipping point. But that’s not Rush’s fault!
I dunno, part of me feels like I’m being too harsh on this film, whose only real crime is saying it’s cool for guys to be dudes. Maybe this film touched a nerve, because it happened to me recently. While my wife and I planned our own wedding last year, it occurred to me that all the people I would have asked to be my groomsmen lived too far away and wouldn’t be available. I’m a 39-year-old man now, and don’t have a close, local network of bros anymore to lean on. I don’t see it as some kind of sad, moral failing on my part. That’s just… that’s life. It happens.
And I know I’m not alone in this. You go online now and see all kinds of articles and reports about The Male Loneliness Epidemic. Some try to paint it as single men being depressed about being single, which is certainly valid, but it also happens with married men whose best friend happens to be their partner. They don’t want or need any new friends. Peter is one of those guys, and seems perfectly happy with his life. It’s only when others project their own standard of weirdness on him that he sees his limited social circle as a problem. Because god forbid a man be well-adjusted and content with himself.
I Love You, Man is an unassuming little comedy that probably didn’t warrant this many words being written about it. But not only is it the only feature film to take place at a Rush concert, it’s also the film that introduced the phrase ‘totes magotes’ into the lexicon of dumb things for cool guys to say. So it’s a worthy footnote in comedy history. It’s charming enough, but the forced, casual coolness does grate on me after a while. Just talk like normal human beings, you idiots.
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
Jon Favreau plays the husband of Zooey’s best friend (Jaime Pressly), one of Peter’s prospective new buddies. Here, he’s the exact opposite of every tightly-wound goober he’s ever played. This guy is the kind of quiet, angry bro who outwardly hates his wife and everyone around him, including his own circle of poker buddies. Favreau plays the part a little too well, which makes it all the funnier when Rudd projectile vomits all over him. It’s a thankless role, but a nice juxtaposition for the guy who doesn’t have any friends to have to deal with a guy who doesn’t want a new friend.
I Love You, Man went into production the same week that Iron Man came out. As Favreau tells it, he got cold feet about even doing the film once he learned Iron Man was a hit. “Robert Downey was like, ‘It is the best thing you could do’ – he said ‘chop wood, carry water,’ which is what they do in the Kung Fu movies to keep you humble.” Rather than escape to a well-earned tropical vacation somewhere, Favs threw himself right back into work. I respect that.
FINAL RATING
3 stars (out of 5). S’okay.
NEXT TIME: A truly grating experience.
- I Love You, Man went into production three months after the strike ended, meaning any improv’d lines or scripted awkwardness was very much done on purpose. ↩︎
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