'Man Up'

A Rom-Com The Old Way

The deluge of comic book content has made the top end of the film market look like it has the mental maturity of a 10year old. In the mean time, you wonder where the adults get to go see things that's a little more - even fractionally so - relevant to the real world where people don't have super powers, they have anxieties.

I feel like Ive watched a lot of comic book content lately and as such I feel like it's a bit of an oasis when the film is about two people which might not amount to a hill of beans in the world, but at least the buildings don't explode and the cars don't flip.

And so we come to this British film replete with the witty repartee and strange characters that only those who write in Britain seem allowed to devise.

Spoiler alert. Also, I watched this Fetch TV. I wouldn't have even known this movie existed otherwise.



What's Good About It

The story is actually very simple so the art is in the telling so to speak. It has echoes of Woody Allen's 70s work in that it relies heavily on the mannered dialogue and the carefully staged situations where people reveal their character. It also smacks of Rob Reiner's 'When Harry Met Sally' where the theory of love is discussed as the focus of a burgeoning relationship. These aren't bad things at all in this film. At least the film doesn't posit the female character Nancy up for the kind of consumerist humiliation we've grown to see with the American varieties of this genre. The film is actually quite didactic, but it hides it well.

It adheres to short, sharp and sweet, and in most art the story moves along briskly. The characters are interesting because they're flawed so it shows some thought; and the pain they carry is something to which we can all relate. Certainly more than superheroes.

What's Bad About It

Simon Pegg is - pardon the pun - the square peg in the round hole. He's not really believable as this character any more than he is believable as Mr. Scott in the recent Star Trek movies. He's ill-suited to this kind of role. His charm comes across as facile and shallow while Lake Bell's Nancy is actually searching for the authentic. The un-believability of Simon Pegg subtracts from the experience of the film. There would have been any number of great British actors who could have played this role but it's the one guy who plays caricatures. It's a real shame.

It's also very un-diverse for a film made in 2015. There's not a non-white person within sight of this film, not even amongst the extras. It's just not what a modern Metropolis like London looks like. Somewhere in the first thirty minutes I wondered if the film might have been better if the guy Nancy met was Black or Pakistani or Chinese. Would she have gone and spent the day with that guy or not? It's not the kind of complaint I'd normally make but the film seemed too comfortable in its ethnocentric certainty of "we're British, we're white".

What's Interesting About It

The weird question that arises out of the film is whether love is fungible. Is out experience of love like repeating patterns or whether there is something new in each and ever experience. Is the love we find with our spouses the same as the love found by the parents who stayed together for 40years? If one's experience of love is somehow locked into a pattern, then it probably needs a complete derailing of character and circumstance to find something new and different.

The film doesn't even go to show that it is good orbed, it simply posits it amongst all the theories of being in a relationship. For instance, Jack meets Nancy mistaking her for somebody else. Does this make Jack's possibilities more open? Does Nancy going along with the mistake offer up the possibilities of something different for her? The film works to convince us that this is what these characters needed. Yet, when Nancy runs into Sean, who is hr obsessive stalker, you get the feeling that the experience of love actually is a kind of torture. Similarly running into Jack's ex-wife and her new partner opens up the conversation to phases of romantic entanglements, which strongly implies all experiences of love are repetitive and doomed to fail.

The Self-Loathing Of Post-Divorce Romance

Jack's traumatic divorce sets the background to his attempting to find a connection with somebody new. It's a likely scenario that earns him a likely put down from Nancy when the going gets a little hostile. Then comes the self pity in the toilet cubicle but in most part Jack is unaware that he is driven by self-loathing. After all, if his ex-wife couldn't love him to the end of their days, then how can he stand himself?

Nancy too is a captive of her self-loathing. We find this out when she talks of her relationship in her twenties which ended and has left her bereft of the desire to be out there or to embrace her life. She can't because she can't stop loathing herself for the failure of her important relationship. One imagines that the catharsis required in rom-coms is one which enables the viewer to find a cure to their own self-loathing they bring into the cinema.

The same self-loathing shows up in 'Annie Hall' and 'Manhattan' as well as 'When Harry Met Sally'. You could almost say that without this self-loathing, there is no romantic comedy because the true nature of these rom-coms are about getting over self-loathing. It is interesting then that the film has a lot of advice about how to get over oneself and one's loathing for oneself, but is oddly opaque about the elephant sitting in every scene.

I've got to say, half a generation ago, Hugh Grant used to make his movies look effortless. Simon Pegg makes us feel these burdens and there's not much joy there.