After seeing the trailer for Management, I didn’t think the film would be anything special…and I was right. Not to say Management is a bad film, but by this time next week, I won’t be able to tell you much about it.
Management follows Mike (Steve Zahn) as he is stuck running a motel with his parents in Arizona and the cross-country (over and over and over again) journey he takes to be with a traveling art saleswoman, Sue (Jennifer Aniston). Sue stays in Mike’s motel a few times and he immediately falls for her. He makes numerous trips to her room at night with wine, champagne, or with just an idea in his head – anything just to be around her. At first she does what any normal woman would do: she puts up with him until he goes away. But the more times he puts his foot in her door, or when he looks at her with his puppy dog eyes, or when he [insert cliché here], she humors him more and fancies the idea that there might be more to Mike than she first thought. This all happens in the first 20 minutes of the film, and everything is fine and dandy…but not for long. Once Sue checks out of the motel, we are hit with a musical montage of Mike being sad and lonely, but by the time the montage is over, Sue pulls back into the parking lot for another nights stay (without any notion of how much time has passed between check ins, but I’ll let that slide). Now, it’s not crazy that after Sue leaves again, Mike buys a one-way ticket to Maryland where she lives – the crazy thing is that when Mike shows up at her office, they go out for a night on the town and he sleeps at her house.
I believe movies are made to take you away from real life, as an escape, but having a random guy, who worked a motel where you once stayed, showing up at your office across the country is weird. No one would hang out and open the door to their house for him. I wasn’t buying that for a second. From then on out it’s a hodgepodge of Mike and Sue falling for each other, then Sue not wanting to be with Mike, then they’re traveling across the country to be with each other…it got a little out-of-hand for a film that didn’t hold my attention.
The whole “Mike being creepy and chasing Sue around the country” thing wasn’t so bad. Having Sue go back to her ex boyfriend, ex punk rocker Jango, played by Woody Harrelson, is bad. Harrelson’s character is forced and not funny. The awkwardness that the film relied on early on, wore off rather quickly. The awkward moments were replaced by annoying pauses in conversation and bad acting…by all.
The writing and direction didn’t help the actors either. Writer/Director Stephen Belber has trapped his actors with his predictable and unrealistic script. Zahn doesn’t show much as Mike. His loneliness and longing for companionship was established early on. With that covered, we were left with a boring sap of a character with a plot that is rather dull and naive. Mike even becomes a Buddhist monk towards the end of the film, but then there’s a jump cut to him hitchhiking on a highway to find Sue, and it’s never mentioned again in the film. Aniston also falls victim to the unworkable plot. No woman would fall for a man who literally stalks her. It only gets worse when she becomes pregnant with her ex boyfriends baby and the film begins to unfold as a soap opera (with the boom mic included in one scene). Belber also seemed lost on how to dissolve to the next scene. A pan up to the sky and holding on a blurred image gets does not work. Small things like that have the potential to wake up and audience. I mean, look what George Lucas did with the wipe.
Behind all it’s flaws, Management has heart – it means well. What we do see is Aniston’s rigid character changed by Mike’s “unguided missile” kind of love (her words). Sue raises a stink at the motel that there is no recycling there. Sure enough, next time she pulls up, she finds Mike stand in front of his obviously homemade recycling bin. There’s also a nice moment when after telling Mike to quit smoking, Sue finds him smoking a cigarette and scolds, “I thought you said you were going to quit!” Mike defiantly throws the cigarette away and replies, “Just did.”
What Stephen Belber has left us with is an unguided (if you will) film that has promise to be something more than a forgettable romantic comedy. What keeps us interested is the quirkiness and romance we hope to see between Sue and Mike. For both of their sakes we want them to be together. But as the cross-country trips begin to build up and the soap opera mentality sets in, our interest is fading just as quickly as Zahn’s acting career.
