No Way, Dude

by Thomas Willett

11:00am PST, December 21, 2011

A popular theme in movies lately has been the stunted growth male comedies. I Melt With You is the latest to join these ranks, when four friends decide to go to a beach house to rekindle their friendship. During that time, they blast 70’s music by The Clash and snort cocaine while talking about their sex lives. The movie opens with a series of messages stating the various states of the vulnerable males, presumably about their relationship with women. The desire to compliment these characters as fragile souls is quickly vanished and replaced with a 50 minute party montage where nothing worth mentioning happens, except cocaine snorting and inviting drunken women to talk about their failed dreams.

The comedy is not so much driven from the script, but by the actors and their dedication to making this flimsy premise sound important. By the time the dark twist happens around the hour mark, the character development has been so set in making them appear like ignorant party animals that their attempt to make them sympathetic is baffling. Besides the fact that Jeremy Piven and Thomas Jane lack emotional range as actors, it’s hard for any actor to take a quick turn and make it feel natural. The attempt to turn Hollywood egocentrics into an art film with Johnny Rotten interview excerpts just makes these characters (and the filmmakers) sound even more delusional.

With a baffling script, writer Glenn Porter sounds like he isn’t so much into narratives as he is promoting machismo propaganda. The story fails to say anything interesting about friendships. Instead, it tries to highlight how great it is to snort cocaine and tell dirty jokes. This feels like a group of actors who were rejected from The Hangover, who embark on making a “smarter” version of that seminal comedy. As the opening song by the Sex Pistols suggests “Don’t ask us, because we’re not there.” There’s nothing intelligent or likable about these characters.

The movie fails both as the intentional drama it is and the comedy it results in. This can be largely due to director Mark Pellington, whose understanding of pace is very primitive. There is a solid 50 minutes before something crucial happens, and about 30 of the opening minutes could be cut without story issues. At over two hours, the story feels needlessly strained and too reliant on Thomas Jane’s attempt to emote insanity. There is too much attention payed to make everything serious that the slower a scene goes, the more ridiculous it is. If there is one redeeming aspect in all this hazy nonsense is that the film reinforces why going to school and not doing drugs are good pathways.

However, a film this bad could be redeemed through some small, memorable moments from interesting characters (not that anyone would want to remember a film like this). But Pellington and crew bomb even at that. Despite a cast that also includes Rob Lowe and Carla Gugino, no one seems to care about delivering a clever line or gag. They’re all there to do their scenes and collect a check. Lowe doesn’t seem interested at all in the movie and hides behind Piven and Jane while they tell dirty jokes. It’s every bad stereotype that Piven earned on Entourage, but here it’s overly exploited. It seems like he knows it but does little to fix it.

I Melt With You fails on every level to be a competent, entertaining movie. Even with dumb characters, Porter writes them with too much importance. There is no authenticity and instead a reminder on the dated style of machismo excess. Along with Pellington’s pacing issues, the desire to make this into an art house film does little but make it look ridiculous. If this is to be taken as a drama, it has failed. The comedy isn’t much better, but it makes the movie easier to watch.