“Trust the Man” is somehow less than the sum of its parts.
Full of snappy lines and wry observations, delivered by familiar and likable actors working on a small budget, this progressively more absurd comedy winds up in that no man’s land of “enjoyed it/can’t recommend it.”
“Trust the Man” wants to be a Manhattan version of “Love, Actually” with a smaller ensemble. It wants us to snuggle, lust, bicker and regret alongside its unhappy couples, only to buy into a wildly implausible ending cribbed from any number of season finales from “Friends.”
To sum up: Go if you’ve been wasting away ever since “X Files” left the air. Go for your never-ending crush on Julianne Moore, or Billy Crudup, or Maggie Gyllenhaal. But don’t go expecting another “When Harry Met Sally,” for the treacle in “Trust the Man” hasn’t set quite that perfectly.
The plot of “Trust the Man” – surely one of the worst titles in recent romantic comedies – revolves around the pairings of David Duchovny and Moore, and Crudup and Gyllenhaal. Duchovny plays a stay-at-home dad feeling increasingly like a kept man for his famous actress wife (Moore).
Crudup is one of those man-boys who never really left the college dorm, kind and supportive of his working wife (Gyllenhaal), but far more interested in figuring out the intricacies of TiVo than starting a family of his own. Complicating matters is the fact that Moore and Crudup play siblings, mixing in a bonus layer of familial bickering.
These four date cute, eat cute, go to psychoanalysis cute, the usual Manhattan love story tricks. To give you an idea of the movie’s level of seriousness (not), the psychotherapists we meet are played by Gary Shandling and Bob Balaban.
Though Duchovny’s dry smirks serve him well here, Crudup is the best of the bunch. His manic and charismatic adolescence refuses to bow to the forces of time; his greatest accomplishment in life is continually moving his car just moments ahead of New York’s Byzantine other-side-of-the-street parking rules.
Can movie jokes be both tired and comforting at the same time? When Moore tells her husband in a cab ride home that he might get lucky, then immediately warns him not to “ruin it,” we’ve heard it before. But Moore is such a pro, and Duchovny is so good at that hangdog look, it feels funny.
Alas, writer-director Bart Freund lich is better at the break-up lines than the makeup lines, leading to these clunkers: “I don’t feel like I know who you are anymore,” followed instantly by “I don’t know who I am anymore.” The accomplished actors have shown us so convincingly that men and women can’t live together, we don’t buy it when they beg to move back in with each other.
Which leads to the question for the ages: If “Trust the Man” showed up on your TiVo, would you watch it? Frankly, not if “SportsCenter” is on.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at mbooth@denverpost.com.
“Trust the Man”
R for language and sexuality|1 hour, 43 minutes|ROMANTIC COMEDY|Written and directed by Bart Freundlich; starring David Duchovny, Julianne Moore, Billy Crudup and Maggie Gyllenhaal|Opens today at the Esquire and Regency theaters.
