Film review: Management

Published on Friday 22 May 2009 17:17

(15) Director: Stephen Belber Running time: 93 minutes ***

TODAY'S ontological question: what is Jennifer Aniston? The world's most dumped girlfriend, a smirking over-age coiffure or a decent actress caught in the smog of fame? Aniston has often been better than the films she appears in, but what goes against her is her cover girl status and her willingness to put herself in awkwardly titled projects.

She filmed The Break Up just as Brad Pitt bailed, and was promoting it just as her new romance with Vince Vaughn sailed into stormy waters. He's Just Not That Into You is possibly the worst film title you could agree to when you appear at the top of America's Most Jilted; and as we speak, Aniston has elected to appear in The Baster, in which her character impregnates herself, while everyone in tabloid land wonders how Jen will ever have a family of her own. You can only imagine that she fell upon a film with the innocuous title of Management, like Oprah on a baked ham. Unfortunately, problems lurk in Stephen Belber's directorial debut, too.

Aniston plays Sue, a sharp-edged saleswoman, working for a company manufacturing corporate art, the kind of blah landscapes and modern splodges in hotels and office lobbies. On a business trip, she checks into a run-down motel and attracts the attention of night manager Mike (Steve Zahn), whose seduction technique involves wrapping a bottle of cheap plonk from lost property. "Management" is how Mike refers to himself when he knocks on Sue's door with two plastic cups.

Somehow choosing to overlook the fact that Mike has the same job as Norman Bates, Sue allows herself to have a brief and awkward fling with him in the hotel laundry room, then leaves Arizona forever without a second thought. Mike, of course, is besotted and follows her across the country with a one-way ticket. But Sue is already in an on-off relationship with a punk rocker turned organic yoghurt mogul (played by wild-eyed Woody Harrelson as a wild-eyed maniac). It's hard to believe Mike and Sue should end up together. "I know what you need," he tells her, "to take care of yourself so that the people who love you don't feel like they're annoying you." Is that boyfriend material, or the first line in a brochure for a nursing home?

You can see why Mike's keen – she's pretty, has a job, and lets him touch her bottom, but you can't help thinking Aniston could do better for herself, even when she was dating Tate Donovan. Management hopes that the mismatch of the childishly needy and the icily sardonic will come across as romantically kooky. Instead, it just doesn't make sense. If you're smart and hard-nosed enough to sell rubbish art, (in fact, if you're smart enough to walk and chew gum) you'd be calling the police as soon as someone like Mike rocked up on your doorstep.

Instead, the film hopes to make you forget this one improbability by loading the rest of the movie with many, many other unlikelihoods, including a well-meaning Chinese stoner (James Liao) who befriends Mike when he arrives in town to see Sue, a contemplative retreat to a Buddhist monastery, and the second most physics-defying skydive in a month, following Ewan McGregor's airdrop in full priestly garb for Angels & Demons.

Management is a high-wire act, doggedly thwarting rom-com conventions yet unable to present a wholly successful alternative. It's more whimsical than provocative; in one scene Mike stands outside Sue's house performing a wildly atonal version of Bad Company's Feel Like Makin' Love. This parodies John Cusack and his ghetto blaster wooing Ione Skye in Say Anything, but it has nothing else to say. And just because it's supposed to make you wince, does that make the experience any less excruciating?

How much you enjoy Management depends on how much you enjoy watching people overcome restraining orders. Otherwise this is a mismanaged opportunity, especially when it embraces the dispiriting conventional wisdom that, for a woman, the best place to find fulfilment is in the arms of a man, no matter how creepy and childlike they may be. Don't listen, Jen.

• On general release from Friday