Movie Review Management

Management (2009) 

Directed by Stephen Belber

Written by Stephen Belber 

Starring Steve Zahn, Jennifer Aniston, Woody Harrelson, Fred Ward

Release Date May 15th, 2009

Published October 10th, 2009

I have seen some truly unendurably awful movies; I'm looking at you All About Steve, but few are as mind numbingly tone deaf awful as Management, a new, supposed, romance starring Steve Zahn and Jennifer Aniston. From first time writer-director Stephen Belber comes a romance so ludicrous and so off-puttingly wacked that even Ms. Aniston's charm gets trampled in the wake.

Management stars Steve Zahn as a slow witted creep who acts as the night manager at his parents roadside motor lodge in Kingman Arizona. One night he meets Sue (Aniston) who's just passing through on business. It's love at first sight for him but she is rightly creeped out, especially after he drops by her room unannounced with a bottle of champagne and invites himself in.

The whole thing should end there. He's a creepy, 40 something adolescent and she sees that right away. We see it more than she does because he is the supposed hero of this disaster and thus we are subjected to him throughout. Nevertheless, the movie can't end 10 minutes in and she is forced to keep the movie going with a very bad and incomprehensible decision.

When she leaves the following day, the creep follows her, cross country, to her home in Maryland. Further poor decision making is all she can do to keep the plot moving forward. The two spend an awkward evening and morning together, no sex, and he's back on a bus to Arizona.

Oh, but we are only half way into this disaster. She must then make another bad choice and return to Arizona, on business and not really at his prompting. They have another brief interlude, including a visit to his dying mother that makes everyone uncomfortable, and then she's gone and he's chasing her across the country again.

Somehow, they get to Washington state where more incomprehensible crap takes place. She moves in with an ex played by Woody Harrelson and the creep skydives into their pool. He works and lives in the basement of a Chinese restaurant. The movie thinks these ideas are charming and funny though nothing is actually done to make them charming or funny.

The whole of Management plays like a joke that everyone involved assumed would be funny but just isn't. Jokes fall flat from the actor's mouths. Pratfalls are taken with no set up. Ideas are introduced as if the idea were really all anyone had and that should somehow be enough. It's not.

Jennifer Aniston's losing streak has reached astonishing proportions. Management is her third consecutive rom-com disaster following the abysmal twosome of He's Just Not That Into You and Love Happens. That Management is somehow worse than both of those films is even more astonishing.

Steve Zahn is a funny actor who in the right role can be very effective. Here, dressed as a teenager with the haircut of a mental patient, Zahn starts as a creep and remains a creep throughout and yet is supposed to be the romantic hero. The plausibility of any movie is negotiated on the movie's terms. Even by that standard Management fails. Even by its own rules it cannot make this creepy moron seem like a match, not just for Jennifer Aniston, but for any other human being ever.

Management is a loathsome exercise in quirk as a replacement for acting, character development and storytelling. A trainwreck of bad choices, flat humor and tone deaf pacing.  It is mind blowing that anyone involved thought this movie was a good idea.