Last week I think was a good week for catching an indie romantic comedy. Management was an enjoyable, if deeply flawed, example of the genre. There’s this guy, Steve Zahn, who is the night manager at his parents’ small-town motel. He’s the kind of actor that you know who he is, but have no way of saying what it is you’ve seen him in before.[1] One day, corporate art saleswoman Jennifer Aniston stays at the hotel, and he gets the idea to give her gifts, courtesy of “management”, in the hopes that… well, I doubt he knows exactly what it is that he hopes for, being the sad sack of a lonely man that he is. Whatever he hoped for, he got a whole lot more than that. But what would have been an unlikely one night stand is turned on its head when he flies out to see her after her departure the next day.

And that’s where the implausibility comes in. I don’t think he was a stalker, so much as a sad sack of a lonely man who also has no sense of realistic boundaries. But she didn’t have the audience’s insight into his head, and would surely have seen him as nothing but a stalker. So, we have about 75% of a movie that is predicated on the least likely reaction I can conceive of, wherein she decides to keep him in her house overnight so that they can hang out for a day or two. There are many more obstacles on the path to what may or may not be true love, as the genre dictates, but it’s hard to really buy anything after that one glaring flaw.

Still, if you can ignore that, it’s pretty decent, starting out with Office-style discomfort humor but frequently branching out into the genuinely funny kind that has no need to be preceded by “horrified”. The best acting is turned in by Steve Zahn’s mom and by his Asian sidekick; as you would expect of an indie comedy, the bit characters are the ones to shine. And I guess that’s mostly why I still watch these: yay, acting surprises!

[1] But not, I think, a character actor. It’s hard to explain why not, which possibly indicates my inaccuracy as to this point.