Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Jan 26, 2016 14:08:12 GMT -5
I Think I Love My Wife
Dir. Chris Rock
Premiered March 16, 2007
I think I like Chris Rock. I used to listen to his standup and watch Everybody Hates Chris from time to time (I was a teenage boy after all), and although he’s gotten more hit and miss as he’s aged, he’s always been very good at getting to the bottom of things; trying to make sense of how people perceive and react to different situations. You can see it when he talks about the increasing loneliness he feels as a black baseball fan, or when he compares the allegations against Bill Cosby to the death of Robin Williams in how both affected him.
But he’s never had much luck in film. Maybe it’s the fact that he just missed the standup boom of the 1980s, when comedians were briefly the biggest superstars on the planet, but with the exception of Top Five, which he directed and starred in, every leading role he’s taken on has been rote and ill-advised, despite the fact that he co-wrote most of the screenplays with longtme pal and collaborator Louis CK.
Like their earlier film Down to Earth, I Think I Love My Wife saw Rock and CK attempt to remake a classic film from the 1970s. Love in the Afternoon was the sixth and final of French Filmmaker Eric Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales,” and while not a great film, it makes insightful points about romance and fidelity that most other films rarely acknowledge– including, bizarrely, this one.
In the original film, Bernard Verley plays Frederic, a lawyer who lives in the suburbs but prefers to spend as much time in Paris as he can. Particularly, he enjoys spending time in the company of strangers– young women mostly– to stave off the creeping loneliness of middle age. Suddenly, he runs into Chloe (Zouzou), the girlfriend of an old friend who’s found herself with no direction in life, and the two strike up a strictly platonic friendship. Eventually, though, Chloe’s chaotic life becomes too uncomfortable for Frederic to handle, and retreats from the opportunity to have an affair with her, realizing that the loneliness of wild city living is ultimately emptier than the loneliness of settling down. It’s not a comedy.
The main points of Love in the Afternoon is that one need not have to be unhappy in a relationship to be attracted to others. This is true, but little remarked upon in popular culture, and too unconventional for I Think I Love My Wife, which finds Rock’s Richard Cooper in a rut in his marriage, causing him to seek out the attention of Chloe analogue Nikki (Kerry Washington). Whereas Chloe was around the same age as Frederic and it really seemed like the two of them would form an unlikely friendship, the age gap between Richard and Nikki is too big to pull it off, and Nikki is consistently portrayed as a wanton temptress in contrast to the unstable but mostly boundary-respecting Chloe.
Maybe it’s a translation issue. New York City isn’t Paris, and 2007 isn’t 1972. I thought Love in the Afternoon was visually dull, but at least it’s full of beautiful scenery, clothes, and people, whereas I Think I Love My Wife is shot in a bland, anonymous style familiar to most romantic comedies after 1990, and has the misfortune of taking place in an exceptionally unflattering time period. Where this film diverges from the original, there are some laughs. Rock takes Love in the Afternoon’s fairly creepy fantasy sequence early in the film an mines it for straight-up comedy, and the film ends with a hilarious and original mock R&B duet, but both of these things would be more at home on their own than here. I don’t know what inspired Rock to write and direct this film, but I’m glad he’s taken a more confident direction with stuff like Good Hair and Top Five. I do like Chris Rock, but this movie is pointless.
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Dead Silence and Premonition. They're both horror films released in winter, need I say more?
Additional Thoughts
- I watched this with Minnie, who didn’t see Love in the Afternoon, and I thought her perspective would be useful (I also thought having her around would keep me from spending the whole movie in the Shoutbox). She thought it was pointless and frantic, and recycled a ton of played-out jokes from awkwardness buying condoms to the general presentation of marriage as a confrontational battlefield. I concur.
- Speaking of frantic, this film is only one minute longer than the original, but packs in a shit-ton of random, pointless shit as well, mainly by speeding up the measured tone of the original with constant dialogue and needless voice-over. Yes, Love in the Afternoon had voiceover, but it was there to explain things we weren’t able to see with our own eyes.
- Omar and Bunk are briefly in this.
Next Time: Reign Over Me
The idea that you can casually dismiss it as "not great" baffles me.