I went to see Management because Steve Zahn is in it, and I’ll see him in anything. Steve Zahn turns out to be pretty much the only reason to see Management, and then only if you’re a big Steve Zahn fan, and then only if there’s nothing else to do, because even his always-fun appearance cannot rescue this picture, ostensibly an arthouse vehicle for Jennifer Aniston. (And if you needed any more proof that people don’t go to see Jennifer Aniston in a movie but go to see movies that just happen to have Jennifer Aniston in them, Management is Exhibit A. This weekend, the Aniston picture made only a little more money than Taken, which was released 16 weeks ago and is now available on DVD.)
Zahn plays a slacker (Yeah, what else is new, but he’s so good at it!) wasting away as the night manager at his parents’ rural motel. Aniston sells motel owners the painted-in-bulk art you find in motel rooms. For reasons that are never made clear, she doesn’t try to sell Zahn and his parents any art. She’s in the tiny town to sell to someone else — which made me wonder…
A) Just how many other third-tier motels does this little town have?
B) How much does this bottom-shelf art go for that a salesperson can make enough money selling it in such small quantities to justify flying across the country to close the deal?
Bonehead Zahn falls for middle-management Aniston. She feels no chemistry, so in exchange for leaving her alone she proposes that she will allow him to “touch my butt.” As you might imagine, neither of them sticks to the “leave me alone” part of the deal, and a second encounter inspires Zahn’s cross-country pursuit of Aniston.
It’s a funny premise that’s been done before (except for the butt-touching), but there’s always room for a fresh attempt. The problem here is that Management is populated by people we are never made to care about. It is further marred by long passages that go nowhere carried out by people whose backgrounds and motivations are largely a mystery. For us to care about Zahn’s goofy character, we need a reason to like him. We never get it. Aniston’s character seems just simple-minded; she is not curious or ambitious, and we don’t know why she lacks these or other basic characteristics that interesting people usually have. That’s the heart of it, really: these people are given some interesting things to do, but they are not portrayed as interesting people. The characters are simply participants–actors, if you will–in various scenes that fail to engage the audience emotionally.
The movie suffers further from radical shifts in tone: One minute, it’s calm and romantic, then it’s surreal (an Airplane-style episode of Buddhist monks playing volleyball with Steve Zahn? Really?), then it’s supposed to be touching. Even that sort of thing can work, since life itself sometimes gives us radical changes in tone, but it only works in the movies when we care about the people it’s happening to.
Management needs a better script, a better director, or both.
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