I’ll admit it, Management got to me. To the naked eye, this low-budget film may look like a cookie-cutter Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy, and that’s exactly what it is for long stretches, especially at the beginning. When the movie starts to show its cards, though, it turns into one of those happy instances when an actor’s personal neuroses mesh completely with her character’s, and it generates a surprising amount of traction.
Aniston plays Sue Claussen, a mid-level executive at a company that sells artwork to hotels and office buildings. Her work is the reason that she checks into a roadside motel in Kingman, Ariz., where she meets Mike (Steve Zahn), an arrested-development case whose parents own the place and who clumsily tries to flirt with Sue. The loneliness of the road drives Sue to have a quickie with Mike in the laundry room the day before she leaves. She thinks that’s it, so she’s unpleasantly surprised when Mike shows up at her office in Baltimore bearing flowers.
Sue is quite a bit chillier than Jennifer Aniston, whose repertoire doesn’t appear to include chill. Beyond that, the character has a wildly successful ex-boyfriend whom she’s not over (Woody Harrelson), painfully recognizes the fact that she’s growing older, and is terrified at the prospect of being alone, which is why she’s desperate to have a child. If you’ve even glanced at the tabloid accounts of Jennifer Aniston’s private life, the parallels here are enough to make you squirm. Maybe that’s why Aniston invests the role with such palpable despair, delivering a much more interesting performance than she did in Marley & Me or He’s Just Not That Into You.
This, however, only comes out in the film’s last half-hour or so, as writer-director Stephen Belber takes entirely too long to get going. The stagey early scenes between Mike and Sue are supposed to be funny as well as sad and awkward. The laughs are practically nonexistent until Harrelson shows up more than halfway through as a crunchy jerkwad of a yogurt mogul. He’s a funny caricature, but the other characters are too wispy, including Mike’s parents (Margo Martindale and Fred Ward) and a Chinese restaurant waiter (James Hiroyuki Liao) who befriends Mike. If this movie had a different lead actress, we might more easily recognize how flimsy it is.
Ah, but Aniston’s real-life romantic mishaps are indeed common knowledge, and many fans relate to her for exactly that reason. Her personal connection with the part, and the inherent skills of the two lead actors, explain the power of the scene in which Sue tearfully breaks up with Mike to go back to her ex, saying, “I’m at a point in my life where I need to be with someone who knows what the fuck he’s doing.” That scene is when the movie finally clicks into place, as does everything afterward, even the left-field interlude when a heartbroken Mike seeks solace in a Buddhist monastery. There’s too much padding in Management, but the part of it that does work, works beautifully.
