About the movie
Management
Rating: 
Cast:
Woody Harrelson; Katie O'Grady; Dominic Fumusa; Collin Crowley; Steve Zahn; Jennifer Aniston; Don Burns
Directed by:
Stephen Belber
On the web:
READER FEEDBACK
'Management' avoids being butt ugly
Family-owned rural motel, weirdo son at the front desk, single female traveller in a business suit.
We recognize this creepy scenario from "Psycho," and it's the quirky ambition of "Management" to turn the setup into a comedy.
Writer-director Stephen Belber starts by casting the disarming Steve Zahn in the role of front-desk weirdo. Zahn plays Mike, a stammering nerd who goes into a state of clammy excitement when a pretty salewoman named Sue (Jennifer Aniston) checks in for the night.
When Mike's dad (Fred Ward) leaves for the evening, Mike uses his status as unsupervised night manager to pester Sue with phony turndown services.
Sue recognizes this as a transparent and oafish come-on, and then does something unexpected (also, many will say, completely unrealistic and possibly nuts).
She asks a question destined to live in indie movie infamy: "Do you want to touch my butt?"
Mike answers in the affirmative, and what follows is like some droll update of "The Piano" - Sue enacts and controls a foreplay regimen, which appears to make her feel safe and in charge. She also decides that Mike is a harmless goofball, and a possible candidate for mercy sex.
This will elicit howls of protest from the same crowd unable to reconcile Seth Rogen with Katherine Heigl in "Knocked Up." What's this with-it chick doing with that loser guy?
"Management" looks for an answer in the mystery of Sue's character - we're told that she's a do-gooder whose activism is a mask for unaddressed personal problems. She's developmentally stymied, like Mike, and this means that she and weirdo Mike somehow understand each other.
At least Mike thinks so. He's transformed by his night or two of butt-touching, and follows Sue all over the U.S., determined to prove that persistence equals love.
Mike is a stalker, but he's worse than that - he's a dawdler, and so is writer-director Beiber. The fitfully charming "Management" takes eons to resolve the Sue/Mike romance, during which we are exposed to a lengthening roster of wacky indie-movie characters (Woody Harrelson has an extended cameo as a yogurt magnate/Nazi).
This is one motel comedy that does not warrant an extended stay.
Good to see Fred Ward again, though. *
Produced by S*dney K*mmel and Wyck Godfrey, wr*tten and d*rected by Stephen Belber, mus*c by Mychael Danna and Rob S*monsen, d*str*buted by The Samuel Goldwyn Co.
