Management (2008)

Director: Stephen Belber
Writer: Stephen Belber
Cast: Jennifer Aniston, Steve Zahn
Genre: Rom-Com

Management is a rather sweet little thing within its genre. This must not be mistaken for good, but rather with some great quirky moments along with the sweet parts, together managing to elevate it above the average. Most of all it's heartfelt and quite original within its more typical premise.

Sue (Aniston) is a traveling art saleswoman, staying overnight at a motel in one of the small towns of her district. Mike (Zahn) is the motel-owners son, and their acting night-manager. His small town inspired naive and puppy-like crush on her, collides with her worldly ways along being used to male attention.

Writer and director Stephen Belber have found the right notes in several scenes, but also proves he still lacks a lot in focus, discipline and eye to cut scenes that doesn't work. For an uneven movie, I truly enjoyed it more than its quality should suggest. Much of that is thanks to Belber's, equal-to-Mike, naive ability to capture quirky scenes and almost eccentric personality ways to grow both the characters and the story.

There's a great chemistry between our two leads. They manage to get right both the initial weird unbalance, and the later nuanced changes. I find Aniston is undervalued in general, and takes a lot more criticism than she deserves. Whenever she actually got a partner to act of like here, she does very well. Whenever she's stuck with the amateurish likes of Gerard Butler in The Bounty Hunter, that's a lot more difficult to elevate to a decent level. Zahn is also doing very well here as the naive Mike, and we meet Woody Harrelson in a fun ex-punk supporting role. In addition Management have managed to turn The New Pornographers' song Adventures in Solitude into a great theme song for the movie.