The whole movie has an embarrassingly dated going-all-the-way ’80s mustiness, from Thomas Jane’s pickup lines to the way the women on screen react to a man who talks like that. He crams the soundtrack with old punk chestnuts, as if none of these guys had ever downloaded a song beyond their X and Dead Kennedys CDs. They’re also stuck in time - or, at least, Mark Pellington is. They’re stuck in rage, hormones, and Neil LaBute-level knowing misogyny (LaBute was one of the producers). I Melt With You is a movie in which the men are so regressed, so studiously brutal and show-off nasty - in other words, such complete and utter concoctions - that the film barely even establishes that they have civilized selves to regress from. You wait for his verbal gut punches like rim shots. Jane twists his face and goes berserk, Lowe mopes, McKay whines, and Piven does the glib motormouth a-hole routine that he’s now far too facile at. And there’s Jeremy Piven as the token family man, a Wall Street player who’s devoted to his wife and kids and is therefore, of course, about to have his entire life ruined by an investigation into his corrupt financial dealings.
#I melt with you full
(He’s the one who brings along a briefcase full of pills.) There’s the sensitive depressive, played by McKay (so uncanny as the title theatrical genius of Me and Orson Welles), and he gives a moist, timid, invisible-ink performance that makes it look as if he’d been studying at the Charles Grodin School of Dramatic Arts. There’s Rob Lowe, grimacing at the Emptiness Of His Life, as a divorced, once-honorable physician who now makes his money supplying rich ladies with Ox圜ontin. There’s Jane’s gnashing public-school educator, who once had a novel on the bestseller list, but his “creativity” has run dry. The answer is: whichever one you happen to be watching. Which of the characters is more fake, broad, hammy, cliché, and annoying? That’s a brain teaser to make your head hurt. It’s a bacchanal movie, but it’s (deliberately) not fun. The movie, you see, is a deadly serious existential inquiry into the ugliness of the Male Mind. I Melt With You says that men are dogs in suits, and nothing more than dogs. Oh, and are they going to let those freak flags fly! Those ids run wild! In the first half hour alone, they do enough drugs to choke a horse - cocaine, pharmaceuticals, all washed down with slugs of whiskey - and the director, Mark Pellington, cuts their laughing, taunting, dancing, and obscene-joke-making confessional banter into showy little testosterone-fueled fragments, all of it staged with a shadowy glow, so that we know they may look like they’re having fun, but they’re really in hell. Jeremy Piven, Thomas Jane, Rob Lowe, and Christian McKay play former college buddies, now in their mid-40s, who reunite for one week each year, at some remote palatial rented villa, to turn back the clock and turn back into the “free” guys they once were.
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