MOVIE REVIEW: 'I Think I Love My Wife'


Longer edit of an Oregonian review:



Chris Rock hasn't made a movie that matches the brilliance of his politically charged stand-up. But at least he's starting to try.

His new relationship comedy (and second writer-director effort) "I Think I Love My Wife" is, I kid you not, a re-make of a 1972 French film -- specifically, the very French Eric Rohmer film "Chloe in the Afternoon."

Given Rock's professed love of the Rohmer-like Woody Allen, this isn't really that surprising. Like "Chloe," "I Think I Love My Wife" concerns an upwardly mobile businessman whose passion is tested by a reckless femme fatale. (Though Rohmer's film does not, if memory serves, contain a long set piece about Viagra-induced priapism.)

Anyway. Rock plays Richard, the least career-minded New York investment banker ever. (Seriously: He looks like a kid wearing his dad's suit.) And his sexless marriage to Brenda (Gina Torres) is taking a toll. As Richard narrates: "The most dangerous time in a marriage is when a couple accepts that they've stopped having sex."

Enter Nikki Tru (Kerry Washington), an old pal of Richard's who drops by seeking a letter of recommendation. Nikki is elemental sexual trouble -- narcissistic, provocative, clubbing at 32, always smoking and asking for favors and pushing boundaries and driving men to ruin.

Richard's 2 p.m. lunches with Nikki feel less and less chaste. And we come to the movie's central, fatal problem: There is no one in this movie to root for, and too few jokes to laugh at.

Rock is jackassishly careless with his hard-won career. Torres, the full-blooded warrior woman from "Firefly" and "Serenity," is reduced to a sex-denying harridan and abstraction of Motherhood. And as Nikki's visits and demands get more and more ridiculous, the movie sort of loses you -- Rock and Washington just don't have the chemistry to sustain your disbelief.

And while the movie makes a few interesting structural choices, and it gets at a couple of truths about marriage, it's just not that funny. The pacing isn't crisp, and the story-driven gags (including, ugh, a condom-buying scene where the clerk loudly discusses the purchase) don't sizzle.

There's some funny narration by Rock, and some trenchant bits of observational dialogue about sex and race, all thrown away like stand-up bits, e.g. --

• "I wouldn't let Michael Jackson watch my kids on TV."
• "You add up how many years you've been together and divide it by two -- that's how long you've been breaking up."
• "You can lost a lot of money chasing women, but you'll never lose women chasing money."
• "Life is long. You're probably not going to get hit by a bus. And you're going to have to live with the choices you make for the next 50 years."

-- that sort of thing. But they're few and far between, and good observations aren't the same as good storytelling. Chris Rock probably has a very solid writer-director effort in him. This isn't it.



"I Think I Love My Wife" review (The Oregonian, March 16, 2007)

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Posted: Sun - March 18, 2007 at 07:38 AM        

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