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Two's company, four's too banal

This film opens with a child straining on a toilet to evacuate his bowels and carries on in the same vein. PHOTO COURTESY OF PANDASIA

First impressions count, even in film. That helps explain why an opening credit sequence that invokes Woody Allen's Manhattan, though without the shimmering imagery (or the eventual payoff of midcareer Allen) is a bad idea. It also explains why opening a film with a small child straining on a toilet and talking about poop isn't just a bad idea; it's an invitation to unfortunate metaphor.

Thus Trust the Man is a strained, flatulent relationship comedy about two couples, only one of which proves of interest to its writer and director, Bart Freundlich, perhaps because the woman in that couple is played by his own wife, Julianne Moore. She's Rebecca, a film actress about to take the theatrical plunge at Lincoln Center. Rebecca is married to Tom (David Duchovny), who has ditched a lucrative advertising gig to trundle their little girl around town and flirt with a single mother lurking at his son's school. Rebecca and Tom live in a West Village townhouse filled with light and tasteful appointments. Every so often they have sex; once a year they visit a therapist (Garry Shandling, having fun). They're vaguely dissatisfied and crushingly dull.

Film Notes: Trust the Man Directed by: Bart Freundlich Starring: David Duchovny (Tom), Julianne Moore (Rebecca), Billy Crudup (Tobey), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Elaine), James Le Gros (Dante), Eva Mendes (Faith), Ellen Barkin (Norah), Garry Shandling (Dr. Beekman) Running time: 101 minutes Taiwan release: Today

Rebecca and Tom need our love to work as characters, but their kind of self-love leaves no room for outsiders. What it does leave room for are her brother, Tobey (Billy Crudup), and his girlfriend, Elaine (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the couple's unmarried best friends who are experiencing their own relationship pains partly because she seems to hear her biological clock ticking and partly because he's a jerk. Elaine and Tobey are in meltdown because Freundlich subscribes to the theory that every Lucy-and-Ricky needs its Ethel-and-Fred, a cruder version of itself to mirror its ecstasies and agonies, no matter how banal. To that end, Elaine and Tobey ape their better-groomed pals while screeching and rattling the cage.

Moore is nicely lighted, but she too is poorly served by Freundlich's unfunny, unfocused screenplay, which basically stitches together a series of short scenes of four people whining in various combinations. Throughout the whining, Tom wears a small, amused smile that suggests he's in on some cosmic joke, though it may just be that Duchovny knows that when you play what looks like the director's surrogate you can't help but come out ahead. Tom makes his wife weep, a little, and doesn't share her limelight, but he turns out to be a great guy with hidden talents just waiting to be revealed. The final scene dies on the vine.

It makes you wonder why anyone bothered. Like a lot of American films made under the rubric of independence, Trust the Man lacks urgency and purpose; you never get a sense of why this story had to be made, much less shared. With its loud noises and costly effects, the typical Hollywood blockbuster at least tries to sell itself (and more films like it) to the audience.

Trust the Man, on the other hand, assumes that it has something the audience wants to buy. It's an assumption that leaves a lot of talented actors hanging, the exception being James Le Gros, who makes a very funny, regrettably brief appearance as a would-be Lothario who turns a rueful caress of his mustache into an epic of smut.
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