VIDEO: The trailer for Management
With a tip of the name badge to Norman Bates, a mama's boy of a motel manager (Steve Zahn) hooks up with an emotionally stunted executive (Jennifer Aniston) for a romance that's stiffer than a Radisson bedspread.
Writer/director Stephen Belber's erratic script proves the main problem, upholding the stalker behavior of Zahn's creepy manchild as a serendipitous call to toss off convention, repression, and the sad doom of life without marriage and kids. As a result, it's Aniston's Sue who gets pegged as the weirdo for not melting before his aggressive gestures and questionable hygiene.
Aniston does still manage a likable fierceness and fragility, and the film coaxes a few laughs from James Liao in sidekick mode. Yet Belber can't settle on a tone, and the second half resorts to contrivance to pad the plot. By the time Woody Harrelson roars in as a gun-toting, dog-breeding yogurt magnate, logic has checked out.
