DVD Review: Trust the Man

By S.P. MacIntyre Feb 5, 2007, 23:12 GMT

New York. Rebecca (Moore), an actress, is crushed to discover that her marriage may be falling apart. Her husband Tom (Duchovny) leaving long-suffering Rebecca to pick up the pieces of their relationship. Rebecca\'s brother Tobey (Crudup), meanwhile, is in a long-term relationship with Elaine (Gyllenhaal) that has begun to turn sour. Both couples are spoiled and bratty. ...more

I’ve heard it insinuated that Bart Freundlich’s Trust the Man draws a number of parallels with the Woody Allen films of yesteryear: supposedly being a smart, dialogue driven film striving to encapsulate the various lives, foibles, and loves of New Yorkers.  So I figured that - since I enjoyed Manhattan, Annie Hall, and Radio Days (and the exchange at the end of Love and Death riffing off Dostoevsky works was the best piece of dialogue ever written in the history of time) - Trust the Man might, at the very least, be interesting.  Let me tell you up front: any similarities between this movie and Woody Allen films are negligible at best.

This is the type of movie that you only own so you have something to watch if you ever bring a date home, but then subsequently hide from your friends for fear of their scrutiny.  Here’s a plot summary: Film and theater actress Rebecca (Julianne Moore) and former ad-exec Tom (David Duchovny) are married with children (but not to children) and have been suffering the steady decline into complacency which only proceeds to get worse as bored house-husband Tom has an affair (only after watching bestiality porn but still before going to a sex-addiction meeting and proclaiming his fetish for deli meat).  Icthyophile Tobey (Billy Crudup) and aspiring children’s novelist Elaine (Maggie Gyllenhaal), both intrinsically connected to the other couple (Tobey being Rebecca’s sibling), fall away from each other as a result of Tobey’s immaturity and fear of commitment/fathering a child.

All of them cope with the stuff “typical” of relationships: temptation, porn addiction, carb-free diets (and mishaps abounding from them), children (or the prospect of having them), stereotypically sophomoric males, insecurity, sad separations, and sappy rejoinings.  I’m going to ruin the ending for you: the movie climaxes in one of those overly dramatic, awkward, and saccharine scenes that’s almost too painful to watch that sees both couples reuniting and life going happily on.

Other stuff to note about the movie: the acting was unspectacular, the soundtrack was uninteresting (and I expected much more from Clint Mansell, the man in charge of the music who also wrote the fantastic score for Requiem for a Dream that everybody takes for their own trailers now – cough, cough Peter Jackson cough, cough), the gags are predictable, and the characters are only believable with a massive suspension of disbelief and cynicism.

As for the DVD itself, the disc features two sides - one for widescreen and the other for full - with the added bonus material split between the two (it’s okay, you don’t actually have to watch the movie twice just to get to it).  There’s an uninteresting documentary about the making of the movie, which is really more of a detailed summary of it, and several mildly amusing deleted scenes (one that would have PETA up in arms, and another that dabbles with Pavlovian conditioning…except, in this instance, for human testicles).  There’s audio commentary, but it’s predominantly asinine, and a French-Spanish-English language selection.

Rent Trust the Man if you have a free-rental coupon and 100 minutes of your time that you’d like to get rid of.  Buy the movie if you’re a huge Duchovny/Gyllenhaal/Moore fan and need to own everything that they do.  Either way, in the first few minutes you get to see Duchovny wax philosophical about bowel movements to his temporarily constipated son.  Have fun.

Trust the Man is now available at Amazon. It is available for pre-order at AmazonUK for a March 5th release. Visit the DVD database for more information.