How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
Directed by: Robert B. Weide
Written by: Peter Straughan, Toby Young
Starring: Simon Pegg, Kirstun Dunst, Megan Fox, Jeff Bridges, Gillian Anderson

Toby Young is a scrappy British journalist who landed a dream job at the celebrity-obsessed Vanity Fair magazine in the late 90s. He moved to New York City, eager to make his mark in America, and proceeded to piss off just about every important person in town. Six months later, he was back in England. The story might have ended there, except that Young went ahead and wrote a book about his experiences, a hilarious book that got rave reviews and catapulted him to fame. Now that book, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, has become a big budget feature film starring Simon Pegg… unfortunately, it’s not getting the same rave reviews.

Ever since I heard about this movie I was excited to see it. Simon Pegg seemed like the perfect guy to bring Toby Young’s unintentional self-sabotage to the big screen, and with director Robert Weide’s experience working on Curb Your Enthusiasm, I was convinced that they had taken exactly the right approach to adapting this book. And it would have worked too, if only they had actually adapted the book instead of completely rewriting the damn thing!

As it turns out, I was pretty satisfied with the first half of the film, and found that it captured a good chunk of what made Young’s memoir so funny and addictive. We see him arrive in Manhattan, awed by the big city and trying his best to inject some British wit and an irreverent edge into the magazine. Unfortunately he is thwarted at every turn, inadvertently finding himself in plenty of awkward and surreal situations. He is shameless and can’t help making a fool of himself, and yet he does also attempt to maintain some integrity by refusing to write meaningless puff pieces that kiss celebrity ass. He’s an oxymoron of sorts, an outsider in a world of shallow people willing to do anything to get ahead, and we root for him in spite of his faults.

Admittedly, one of the film’s weaknesses is that they went and changed all the names of the real celebrities that were involved. For example, in reality, it was Nathan Lane that Young offended by asking if he was Jewish and gay, but some of the humour is lost here because it’s only a fictional actor that he is interviewing. The movie also feels sanitized to an extent, which is odd considering that it is still rated R (primarily for the infamous strippergram scene, I’m guessing). In my head I was picturing the reality-based comedy of Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, but the end product is a lot more glossy and doesn’t feel at all like it is based on a true story.

All that aside, the movie was still enjoyable and funny to a point. Pegg’s rubbery facial expressions alone were enough to keep me amused (and revealed some disturbing similarities between himself and Rowan Atkinson), meanwhile Jeff Bridges was great as the fictional version of Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. Megan Fox was perfectly cast as the airhead actress riding a wave of success, and her Mother Teresa biopic was a fun little parody (although the fake trailer might have been funnier if I hadn’t just seen Tropic Thunder do the same thing a couple of months ago).

What really sent the movie into a bit of a tailspin, however, is the fact that they decided to tack on a love story to the second half of the film. It’s not that it wasn’t handled well (Pegg already proved that he can do romantic comedy in Run Fatboy Run), and it’s not that absolute replication of the source material was necessarily required here. But the decision to give Young a conscience forced the movie to lose whatever edge it might have had, and and it completely changed the pacing and the focus of the story. On top of that, they even throw in a serious father/son relationship scene, which gets to be a bit like something out of Screenwriting 101.

In the end, I think How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is a little bit better than some of the reviews are letting on, and having the spirit of Toby Young captured on screen at all is still pretty cool in and of itself. Unfortunately, I think the temptation to tailor it for The Devil Wears Prada crowd was just too great, and they lost sight of what made the self-deprecating tale so infectious in the first place. The movie is much more a rainy day rental than a must-see, but I still wholeheartedly recommend reading the book if you get the chance. — Sean

SCORE:

Recommended If You Like: The Devil Wears Prada, Run Fatboy Run, Mr. Bean