I Melt With You | Review

If you’re humming the early ‘80s hit song of the same name by Modern English as you’re about to watch the latest film from director Mark Pellington, I Melt With You , you may not think of the said song at all by the final frame. In fact, the feeling evoked by that song will be absent from your thought processes, whether you loved or hated the film. What starts out as another one of those films examining the male psyche in the context of a yearly bonding buddy get-together, Pellington’s film feels like Bret Easton Ellis’ version of The Hangover (2009). But just when you’ve thought you were watching Less Than Zero (1987) for the mid-life crisis male, it take a dark nose-dive, creating an emotionally draining yet compellingly vivid drama about the death of dreams. Unlikeable characters and nearly unbelievable character development in the second half will decide if you love or hate it, but it’s a powerful film that will most certainly cause a reaction.

Coming together for an annual orgy of drugs, sex, and glorification of the past, four male archetypes get together. There’s Richard, a disillusioned English teacher (Thomas Jane); Jonathan, a crooked doctor (Rob Lowe); Ron, a Bernie Madoff type being investigated by the FBI (Jeremy Piven); and Tim, a homosexual mourning the accidental death of his partner, which he caused five years ago (Christian McKay). At the time of their get together, Tim is about to turn 45. The four friends giddily devour an exorbitant amount of prescription pills, alcohol, cocaine, and other drugs, as they happily exult in each other’s company. Touchingly tender with one another, we catch glimpses of various aspects in their lives that perhaps explain their need to feel nothing. And when you think they couldn’t be more typically pathetic or deliriously dull to watch, one of them does something drastic that reminds them all of a promise they made to each other 25 years prior, which changes the course of the film completely.

I Melt With You obviously has lofty intentions about the fragility of the male psyche, which seems to be the most divisive element of the film. Audiences will either accept the believability of the choices these characters make or reject the film as unbelievable. But really it depends on your own personal bias concerning human behavior.

This has to be one of the more realistic and least romanticized films about male bonding, and it’s frankly refreshing to see a group of heterosexual men comfortable with a gay best friend and in their ability to voice their feelings. A pulsating punk rock soundtrack bursts through most of the film, featuring songs from The Pixies, Dead Kennedys, The Sex Pistols, and, as you could guess, Modern English. Matched with a hyperkinetic camera that zooms chaotically over a roving landscape and a blustery sky, the film creates a perfect sense of turmoil roiling inside the character’s selves as well as the indifferent world outside of them.

Are there people worse off than these four characters that are grappling with the disillusionment of what their lives have become? Of course, and that’s usually always the case (and we can’t always expect the trials and tribulations of something like Precious, 2009). If anything, Pellington’s film deserves to find an audience, both for its audacity to show us four bastards we should care nothing about and also for its ability to make us feel like we can understand and maybe even empathize with them. While the song by Modern English would have you believe that “you’ve seen the difference and it’s getting better all the time,” I Melt With You would have you believe that maybe it’s not—and maybe there’s only one idealistic high afforded to us in our lives. Perhaps the future is not open wide.