Ten minutes in to Made for Each Other you might not know exactly what you’re watching. Strange sexual innuendos flow abundantly, characters have strange speech patterns, and everyone has an obsession with eating hot wings in bowling alleys. It’s not your typical suburban hell story, and you might never see anything like it ever again – but not because it blazes new trails in its basic story or characterizations, it just doesn’t seem at all concerned with making sure you’re on the same page. We see characters in varying stages of love torn asunder and people dealing with loss in ways that most guys would love to say is how it really goes, but it’s all just a smokescreen for putting really ridiculous ideas and double entendres on the screen in absurd combinations. You’ll recognize a lot of the characters, but only because they’re caricatures taken to an extreme slant with a childish goofiness. Even if it pans out to being a mediocre independent comedy in the end, it leaves us with a few choice nuggets of comedy gold.
Dan (Christopher Masterson) and Marci (Bijou Phillips) got married three months ago, and while there are plenty of jokes about sex drying up after a few years, Dan is still waiting for them to have their first-time. He confides in his co-worker Mike (Samm Levine) about his marital issues, only to find that everyone in his life is experiencing sexual issues of one sort or another. Mike is sleeping with Dan’s mother who long ago forced her husband, and Mike’s father (played well by George Segal) out of the house and back into his bachelor days of sex with young women. Dan is adrift with no compass to guide him besides the misinformed opinions of his friends (including Danny Masterson), whose advice becomes even more useless and potentially harmful after Dan has an affair with his ex-girlfriend and Marci’s sister, Catherine (Lauren German). As many men in comedies about poor love choices are apt to do, Dan chooses to trick his wife into having an affair in order to assuage his guilt rather than coming clean. To pull off his plan he hires the services of a traveling actor (Patrick Warburton) performing in a musical adaptation of Waterworld, to sleep with his wife and be so bad at sex that she never considers sleeping with another man ever again. It’s a silly story with not much grounding it, because Made for Each Other really isn’t about the story at all.
If you’re going for blind optimism, Made for Each Other has something to say about the unpredictable nature of love and the many crazy things it drives human beings to do in its name. Something of that message shines through, but for the most part the film feels like nothing but a medium for showcasing characters with odd personalities trapped in some hellish world of romance and, of course, a musical of Waterworld (which is really funny and luckily gets a decent amount of screen time). The performances are all somewhere slightly above par, which is good considering the film rides entirely on that strength and doesn’t bank at all on your caring about the story. The investment you’re asked to place in the characters is minimal, instead the film proposes that you treat everyone as their own brand of clown with some odd sexual or personality flaw that endears them and alienates them from you all at once. The cheap laugh is attempted more often than anything else and Patrick Warburton once again gets stuck playing a blustery character of such unfathomable ego that the humor he’s capable of gets drowned out by the volume of his character’s preening. Warburton is a great talent when allowed to be understated, but Made for Each Other requires all of its performers to go over the top and consequently some of the nuance gets lost in translation.
It’s dumb, it’s campy, and it makes no pretense at making sense, but you just might enjoy dipping into this odd slice of suburban Americana for 90 minutes. The Waterworld musical segments are too good to not seek out.
DVD Bonus Features
The DVD has a lot of the usual fare like extra and deleted scenes, a trailer, and a short behind the scenes featurette hosted by Levine.
"Made for Each Other" is on sale August 31, 2010 and is not rated. Comedy. Directed by Daryl Bob Goldberg. Written by Eric Lord. Starring Bijou Phillips, George Segal, Patrick Warburton, Danny Masterson, Christopher Masterson, Lauren German, Samm Levine.
