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Possibly borrowing a bit from the breakout success
of Knocked Up and its notion of upscale women dating down,
way down, the smitten stalker comedy Management aims for
the sweeter side of creepy behavior when it comes to romance.
And while the pathologically inclined love crazed talking
points of this script might be more appropriate for a motel
horror movie say, like Psycho, Jennifer Aniston and her
nutty suitor played by Steve Zahn, excel at keeping the
potentially darker tone always threatening to rise to the
surface, reliably upbeat and breezily afloat.***
Jennifer Aniston is Sue in Management, a corporate sales
agent who makes the rounds from town to town, hawking tacky
artworks intended as decorations for commercial settings.
When she stops for the night at a seedy family run motel
in nowhere Arizona, the proprietors' son Mike (Steve Zahn),
who has been cooling his heels there his entire adult life
as the forlorn night manager, makes a series of inappropriate
persistent plays for the exhausted woman, who just wants
to get a room.***
After a succession of visits to Sue's door, with offerings
of bottles of wine and champagne that he digs up and pretends
are routine gifts for guests, she figures out just what
Mike is up to. And in turn makes a rather kinky business
deal, to allow the bottom feeder to touch her bottom just
once, if he'll go away for good after that.***
But the butt grabbing arrangement, utterly formal and
impersonal in its terms and execution, affects the somewhat
lonely businesswoman to such an extent, that she soon finds
herself tracking down the perpetrator with permission to
grab, over to the motel laundry room. Where she intiates
a quickie on the run between the sheets, the ones he's folding,
that is, before dashing out of town on her next work assignment.
But with Mike not far behind, to her dismay, as he pursues
her around the country whether she likes it or not. And
despite some fairly thuggish interference on the part of
her rich and infamous punk rocker lost and found boyfriend,
played by Woody Harrelson.***
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