Black & White World

I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With (2006)

Here’s one I really wanted to like.  I’ve come to really enjoy Jeff Garlin from his work on Curb Your Enthusiasm, he’s an incredibly engaging and funny actor.  His work here is great, and there is the germ of a really great movie here—a story that hasn’t been told very much from a man’s perspective:  the story of a lonely, overweight guy who eats to compensate for his loneliness, and his search for romance.  It’s a story that’s rather familiar from a woman’s point of view, but not one that’s often told about a man.

The worst mistake the movie makes is the casting of the odious Sarah Silverman as the woman Garlin takes up with (a very skinny girl, I noticed—heaven forbid even the lonely, chubby guy should find love with a full-figured gal).  Silverman is so thoroughly unlikeable, even though she is not doing her usual offensive envelope-pushing schtick, that the viewer is relieved when she dumps him.  Garlin was probably going for sympathy there, but he didn’t get it from me—he’s better off with Bonnie Hunt.

Most of the movie has a real-world feel to it, maybe a slightly skewed or quirky version of real life, but real life nonetheless.  Then it occasionally veers off into surreal territory; many sequences feel as though they are intruding on the film from some other movie.  There are moments of real honesty, though.  My favorite image in the movie is Garlin, sitting on the hood of his car (in what comes off like an homage to Seinfeld, he has found a perfect parking spot in front of Wrigley Field and refuses to move his car for the rest of the movie), quietly eating a sack full of junk food and staring at the moon.  I wish the movie contained a little more of this poignancy.