| Yes Man | |
|---|---|
 Film poster | |
| Directed by | Peyton Reed |
| Produced by | Jim Carrey David Heyman Richard D. Zanuck |
| Written by | Screenplay: Nicholas Stoller Jarrad Paul Andrew Mogel Book: Danny Wallace |
| Starring | Jim Carrey Terrence Stamp Zooey Deschanel Bradley Cooper Rhys Darby Danny Masterson |
| Cinematography | Robert D. Yeoman |
| Editing by | Jeff Micks |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
| Release date(s) | December 19, 2008 (US, ES) December 26, 2008 (UK) January 1, 2009 (AU) January 21, 2009 (FR) |
| Running time | 104 min. |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $70 million |
| Gross revenue | $122,710,000 |
| Official website • IMDb • Allmovie | |
Yes Man is a 2008 American comedy film directed by Peyton Reed and starring Jim Carrey. The film is based on the true story and 2005 book The Yes Man by British humourist Danny Wallace (who has a brief cameo in the film). Production began in Los Angeles, CA in October 2007.
Plot
Carl Allen (Jim Carrey) is a divorced middle-aged man in Los Angeles who spends his days working as a junior loan approval officer in a bank, supervised by his immature manager Norman (Rhys Darby). Routinely declining social engagements so as to avoid meeting his ex-wife Stephanie (Molly Sims) with her new boyfriend, he has grown used to spending his evenings watching DVDs alone in his apartment while ignoring his friends' phone calls. But after he lets down his best friend Pete by forgetting about his engagement party, his friend Nick (John Michael Higgins) persuades him that he needs to start living again. Nick takes Carl to a motivational seminar called "Yes!" where Carl is publicly accosted by inspirational guru Terrence Bundley (Terence Stamp). Browbeaten into making a covenant with himself, Carl promises to stop being a "No Man" and to answer "Yes!" to every opportunity, request, or invitation that presents itself thereafter.
After the seminar, a homeless man asks Carl for a ride to Elysian Park. Although Carl's instinct is to say no, Nick intervenes, reminding Carl that the proper answer is yes. During the drive, the homeless man asks to borrow Carl's cell phone (Carl again says yes) and wears out the battery making calls. When they reach their destination, the man asks for the cash in Carl's wallet (which Carl reluctantly gives), but then Carl discovers that his car has run out of fuel. With his phone battery dead, he hikes to a gas station several miles away, where he meets Allison (Zooey Deschanel). She takes pity on him and gives him a hair-raising scooter ride back to his car. Emboldened by her spontaneity and by a newfound sense of possibility, Carl impulsively kisses Allison, and believes that his life has changed for the better.
After this positive start, Carl continues saying yes. After he wins a promotion at the bank for agreeing to work on a Saturday, he goes out to celebrate with his friends, gets very drunk, impetuously kisses a girl, and becomes involved in a comic fistfight with her boyfriend (he luckily escapes injury). But when he agrees to erect some shelving for his elderly neighbor Tillie (Fionnula Flanagan), and she proposes to reward him sexually, Carl is horrified. He says no and attempts to leave her apartment—but he gets his shirt stuck in the door, falls down the stairs after freeing himself, and almost gets mauled by a guard dog. Terrified that he has broken the Yes! covenant, Carl returns to his neighbor's apartment, where he allows her to perform oral sex on him.
After this brush with his old No Man self, Carl now commits himself to saying yes to absolutely every opportunity that comes his way—he takes flying lessons, attends Korean language classes, learns to play the guitar, and even says yes when he receives spam from a Persian dating website. As before, saying yes"works to Carl's advantage. When he says yes to a concert promoter whom he has previously ignored, he sees a band whose lead singer turns out to be Allison. Although the band is dreadful and the audience tiny, Carl is again charmed by Allison's spontaneity and idiosyncrasy. She invites him to the unconventional class that she teaches in the park in the mornings, which combines photography with jogging, and the two begin dating.
At work, Carl has been saying yes to every loan application that crosses his desk, but this seemingly reckless approach to lending wins him a promotion to executive after it opens new territory for the bank in the area of microcredit. He finally agrees to attend one of Norm's costume parties where they dress as Harry Potter characters. His newfound talents prove fruitful when it comes to saving a man (Luis Guzman) from committing suicide: as the man stands on a ledge outside a tall building, Carl picks up a guitar and plays Third Eye Blind's song "Jumper" to persuade the man to return inside.
As their relationship blossoms, Carl and Allison meet at the airport for a spontaneous weekend away. Having decided to take the first plane out of town, they end up in Lincoln, Nebraska, where they explore the Frank H. Woods Telephone Museum, attend a college football game, and go skeet shooting. As they shelter from the rain in a barn before their departure, Allison asks Carl to move in with her. He hesitates, but says yes anyway. But while checking in for the return flight, Carl is detained by FBI agents, who have profiled him as potential terrorist because he has taken flying lessons, studied Korean, approved a loan to start a fertilizer company, been married for six months three years previously, and bought plane tickets at the last minute.
Carl calls his best friend Pete, a lawyer, who travels to Nebraska to explain Carl's commitment to saying yes to everything. At this point, Allison finds out about Carl's motivational covenant, and begins to doubt whether his commitment to her was ever sincere. She also finds out about Carl's marriage and divorce, which he had not mentioned to her previously. Deciding that she can no longer trust a man who is obliged to say yes to everything, regardless of his true feelings, Allison leaves Carl at the airport. Carl repeatedly tries to contact her, but to no avail.
In a vain effort to speak with Allison, Carl attends another of her band's concerts, where she indirectly tells him to jump off a bridge so Carl signs up to do a bungee jump. While dangling from the bridge after the jump, he receives a phone call from the bank's vice president, saying that he must fire his old boss Norman. He tries to make things better, going through with the bridal shower he has agreed to organize for Pete's fiancée, and even setting Norman up with a Korean party planner whom he met when planning the shower.
While he is broken up with Allison, Carl gets a tearful phone call from his ex-wife Stephanie, whose boyfriend has walked out on her. Carl goes to Stephanie's apartment to comfort her, but she kisses him passionately and asks whether they can get back together. After Carl emphatically says no, his luck takes a turn for the worse: The elevator in which he tries to leave Stephanie's building almost snaps free of its cable, a black cat crosses his path, and his car gets clamped and towed. He has a momentary hallucination in which the tow-truck operator metamorphoses into himself, and starts to chant "No Man, No Man, No Man."
In desperation, Carl decides to track down Terrence Bundley so that he can be released from the Yes! covenant. After lying in wait for Bundley in the backseat of the his convertible, Carl emerges after the car pulls off, but Bundley is so shocked that he loses control of the vehicle and crashes it. Carl awakes some hours later in the hospital, only for the guru to tell him that there really wasn't any covenant, and that he wasn't supposed to take saying yes so literally. The point of the covenant was only to open Carl's mind to other possibilities, not to take away his ability to say no when he needed to. Freed from this restraint, Carl borrows the Ducati motorcycle from a male nurse who bought it with the money he lent the man and rides it to Allison's morning class, wearing only a hospital gown. He apologizes, admits that he does not want to move in with her just yet, but tells her that he genuinely loves and wants her—and has been with her not just because he is compelled to say yes. The couple kiss passionately while the amateur photographers capture the moment.
At the end of the movie, Carl and Allison make a rather large donation of clothes to a local homeless shelter. Cutting to the scene of the Yes! seminar, Bundley is surprised when he walks on stage to several hundred naked audience members. It is implied that the participants have said Yes! to donating their clothes to charity.
In a scene during the credits Carl and Allison try on a new body skating outfit designed by a man he had previously denied a loan early in the film. They zip down a large hill at high speeds laughing all the way.
Cast
- Jim Carrey as Carl Allen
- Zooey Deschanel as Allison
- Bradley Cooper as Peter
- John Michael Higgins as Nick
- Rhys Darby as Norman
- Danny Masterson as Rooney
- Terence Stamp as Terrence Bundley
- Molly Sims as Stephanie
- Sean O'Bryan as Ted
- Sasha Alexander as Lucy
- John Cothran Jr. as Tweed
- Luis Guzman as Jumper
Production
Carrey received no upfront salary for his role in the film. He will instead be paid 36.2 percent of the film's gross after its production and marketing costs are recovered.[1]
During shooting of a scene where Carrey's character bungee jumps off a bridge, Carrey interrupted and asked to do the stunt himself.[2] Carrey stated to the stunt double that he intended to do it in one take. When he jumps off, he is seen taking out a cell phone for the scene.
While shooting the scene in the bar where Carrey's character turns around into a waitress and falls flat on his back, Carrey executed the stunt incorrectly and fell to the floor harder than he expected, breaking three ribs in the process. Carrey himself revealed this in an interview for Moviefone in response to a viewer-submitted question about the film's stunts. [3]
Carrey also mastered basic Korean for a scene. A language coach was hired to help Carrey learn the language accurately. However, this is not the same for the scene in which Carrey's character learns to play the guitar; Carrey has been playing the instrument since his childhood.
The film's soundtrack features original music by "Munchausen by Proxy", a fictional band named after the Münchausen syndrome by proxy, a psychological disorder. Jim Carrey's character is incessantly invited to see the band by an over-eager manager/street promoter. Along with female lead Zooey Deschanel, the fictional band was created by Von Iva.[4] The San Francisco-based all-girl power trio of vocals, keyboards and drums were hired to collaborate with the actress to write and perform the original songs and stylized aesthetic of the group for this pivotal scene.[5][6] Von Iva got the part of the fictional ensemble in the film after the movie's music supervisor, Jonathan Karp, saw the cover of their CD in Amoeba in Hollywood.[7] The soundtrack also features 9 songs by the Eels including a brand-new song, "Man Up." [8]
Reception
Yes Man generated mixed reviews. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 42% of critics gave positive based on 128 reviews.[9] Most critics thought that its plot was too similar to Liar Liar, which also starred Jim Carrey. [10] Metacritic also calculated a 45/100 approval rating based on 23 reviews.[11]
In his review for The Miami Herald, Rene Rodriguez wrote, "Yes Man is fine as far as Carrey comedies go, but it's even better as a love story that just happens to make you laugh,"[12] while Kyle Smith of The New York Post countered in his review that, "The first time I saw Yes Man, I thought the concept was getting kind of stale toward the end. As it turns out, that was only the trailer."[13].
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