Dan Stevens as a dashing robot lover? That computes
I'm Your Man intelligently mixes sci-fi, romance, and comedy
Film Reviews Dan Stevens
There’s something a little too perfect about Dan Stevens. Even when he’s not literally playing a Disney prince, he looks like one: poised, chiseled, giving off a clean-cut aura no matter his state of grooming. For as much as the Downton Abbey alum has capitalized on his leading-man presentability—how suited he is to wearing suits—his best performances play deviously on that quality. Think of The Guest, in which Stevens’ hunkiness operated like a smoke screen (it was almost an inverted Beauty And The Beast, hiding a wolf under sheep’s clothing), or of last summer’s Eurovision, wherein he spoofed his own Ken Doll appeal. To that list of self-subversions one can now add I’m Your Man, a clever and sneakily resonant mix of sci-fi, comedy, and drama that finally just goes right ahead and casts the star as a heartthrob built in a lab.
Tom, the character Stevens plays, is a “dream partner:” an entirely synthetic humanoid designed to fulfill one particular person’s every emotional and sexual need. He’s a literal love machine, in other words. And from the moment he steps on screen, into a hopping, vaguely anachronistic nightclub where the new products first mingle with the humans they’ve been carefully calibrated to satisfy, it’s clear that Stevens has found an ideal application for the slight uncanniness of his charisma. Tom has the smooth moves of A.I.’s Gigolo Joe and some of the quizzical cluelessness of Star Trek’s Data, all wrapped up in the classical good looks of, well, Matthew Crawley.
I’m Your Man is set in a near future where robot lovers are still a cutting-edge innovation, not an everyday commodity. Tom, who’s essentially a test model, has been customized to what you could call the advanced dating profile of the user he’ll be going home with: Alma (Maren Eggert), a research scientist who’s only agreed to the three-week study in exchange for funding from the company seeking her feedback. She’s to weigh in, based on what she experiences with Tom, on the let’s say effectiveness of the technology—and also maybe on how wise it would be to unleash a bunch of Toms on the public.
Alma, we quickly learn, is a hard-nosed pragmatist, even something of an academic crank, and she has no expectation of actually developing any real relationship with this handsome computer staying in her apartment for the better part of a month. Still, Tom is persistent—his whole reason for existing is to win her over, to fulfill her every fantasy. Adapted from a short story by Emma Braslavsky that could have served, with a tweak in tone, as the source material for a Black Mirror episode, I’m Your Man recognizes the inherent comic possibilities of its premise without pushing them into broad farce. Some of the humor rests on Alma’s initial ease in resisting the algorithm. Like any computer, Tom has to be taught the user preferences: On their way home, he constructively, scientifically critiques her driving, and her wordless response is all he requires to begin course correcting towards behavior she’ll better appreciate. He also totally rearranges her apartment, then swiftly returns it to its original state when met with irritation, not swooning.
Still, Alma isn’t made of stone, even if she approaches her strange situation with a rational skepticism. Against her best judgement, she starts to like Tom, to warm to his attempts at seduction and ingratiation. And how could she not, when that comes in the form of Dan Stevens, doing a cybernetic approximation of her romantic ideal? The film even supplies a funny explanation for why Stevens is speaking fluent German in an English accent: It’s part of his programming, a setting designed to match whatever hidden desires of nationality she betrayed through the questionnaire process. The filmmaker, Maria Schrader, who directed all four episodes of Netflix’s Unorthodox, keeps the tone just left of romantic-comedy center.
I’m Your Man doesn’t go exactly where you might expect it to. Its slightly unpredictable trajectory is set by Alma’s stubborn understanding of the illusion she’d have to buy into to fall for Tom. (“I’m acting in a play,” she says when things get weird.) There are genuine big concerns nipping at the edges of the film’s high concept—questions about happiness, the value of conflict in relationships, and even what makes someone human. (By the film’s definition, it’s a way of looking, maybe an understanding of life’s intangible poetry.) Does Tom become more human, his artificial intelligence evolving to genuinely bond with the person he was created to please? Or does his advanced CPU, as diligent as the T-800’s, merely find a way to react to her resistance—at one point by actually denying her drunken desires in favor of something like the long game? I’m Your Man leaves such matters intriguingly ambiguous.
This is, perhaps, a movie easy to oversell. It earns a lot of goodwill simply by never devolving into a dumber version of itself, into what you might expect from a film featuring Dan Stevens as a sexy robot. But I’m Your Man’s charms are real, and steeped in a lightly inquisitive, even philosophical engagement with the meatier matters of smart science fiction and smart relationship drama. Credit the performances for keeping the balance of frothy-to-thoughtful. Eggert, best known to American cinephiles for her work in the much more esoteric films of Angela Schanelec, identifies the comedy of Alma’s experience as a kind of intellectual screwball: the relatable hilarity of trying to square what the head knows with what the heart wants. And she’s got a great scene partner in Stevens, refining his star power into a just slightly, almost imperceptibly mechanical approximation of Don Juan smolder. He lets us admire the interface and still see the code ticking away underneath it.
30 Comments
Ok, I’ll admit it. Dan Stevens is my celebrity man crush.Not necessarily my type of movie, but I’ll check out for my boo.
Legion is still my favorite show ever
No mention of Legion in the review?I kid. (How dare you not refer to the thing I know and like more than the things you do mention?!) Although I suspect there are a lot of fans out there (what’s the word for that…starts with an “L”…?) like me who could give a crap about Downton Abbey and know him best as David Haller.I agree with the man-crush. If you haven’t seen The Guest, I highly recommend it.And I will be checking this out. Sci-fi rom-com sounds exactly like my type of movie, so thanks, Dowd, for bringing it to my attention.
The filmmakers landed Stevens as the lead and apparently still felt the need to hedge his handsomeness by offsetting it with that utter doof in the back right of the lead photo.
I think that guy is supposed to be someone else’s ideal sexy robot.
I first saw him as the lead in the Andrew Davies miniseries adaptation of The Line of Beauty, by one of my fave writers, Alan Hollinghurst. 2006, I guess. So that roles has sorta coloured how I’ve seen him since. (Also realized recently, I think it’s where I first saw Hayley Atwell)
I want to see this for Maren Eggert, who I only know from the long-running TV series Tatort. She has an intelligent, everywoman quality about her that really drew me into her performance. BTW, it *is* Maren and not Marren; please give this actor the respect she deserves and correct her name.
Good review, Dowd.But where is Caroline’s?
in the City?
No, that’s Summer.
Still, it would have been interesting to see Rob Schneider’s take on this role.
Derp
I hope they eventually return the hundreds (hundreds!) of pages of “Dan Stevens as a sexy robot” spec I wrote. Too weird for a German sex robot movie apparently.
Sprokets?
This looks really thought provoking instead of silly. It could so easily have been ridiculous. Where’s the kickstarter? 😉
This seems oddly reminiscent of Making Mr. Right.
No, no, no…it’s like if Comedy Central’s Battle Bots was a rom-com!
That’s what I thought too. They already made this movie, and the robot looked like John Malkovich.
Malkovich is a love-bot? I’d hit that!
A love-bot with weird blond hair. He also plays the robot’s designer, so it’s a case of multiple Malkoviches well before the days of Being John Malkovich.
It’s John Malkovich and . . . John Malkovich in The Love-Bot Trap!
If my dick gets any harder it’s going to flip my desk over!
Sandra Hüller! Well, if she’s not mentioned in the review, I guess it’s a bit part.
I think this really looks interesting, even just because the age difference between the two leads skews against what you typically get from Hollywood.
There’s something a little too perfect about Dan Stevens. Even when he’s not literally playing a Disney prince, he looks like one: poised, chiseled, giving off a clean-cut aura no matter his state of grooming.Given that I mostly know Dan Stevens from Legion, as a dissheveled telepathic insane person, let’s just say I have a very different impression of him.
Sadly, I cannot take Dan Stevens seriously after the absolute goofiness displayed on his face during his final scenes on Downton Abbey.
Sounds like a lighter version of The Silver Metal Lover.
He has the most beautiful eyes, it’s distracting. But if we’re debating sexiest robot, should we consider Jon Hamm in Marjorie Prime? Or was he just a hologram AI?
Thanks for the reminder of The Guest. Also that I’m overdue for a re-watch of You’re Next, simply because it’s a fun film and never fails to entertain.
Interesting that you mention Data, as there’s a TNG episode that sort of mirrors this film. Called “In Theory,” Data is the rebound boyfriend for an engineer fresh out of a relationship, and like Stevens in this film, he tries to tailor himself to be the type of lover that she wants. What’s interesting is the dichotomy of the paramours’ perspectives. In the TNG episode, she left her old boyfriend because he was emotionally distant, and then immediately latched on to Data, who at that point was incapable of showing emotion, or even of believably simulating it (though his over-the-top lothario impression was priceless). Here, Alma is the distant one, resisting and outright refusing to feel anything for Tom. One sought something authentic in the artificial, while the other asserted the artificiality and surprised herself when the authentic moments evolved. I love the inversion.Also, I just got back from a screening that included a live Q&A with Stevens afterwards, and funnily enough, he said the hardest scene for him was the opening scene because he had to learn how to rumba from a very demanding German dance instructor during his off days (due to COVID protocols, that opening ballroom scene, the largest crowd scene of the film, was shot last). Part of the reason he was cast was because he was an Englishman who knew German, but because he wasn’t a native speaker he could work that into his intentionally rigid, technical line-readings (with physical mannerisms he styled after Cary Grant), so to compound that with seductive dance as a form of instruction ended up being his biggest challenge. Whatever he went through, it worked. It was a delightful performance.