My World of Flops, One Is the Floppiest Number Case File #181 The Lonely Guy (1984)
The concept of the lonely guy has changed dramatically in the thirty-seven years since Steve Martin starred as the title character in 1984’s The Lonely Guy, a Neil Simon-adapted big-screen adaptation of Bruce Jay Friedman’s 1978 best-seller The Lonely Guy’s Guide to Life.
We’re less innately sympathetic towards straight white sad sacks who want sex and relationships but don’t know how to go about getting them. We’re less likely to see these figures as cute, harmless and pitiable than problematic and toxic.
These days lonely guys are sometimes known and feared as angry Incels. If they self-identify as “nice guys”, or loudly profess that they’re not like other guys (#Notallmen) then they are held in even greater suspicion.
Yes, a title like The Lonely Guy would take on a more sinister connotation in 2021 than it did back in the mid 1980s, when the film was released to lukewarm reviews and tepid box-office or the late 1970s, when Friedman (who also wrote the short story that inspired The Heartbreak Kid) was published.
In The Lonely Guy, director Arthur Hiller, screenwriters Neil Simon, Ed Weinberger and Stan Daniels and stars Steve Martin and Charles Grodin endeavor to make “Lonely Guy” a thing with mixed results.
The Lonely Guy is not a great film, or even a particularly good movie, but it’s worth seeing for one of Charles Grodin’s best and most overlooked performances as suicidal depressive Warren Evans, a Yoda-like guru of geekiness who mentors Steve Martin’s lovelorn greeting card writer Larry Hubbard in the ways of the loveless urban sad sack.
Warren Evans is the saddest man in the world but he’s more than that. He’s the living personification of sadness, despair in heartbreaking human form. Grodin maintains a Todd Solondz level of despondency throughout The Lonely Guy. The film is deeper, richer and better for it.
Larry Hubbard meets a brown cardigan-clad, balding Warren on a park bench after coming home to discover his ballerina girlfriend in bed with a fellow dancer.
The poignantly pathetic loner sizes up as Larry as a fellow “Lonely Guy” and introduces him to a secret world of lonely guys who must find a way to get by in the absence of romantic love.
Warren encourages Larry to make friends with the plant AND animal kingdoms. He tells his heartbroken pal to buy ferns as pals as well as pets. Warren insists of ferns, “Make em seem like they’re your buddies! You can watch football together!”
When Larry deadpans, “Watch football games with a plant?”, Warren happily retorts, “Hey, you never know!” before laughing letting loose a goose-like honk of a laugh.
It’s an exchange with a suspiciously similar rhythm to the classic The Simpsons moment when Albert Brooks’ Hank Scorpio asks Homer, “Ever see a guy say goodbye to a shoe?” And Homer mysteriously, controversially replies, “Yeah, once.”
Warren has very intense ideas about ferns. He tells Larry that he should stick around and have a drink with his plant babies after watering them because they “don’t like to drink alone”, then adds a somber, “seriously” in case Larry thought he was joking.
Ever the considerate friend, Warren offers to help Larry get back on his feet by buying him towels wholesale that have the initials of couples that have gotten divorced and when his new pal tells him that he wouldn’t want to grow depressed every time he takes a shower Warren assures him, “You’ll probably be depressed anyway” in a manner that’s simultaneously hilarious and utterly heartbreaking.
That’s a perfect description of Grodin’s performance here. Grodin and Martin unsurprisingly improvised a lot of their dialogue. That helps explain why it has a different, more naturalistic and explosively funny rhythm than the rest of the film.
It’s a performance full of quotable lines ad-libbed in the moment, like when Warren tries to convince his best/only friend to get a dog because you don’t have to win a dog’s love because it is instinctual, reasoning, adorably, “Hitler had a dog. That dog went CRAZY over him!”
When Warren invites Larry to a party at his house and the only other “guests” are life-sized cut-outs of celebrities like Richard Pryor, Loni Anderson and Tom Selleck it’s laugh out loud funny but it’s also almost unbearably sad.
Warren has such terrible self-esteem that he seemingly feels unworthy of interacting with flesh and blood human beings (with the exception of Larry) and must resort to interacting with inanimate objects, like the robot he plays chess with, his ferns and his cut-out friends, of whom he poignantly insists, “They’re real good company! You’d be surprised.”
Grodin’s unforgettable loser is the film’s real Lonely Guy. Compared to Warren’s deep, permanent misery Larry is just temporarily between girlfriends.
After getting dumped, Larry decides to write a book about his experiences called A Guide for the Lonely Guy that proves a runaway best-seller. Larry suddenly finds himself in the enviable position of having women throw themselves at him, but he remains hung up on Iris (Judith Ivey), a six-time divorcee who is reluctant to commit again given her long history of romantic failure.
The Lonely Guy isn’t much of a movie. It has the ramshackle, episodic feel of a collection of uneven sketches haphazardly stitched together through the protagonist’s fourth wall-breaking asides to the audience and the rickety central conceit of the “Lonely Guy.”
It’s even less of a romantic comedy. Even a movie this wacky and digressive needs at least some minimal level of characterization if it wants audiences to be emotionally invested in its central romantic relationship but The Lonely Guy instead always goes for laughs that never come unless Grodin and Martin are together in scenes so wildly superior to all the others that they belong in a different movie altogether.
In The Lonely Guy, Grodin did what he so often did over the course of his life and career: he invests a nothing of a movie with real pathos, real comedy and more than anything, real pain. It’s a C+ movie with an A+ performance from one of the all time greats.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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