Film

Is Peyton Reed an underrated director? Down with Love dissected the Day-Hudson rom-coms with more lifeblood than its highbrow equivalent, Far from Heaven. The Break-Up shirked conventions and built to a devastating final scene in which the characters…talked like adults. Yes Man hews more closely to formula, but give Reed credit for bringing scattered wit to a film that could have easily been Liar Liar 2—a high-concept yukfest in which banker Jim Carrey pledges to a self-help guru (Stamp) that he’ll say “yes” to every question for a year.

Yes to flying lessons. Yes to spam e-mails. Yes to being serviced by the elderly woman next door. (Groan.) Yes to every loan he’s asked for, albeit in a movie that seems distinctly pre-bailout. Can’t back down from a bar fight. There are vestiges of the Bad Carrey, flailing manically while hopped up on Red Bull. But the movie aims squarely for Capra territory in its romance, with Zooey Deschanel somewhat plausibly digging her accidental suitor’s weirdo confidence. Is this a workable model for living? No way—maybe in the source material, an autobiographical book by Danny Wallace. But as self-help comedy, the movie is no more overdetermined than its own highbrow counterpart, Happy-Go-Lucky.