7 / 10
Official trailer
Peyton Reed directed. Carl attends a self-help seminar run by Terrence Stamp’s Terrence Bundley, where attendees are required to make a covenant: say yes to every opportunity that arises. Carl says yes, and things start happening. Zooey Deschanel plays Allison, a photographer and lead singer of a band called Munchausen by Proxy. Bradley Cooper plays Carl’s best friend. Rhys Darby plays his boss. The film made approximately two hundred and twenty-three million dollars worldwide on a seventy million dollar budget.
Yes Man wins me over more than a high-concept Carrey comedy should. The gimmick could have been a one-joke sketch, and it keeps finding new ways to drag Carl into trouble. The ending lets it down and holds it at a 7, but I laugh plenty before it gets there.
The premise is the structure. Carl can never say no. The script generates ninety minutes of comedy from this single constraint by putting Carl in escalating situations where the obvious response is no. The constraint produces work. The film is consistently funnier than its high-concept premise suggested it would be.
Jim Carrey
Carrey was forty-six during filming. He had been at the top of mainstream comedy for fifteen years. The performance is calibrated instead of manic. Carrey could have played Carl as a vehicle for his usual physical comedy. Instead, he plays Carl as a real person whose covenant produces increasingly strange situations. The strange situations get the physical comedy. Carl himself stays mostly grounded. The choice gives the audience someone to identify with even when the plot becomes absurd.
The Korean-bride sequence is the film’s most-quoted bit. Carl says yes to learning Korean and yes to a mail-order bride newsletter and yes to a bar fight involving a Korean ex-husband. The escalation is fast. Carrey plays the escalation as a man who has agreed to all of this and is now confronting the consequences of his agreements. The comedy is in his face. The face is the same face Carrey has been making since the early 1990s. It still works.
The Korean-bride stretch is the funniest part of the film for me, and it’s all Carrey’s face. He looks like a man doing arithmetic on his own bad decisions in real time, and I’m laughing before anybody says a word.
For Writers
A premise that forces a character to make consistent choices generates comedy automatically. Carl must say yes. The reader can predict that bad situations will follow. The pleasure is in watching the bad situations. The lesson is that strong constraints on protagonist behavior produce more comedy than wide latitude does. A character who can do anything has to be funny through cleverness. A character who can only do one thing produces comedy through the gap between the constraint and the situation.
Zooey Deschanel
Deschanel was twenty-eight during filming. The role is one of the foundational performances for what would become her career-long persona. Allison is an offbeat woman who rides a scooter, sings in a band with a name only she finds funny, and runs a photography class for joggers.
The character is the prototype for the manic pixie dream girl criticism that would later be applied to Deschanel’s roles. The criticism is fair as a general observation about her career.
It’s also true that in Yes Man, Allison has more interior life than the criticism suggests. She exists for reasons other than fixing Carl. She has her own friends, her own projects and her own reactions when he disappoints her. I like her a lot, and I think Deschanel gets less credit for this part than she deserves.
The relationship between Carl and Allison is the film’s emotional center.
Both performers commit to it. The middle of the film, where Carl says yes to a spontaneous trip to Lincoln, Nebraska with Allison, is the warmest material in the runtime. The script justifies the third-act crisis by establishing how much Carl has come to care.
The Lincoln, Nebraska trip is the part of Yes Man I’d go back for. The jokes ease off, and Carrey and Deschanel get to be two people falling for each other. I’d have traded a couple of the gags for more of that.
For Writers
A romantic interest who exists primarily to change the protagonist is a structural problem. Yes Man partly avoids this by giving Allison enough specific business that she reads as her own person instead of as a fix-Carl device. The lesson is that secondary characters benefit from having lives the protagonist doesn’t influence. A character whose every scene is about the protagonist becomes a tool. A character whose life intersects with the protagonist while continuing in its own direction becomes a person.
The Third Act Crisis
The third act has Carl losing Allison after she discovers the covenant.
She believes everything Carl has said yes to was the covenant instead of his actual feelings. The script resolves this through a confrontation with Terrence Stamp’s character, who reveals the covenant was always a metaphor instead of a literal rule. Carl finds Allison. They reconcile. The film ends on a frozen yogurt date.
The resolution is the film’s weakest material. The covenant-as-metaphor reveal is dramatically convenient instead of earned. Allison’s anger is also resolved more quickly than the setup justified. The script needs to end the film and chooses speed over emotional satisfaction. The choice is defensible because the audience doesn’t come to Yes Man for a deep dramatic resolution. The audience comes for Jim Carrey saying yes to things. The film delivers that. The reconciliation is afterthought.
The ending is a letdown. Terrence Stamp’s character explains that the covenant was a metaphor all along, and the whole problem evaporates in one conversation. Allison deserved a better reason to come back, and Carl deserved a harder road to getting her.
For Writers
A weak resolution is acceptable in comedy if the body of the work has been strong. Yes Man’s third act is the weakest part of the film. The audience forgives this because the rest of the film has been entertaining. The lesson is that the audience for genre comedy doesn’t require the same structural rigor as the audience for drama. Comedy can survive a soft ending if the middle has been funny. Drama can’t. Know which audience you’re serving.
Craft Note
The Jim Carrey skateboard sequence is the film’s clearest demonstration that Carrey’s physical comedy capability hadn’t diminished a decade after The Mask. The skating-into-the-bush physical work plays through Carrey’s commitment to the impact, the recovery, and the comedic timing of the aftermath. Physical comedy depends on the performer continuing to deliver the pratfalls the audience associates with their identity.
Is Yes Man worth watching?
7/10. It’s a reliably entertaining mid-career Jim Carrey comedy with better performances and writing than the high-concept premise suggested. Deschanel is good, the Korean sequence ranks with Carrey’s funniest mid-career bits, and the Nebraska trip has more heart than the poster promises. The soft third act is the only thing keeping it from an 8. Watch it on a Sunday afternoon.
