How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (2008)

Robert Weide's 2008 adaptation of Toby Young's memoir arrives with a self-description attached: a testosterone-laced Devil Wears Prada. That phrase does a great deal of work, and none of it flattering. Simon Pegg plays Sidney Young, a British polemicist who stumbles into a job at a glossy New York magazine and proceeds to insult, grope, and offend his way through the celebrity-industrial complex. The film wants to be a satire of access journalism. It settles for a man falling over furniture.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is thin. The cast is white, British, and well-tailored, with Thandiwe Newton appearing as herself and Max Minghella hovering at the edge of the frame. A transgender character named Bobbie turns up for a single sequence, in which Sidney brings her to the office and has her strip for his boss to obtain blackmail material. This is the film's entire engagement with trans life, and it is played for laughs. Women fare little better: Megan Fox's starlet exists to be desired, and Kirsten Dunst's Alison exists to be won. The satire aims at publicists and celebrity vanity, which is a soft target, and it never extends its contempt to the economic machinery that produces them.

There is a moral buried in the third act, something about the cost of selling your principles for a good table at the awards show. The film delivers it by having Pegg tackle a starlet on stage and confess to killing her dog. This is not sermonizing. It is farce with a conscience it cannot quite articulate. The result is a comedy that mocks the worship of fame while remaining entirely in thrall to it, a position the film never examines and possibly never notices. We are left with a modest, sour little picture that wants credit for seeing through the velvet rope while standing firmly on the correct side of it.