Now That I Have Found You
By Cynthia Fuchs

Chris Rock’s decision to remake Eric Rohmer’s 1972 comedy, Chloe in the Afternoon, suggests the two films have something in common. They do share some manifest themes, including middle-class/midlife restlessness, men’s self-serving cluelessness, women’s alluring mysteriousness. Like the original, I Think I Love My Wife presents a not-so-happily married man, here Richard (Rock), caught between his glorious wife Brenda (Gina Torres) and luscious obsession-object Nikki Tru (Kerry Washington). Again, the two women are arranged to form a common moral dilemma for the man: will he stray or stay?

Still, the movies aren’t exactly the same, starting with the shift of emphasis in the titles. Rock and longtime cowriter Louis C.K. have refocused the male’s anxiety to suit a U.S. market: Richard worries about his feelings and needs incessantly, especially concerning his “possession,” the wife. That he’s not feeling precisely in control of his property is suggested in the updating of the marriage: this one, unlike Rohmer’s, has produced children, Kelly (Milan Howard) and a prop-baby still in diapers. The kids take up Brenda’s time and energy, and make her extra-intimidating, as she can handle all situations where dad occasionally looks incompetent (he can’t handle the diapering so deftly as mom).

Brenda not only manages the house and the kids’ cultural context (she’s going to join Mocha Moms, she announces, in an effort to provide her children with playmates of color, as they live in white Westchester), but also maintains a regular dinner menu suited to his tastes and looks fantastic at every moment. The camera looks down on them as they lie side by side in bed, untouching. “How can my wife not have sex with me,” he wonders in voiceover, “And then send me out into a world with so many beautiful women? It’s like dropping me into the ocean and asking me not to get wet.” Poor Richard.

To make his situation slightly less pathetic –or maybe it’s more pathetic—I Think I Love My Wife delivers to Chris Rock Fan expectations. Richard marks his blackness by way of frequent n-word jokes and broadly race-based comedy. He also makes clear his own fretful, voracious appetite regarding women: strolling through the park of his imagination, he comes on to every beauty who comes his way: “Would you like to have sex with me?” (”Yes!”) or again, “Can I bite your ass?” (for $1000, anything is possible). The movie is an erratic, noisy, and anxious paean to masculine desire. In a word, it’s all about dick.

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