A spoiler-heavy movie review.
Yes, your boy Jay went to see a chick movie. There is no way around it: “The Broken Hearts Gallery” is for girls, through-and-through. And it was the only other major new release playing that my wife wanted to see for her birthday, that wasn’t subtitled (or I’d be all-over “Train to Busan 2”). But I was able to get through it like a champ. Allow me to explain: before the film, there was a trailer for “Ammonite”, which looks like the latest period-drama about an older, professional woman falling in lesbian with her much-younger assistant. It has Kate Winslet – who is fantastic – and Saoirse Ronan – who is mouth-gapingly pretty – so obviously it looked like something I would watch. My problem was that, hasn’t that particular film been done a few times now? It did seem awfully familiar. So it wouldn’t be in my best interest to assume (lest I be disappointed) that A: there would be steamy reel-to-reel sex, because there wouldn’t be, and B: that it would follow any kind of original plot or story-progression. There will obviously be some persecution; maybe the younger woman initially rejects the older woman’s advances; and the affair will probably ruin their lives, whether that means a lynching or a sad, lonely death at home like queer Alan Turing in “The Imitation Game”. Maybe the younger will leave the older for a man? Who knows. The point is, we’ve reached a precipice in cinema, where it doesn’t matter what you write, because it’s all been written before, either in books or on film, in English or any other language. So then it was all about how it looks; what directorial decisions are made; aesthetic choices that stand separate from whatever the writer originally intended behind their words.
Ammonite looks like it was shot on wet, beachy English sandfronts, with candlelit close-ups and a dark blue color wash probably added in Editing. Again, none of those choices sound like they are new and refreshing. So you have a film then, with an unoriginal plot, presented unoriginally. Have we really reached a point where the way a film looks and feels has become derivative? Has all the different ways a movie can be made dried up just as shriveled as all the different stories being told? Maybe that’s why I concentrate so much on acting with these reviews: because whatever combination of actors and actresses you have can easily make-or-break an otherwise-mediocre movie. That’s really what it’s about. Do you like Jason Statham and The Rock? Would you like to see them together? Hollywood has made it happen, DIRECTLY TO YOU. How about Winslet and Ronan? Again, the powers-that-be heard our cries and now it’s coming, and I’ll probably watch it. And you should see The Broken Hearts Gallery for its actresses, too, despite how painful it was to get me in to the theatre to watch it to begin with.
Geraldine Viswanathan (“Blockers”) is Lucy. Lucy is the “pixie dream girl” you’ve probably heard mentioned in places before: like Zooey Deschanel in TV’s “New Girl” or Zoe Kazan in “Ruby Sparks”, she makes for an absolutely-awful adult but still manages to win male affection with her good looks and charm. If only these boys knew what messes their bedrooms look like before they started dating them. Lucy’s isn’t any different: she keeps mementos from past relationships, to the point they are indexed and categorized – with shoelaces in ziploc bags tacked to the walls. She’s a hot mess! And her friends & roommates (Molly Gordon as the married one and Phillipa Soo as the lesbian one) see it too. How can her personal life be such a disaster when she’s working as a curator’s assistant for a prominent New York art gallery? Yes, she’s an aspiring curator herself, but when she’s fired after a very-public tirade aimed at her ex, it doesn’t look like she’ll be able to hold down a job either. Then she meets a nice boy named Nick (Dacre Montgomery from “Stranger Things”) who has his own problems, and they become really good friends, and she has this idea to turn the old hotel that he’s renovating into an art installation where people can donate their own chachkies from old relationships that they can’t get rid of, and it seems like things are going really well with Nick and maybe something is going to happen but then Lucy’s ex shows up again because he heard she was Instagram-famous for her “found art” exhibit and tries to woo her back, which leads to some poor choices on Nick’s part and… etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Frankly, for how uninspired these romantic-comedies can be, there was just too much damned plot in this one. Yes, it was always easy to follow (this isn’t “The Usual Suspects”), but it has to be easy, because it’s meant for school-aged girls. It just seemed that, every time the movie was able to sufficiently wrap up the plot, something else came out of left-field. Not that it’s ever a bad thing for a movie to have multiple threads going, and Broken Hearts Gallery actually has a doozy of an 11th-hour twist, right after Lucy ends things with her ex and you think she’s going back to Nick and everything is happily-ever-after. But after the bombshell, it just continued to spin its wheels for another 20-minutes while it wrapped up those dangling threads, then. Definitely sucked the air out of the movie, for sure. But I’m sure Netflix would love producing a million-hour show from the material, and maybe a million-hours more would help add some filler where the pacing was lacking.
However! Believe-it-or-not, Broken Hearts Gallery was actually really good. Fun, even. There wasn’t any adult drama in the movie you wouldn’t see on The CW, and the “clean-factor” was a nice palate cleanser after all the dark shit they’ve been putting in theatres lately. Granted, being a film about the New York art scene, writer/director Natalie Krinsky is admirable in her name-dropping and topical humor (leftover from her story-editing days on TV’s “Gossip Girls”, I’m sure) but some of it went right over my head too, whether that’s because I’m not an artistically-minded school-aged girl and don’t know these things, or I’ve just been slack on my knowledge of the current New York art scene. Thank God Krinsky has such an affable cast, then, to fall-back on for some good old-fashioned jokery-doo in-earnest. I can’t stress how awesome the three leads are, all in their own way: Viswanathan, Gordon, and Soo kill it. I don’t know how much improvising there was, but their banter was likable, funny, and – most-importantly – not annoying. In fact, all of the actors are pretty good, and Krinsky gets credit for not over-editing scenes and just letting the camaraderie of the cast play out naturally. Highlights were Lucy’s ex (played by Utkarsh Ambudkar) reacting to her profanity-laden oration (literally just a cutaway, but perfectly-timed); an extended karaoke party with a perfectly-reasonable “go get her” speech from Nick’s best friend, played by Arturo Castro (a funny guy, this one); and Gordon & Soo threatening Nick with a cucumber after he has a fight with Lucy. The list goes on, but that doesn’t even include the romantic stuff, which Viswanathan and Montgomery do well with too, as far as I was concerned. So, you have a chicky-movie, overwrought with clichés that are poorly-hidden beneath clunky contemporary art-speak, that is saved from home video obscurity by an amiable cast that’s game, with a main character who is SO HOPELESSLY INCAPABLE that it is unfathomable how ANY man could find her behavior acceptable. Even the ex at one point says he’s 35, and Lucy couldn’t be older than 20, so it definitely seemed like that partnership wasn’t all about the smarts, if you know what I mean. Really, if you’re 35 and you’re cruising for a young chick then an educated art babe isn’t the worst choice, so long as you know how to communicate with them (because take my word for it, those art babes are a different breed). But if I was ever invited to their bedroom and found they kept shit they stole from their ex’s, and they had been collecting those things since they were 12, I’m fucking out of there. If it’s just one shrine in an Ikea spice rack and the babe is particularly emo, then it might be forgivable. Otherwise, I don’t care if you look like Geraldine Viswanathan.
//jf 9.26.2020
Poster sourced from joblo.com.
theory of a daskeman 