Look, I’m not proud of this. Yes, I went to see a romantic comedy. Yes, I went by myself. It was just me and one couple in that theater and they seemed very annoyed that I was there. But until more movies start being released, this is all that I was left with. Even though I’m not exactly the target audience for this sort of thing, The Broken Hearts Gallery is the debut feature from a regular writer on Grey’s Anatomy and Gossip Girl, so how the fuck could I not like it? Unfortunately, it turned out to be hackneyed bullshit, which isn’t what I expected with that kind of pedigree.
Our main character is Lucy, whose dependence issues are the closest that she comes to having an interesting personality. She keeps an object from all of her failed relationships, even though given her age of 26 and the number of such objects that she has, this means that her relationships typically last 6 hours. She starts an “art gallery” that consists of these objects and invites others to contribute their own mementos of relationships past. There isn’t really an antagonist, but we get such nail-biting questions as “Will they get the bank loan for the gallery?” and “Will she get back with her asshole ex-boyfriend or start dating that quirky guy that’s a little off-beat, but just makes her oh so happy?” The suspense damn near killed me.
Okay, okay. I’m obviously not the intended audience for this and I know that these kinds of movies are about the journey, not the destination. I know that she will end up with the nice guy, that’s not the point and I can appreciate that. If you want to sit down in a couple of months and watch a Hallmark Christmas movie marathon, I’ll bring the beer and hope she ditches that big-city lawyer and marries that guy that owns the bakery and wears flannel. We’ll laugh, we’ll cry, we’ll have the merriest fucking Christmas since the Muppets met Big Bird. So I can deal with the tropes of this genre, but you need to give me characters that amount to something more than a list of reasons why people think that Gen Z is a dumpster fire. As with Kajillionaire, these are people solely defined by quirkiness and lethargy. Despite living in New York, nobody has a job, nobody really seems to have any problems and everybody just sits in apartments and cafes and tries to be quirkier than each other. What the fuck do you people do? How did that guy afford to buy a hotel? These are not characters, they are loafing, one-note pieces of nonsense that need to get their shit together. Oh, you found a dirty old couch? Better drag it all they way across Brooklyn, then stop to get ice cream cones that you can eat on the couch in the middle of the block while giggling like jackasses. You’re so fun and free-spirited. Fuck you. Get a fucking job.
This is also the second week in a row that I know that a movie is a comedy only because the internet told me so. I didn’t laugh once. That couple in the theater was making out the whole time, but they didn’t laugh once either. It wasn’t even that the jokes didn’t work; it’s that I don’t think there were any jokes. A character that doesn’t speak (for no particular reason) isn’t funny. A lesbian that has a thing for Russian models isn’t funny. There needs to be actual jokes and payoffs to these things or we are just left with uninteresting people doing uninteresting things for two hours. I don’t understand. Is it hip to make comedies without jokes now? Did I miss a meeting?
Or maybe I’m just an angry old man that just doesn’t get it. If you are an overly-sentimental jackass in your twenties and you admire the work ethic of the characters in Rent, then maybe you will find this hilarious. If you aren’t and you enjoy romantic comedies, then you probably won’t enjoy this. I may not like the genre, but I can still appreciate when it is done well and this is just pathetic.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broken_Hearts_Gallery#/media/File:The_Broken_Hearts_Gallery.jpeg
