If you gathered together Judd Apatow’s extended posse for a class photo, Paul Rudd would be brandishing his knockout prefect smile, Seth Rogen would be caught in mid-blink, Katherine Heigl would be absent, Jonah Hill might be sticking his middle finger up on the sly… and Charlyne Yi would be the short, awkward, dimpled girl with horn-rimmed glasses at the end of a row. She was the stoner girlfriend in
Knocked Up and is working on another project to be produced by Judd Apatow, but her style of comedy belongs to a whole other schoolyard.
In fact, it feels like a stretch to call her a comedian. Yi’s comedy routine, such as it is, is not so much based on crackin’ wise as just being a bit of a dork, and what little we see of her stand-up in
Paper Heart is very feeble indeed. But most viewers will enjoy Yi’s naïve enthusiasm. Whether they’ll enjoy
Paper Heart is another matter.
Paper Heart, conceived by Yi and written by her and Nick Jasenovic, takes the form of a documentary, following Yi on her cross-country quest to understand that most thorny of subjects, love. Right from the outset, Yi says she doesn’t believe in true love – at one point she wonders, with a touch of regret, if some people are born without the necessary chemicals – but she wants to know what ordinary Americans think. She speaks to bikies, romance novelists, divorce lawyers, Nashville musicians, married couples and children, not to mention a couple of celebrity friends, all of whom have their own light to shed on the subject.
What makes
Paper Heart interesting is the way that it combines reality with fiction. At an LA party, Yi meets Michael Cera – playing a version of himself, which he’s arguably done his whole career – and the two quietly fall for each other. The director, Nick Jasenovic (actually played by Jake Johnson) knows an opportunity when he sees one, and the budding young couple now finds themselves the unwitting subjects of the film. As you’d expect, a camera crew following their every move wears a little thin with them.
It’s a neat concept, except that neither of these two elements is especially strong. Ultimately, it’s this little ingenuity that is the movie’s failing: the documentary elements only serve to bring the artifice of the fictional segments sharply into focus. Even Cera, a real natural and funny as usual, sticks out like a sore thumb in this cinematic sleight of hand.
Yi isn’t exactly Louis Theroux when it comes to her interview technique either, and the real-life love stories are sweet, but… well, just sweet. A bit like reading a box of Hallmark cards for 89 minutes. Yi’s lo-fi puppet theatre, which dramatises the stories of some of her interviewees, also seems to be trying too hard to be cute. (Funny that they didn’t dramatise the romance of two burly gay New Yorkers the same way.) It’s all a bit like an old segment on
Sesame Street, and after a while the three leads leave you desperate to hear some grown-up voices.
It’s hard to be taken in by
Paper Heart when, like one of Yi’s puppet sequences, you can see the puppeteer orchestrating the deception. For a movie about love, I’m afraid there’s only enough in
Paper Heart to just like.
Paper Heart is coming soon to Australian cinemas.
Here's the trailer: