Paper Heart

By Matt Prigge
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Aug. 4, 2009

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Michael Cera’s fumbling, prepubescent-voiced puppy-dog act was effective because his affections went, mostly, unrequited—and also because he was a still-forming, button-his-shirt-all-the-way-to-the-top teen. As a twentysomething who can handily get some ass, his story’s a little different. If you found something more than a little icky about Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist—which a grossed-out colleague dubbed “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Cutefest”—then steer far clear of Paper Heart, which makes that cutesy-pie romance look like Scenes From a Marriage.

The twist here is that Cera is playing himself, or rather “himself.” A doc-fiction hybird, Paper Heart revolves not around the onetime George-Michael Bluth but his (then-)real-life girlfriend, performance artist, writer and Apatow gadfly Charlyne Yi. (She played Martin Starr’s girlfriend in Knocked Up.)

Sporting an act that combines disarmingly effluent giggling and deer-in-headlights awkwardness, Yi professes to be a romance-skeptic; never once, she claims, has she been a fool in love, and the very concept seems bizarre.

So she and filmmaker Nicholas Jasenovec bounce around the country asking people to recount their own varied tales of amour. But early on she “meets” Cera. Will the skeptic turn believer? Or will the film throw in a bullshit crisis right on cue at the end of the second act?

You don’t need to be a bourbon-swilling grump to find the scenes spying on Cera and Yi’s “dates”—they get hot dogs! they wander a supermarket for a half-hour and can’t find anything they want to cook!! they stare into each other’s eyes and try to say the same thing the other is saying!!! OMFGWTF!!!!—vomit-worthy.

Jasenovec, embodied on-screen by actor Jake M. Johnson, callously denies the two lovebirds privacy, arguing that Yi’s love life is the film’s very concern and he wouldn’t want to miss anything. It’s a disingenuous move, not only because it’s so nakedly manufactured, but because it serves standard rom-com plot needs and not remotely the film’s subject.

Whenever Yi is listening to her various anonymous interviewees, Paper Heart offers unpushy insights into love’s many aspects. But even these scenes are severely undercut by the too-cute-by-all decision to reenact their tales via cardboard cutouts. Cera, meanwhile, needs to take a page from his Superbad co-star Rogen—who again proves himself fairly versatile in Funny People—and start playing racist psychos STAT. C-

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