Paper Heart

Paper Heart

88 Minutes






I say: Paper Heart is a cute hybrid of documentary, mockumentary and Gondryesque animation that blend perfectly to create an unpretentious look at unconventional love. You say: Great, another quirky romantic comedy.

Trust me on this; I'm a scientist. The backlash against the dreaded Q-word is problematic at best: when you complain about weirdos in movies you must surely then be espousing that which it counter-programs: normative films where Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson are the heroic role models of romance and the weirdos are relegated to the roles of best friends who are unable to couple in Hollywood's romantic schema because they're so undesirable.

Not to say that the Q-word is a flawless option, either. Too often is it used as window-dressing to cover up bad writing or half-baked characters. Little Miss Sunshine's Steve Carrell is a suicidal gay Proust scholar, but he could just as easily be a dyslexic particle accelerator technician or a piñata fetishist. Gigantic's Paul Dano wants to adopt a baby from China because otherwise he'd just be a mattress salesman who has sex with Zooey Deschanel -- which would put it in a completely different genre. Away We Go is a better example of the trend: the excessively contrived weirdness is only occasionally slathered on, and even then it's all to benefit the main characters' survey depicting the possibilities of how their budding family can turn out.

There's an important moment within Paper Heart in which Charlyne Yi and her pseudo-fictional director Nick (played by Jake M. Johnson) tell Michael Cera that they're shooting a documentary. He asks if it's going to be quirky. It's a very meta moment, but also an important one to frame the film, as Yi, from what I can tell from her general demeanor and brief appearance in Knocked Up, is a character of self-consciousness, easily getting embarrassed and breaking out into blushing giggles. That line is an extension of that self-consciousness; an attempt to curb the criticism that the film's most likely going to get before anyone gets to say it.

However, I wouldn't describe Paper Heart using the Q-word, as its connotation involves being distractingly contrived and Charlyne Yi puts herself at the front of her film, appearing in both the documentary and mockumentary scenes as herself. There's also a natural awkwardness to Yi and Cera's coupling that Q-word comedies often lack. The mundane documentary mise-en-scene and the seemingly improvised conversation between the two actors gives it a feel more akin to a mumblecore movie than to Juno. They're both "weird," but they still feel like people.

It also helps that their coupling isn't the sole focus of the movie. Rather, that storyline runs parallel to the documentary scenes in which Yi interviews a variety of people in different stages of love: the couple that have been married for decades, the lovesick divorcee, the engaged high school sweethearts and so on. Yi's intent as a nonbeliever is to explore something as unquantifiable and amorphous as love and prove its existence. These segments range from silly to heartwarming to hilarious, as when Yi interviews a group of kindergartners of various coherence.

The most contrived element, the Gondryesque puppet scenes, are used sparingly, often to depict the extended anecdotes by the documentary subjects that need visual aid and show off the film's shoestring cuteness that's as hard to reject in its unpretentiousness. We literally see the strings moving around the puppets just as we see the camera crew shooting the documentary -- another bit of charming self-consciousness. Paper Heart is, then, a sweet little film made by weird people who know they're weird as opposed to a weird film made by normal people who think they're clever. It's never uproariously funny, but it doesn't need to be. It has a heart to make up for it.

by Danny Djeljosevic