By Preston Wilder
You’re Chris Evans, known to the world as Captain America but longing to play a romantic lead, preferably in something small and edgy. You’re Michelle Monaghan, looking for a hit that’ll showcase your powerful (if not very versatile) brand of sparky romantic energy. You’re Aubrey Plaza from Parks and Recreation, or Anthony Mackie from The Hurt Locker, or doleful journeyman Luke Wilson, or Topher Grace whose career seems to have stalled lately, and you take a supporting role in a little-known rom-com. Why? Well, because it’s just a few days’ work, and all those other people are doing it. And you get to work with Captain America.
The exact process by which films like this get made, and even end up with a very presentable cast, may never be known – but I’d say it has more to do with benign indifference and a ‘why the hell not?’ kind of logic than any close reading of the script. Take Playing it Cool, for instance, an obscure little film which went straight to DVD in (for instance) Britain. Chris Evans is our nameless protagonist, a screenwriter trying to write a rom-com, the kind of cute self-referential touch that should get alarm bells ringing unless the name ‘Charlie Kaufman’ is attached. Chris has a problem: he’s writing a script about love, yet has never been in love. Here’s my typical relationship, he says in voice-over – and we see a quick sketch of Chris picking up a girl, going back to her place, then being beaten up by her irate boyfriend.
This is puzzling, because that example proves nothing. The point is that Chris has commitment issues – but trying to make it with a girl who’s already taken has nothing to do with commitment issues. That’s a recurring problem in Playing it Cool, which tries for a certain slick wisdom about relationships – “Love is like a leak on a boat,” goes one line, the corollary being that men try to plug the leak with sex – but never gets beyond shallow peppiness. A lot of that is down to Chris Evans, a hugely likeable actor but not one to suggest a tormented inner life. The entire premise is that Chris is blocked by a childhood trauma (his mum walked out, leaving him to be raised by his grandpa), then falls in love for the first time when he meets Ms. Monaghan – yet he doesn’t come across as a man unlocking long-repressed emotions, more like a man who has the hots for this girl but she’s engaged, major bummer.
The film gets by on energy, and a handful of good jokes; the one about famous writers having sexually suggestive names (Longfellow? Hardy? Balzac?) is particularly inspired. But a lot of time is spent on the central relationship, and that relationship is a dead loss. Chris and Michelle are smiley ciphers, bantering like well-crafted holograms: they go to yoga together, read birthday cards, joke about everything. When the platonic relationship inevitably turns non-platonic (men and women can’t be friends, says Aubrey Plaza in a German accent: “Vee are squvids and squvirrels!”), Michelle is suddenly cynical and Chris is suddenly needy, which doesn’t really square with anything we’ve seen before – mostly because we didn’t see anything before. The film never creates complex characters, so it never convinces when it drops them in a complex situation.
Instead, Playing it Cool tries to play it cool, going off on stylish tangents that may have seemed clever in the writing but only look desperate onscreen. The film keeps pausing for ‘stories’ told by minor characters, into which Chris imagines himself and Michelle: one story prompts them to switch genders (she looks hot as a man), another is set in mediaeval times, another is a WW2 yarn told in cartoon form. Director Justin Reardon adds his own attempts at style, thus for instance the black-and-white Chris in a colour world when he laments that there’s “someone for everyone” except him. But the absolute worst bit of whimsy is a chain-smoking figure who lurks on the fringes, sometimes shaking his head sadly: this is his “heart”, explains Chris – a symbol so lame I’m not even sure what it means. His feelings? His thirst for romance? His actual organ?
“Time to write my own ending,” cries our hero in the final act, having finished that pesky script in no time at all – and sets off to spoil Michelle’s wedding to Mr. Wrong, the film self-consciously wallowing in the cheesy rom-com clichés it mocked in the first act. It’s a risky strategy, based on the hope that we’ve grown to love this couple so we’ll cheer their happy ending against our better judgment, and it doesn’t work at all; the film just isn’t good enough – though I guess it’ll kill 90 minutes on TV someday, especially with this cast. Why did they do it, anyway?
DIRECTED BY Justin Reardon
STARRING Chris Evans, Michelle Monaghan, Topher Grace
US 2014 94 mins
