It's Not Me, It's You

He's Just Not That Into You
Directed By Ken Kwapis. Starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Scarlett Johansson, Justin Long, Jennifer Connelly, Ginnifer Goodwin, Kevin Connolly, and Bradley Cooper.
2/5 Stars

I don't even think if He’s Just Not That Into You knows whether or not it's a romantic comedy. I know I don't.

Here’s the lowdown: Gigi (Ginnifer Goodwin) likes Conor (Kevin Connolly), but he is infatuated with Anna (Scarlett Johansson), who in turn has a crush on Ben (Bradley Cooper). Ben also likes Anna but he is married to Janine (Jennifer Connelly), making Anna and Ben’s relationship difficult. Janine is friends with Beth (Jennifer Aniston), who is in a relationship with Ben’s friend Neil (Ben Affleck). Neil loves Beth but won’t marry her (the old “If it ain’t broke then why fix it?” philosophy). Janine and Beth are friends with Gigi, who begins a peculiar friendship with Conor’s friend Alex (Justin Long). Conor, meanwhile, gradually develops an intriguing business relationship with Anna’s friend Mary (Drew Barrymore). Simple, see?

I enjoyed the first 20 minutes of this movie immensely. It started off as a film not about a romance but just a film about romance itself, and all of the paranoia, nervousness, neurosis, and idiosyncrasies that come along with courting and flirting in our modern-day world. Even all of the dialogue concerning technology’s relationship to romance was spot on. I am also a highly neurotic guy who has the tendency to over-think a lot, which helped me to sympathize with Gigi, whom likely would merely just come off as a pathetic, paranoid SWF to most other men.

The problem is, after the first 20 minutes or so, we get it. There’s nothing much more this script can do. It juggles back and forth between so many barely interrelated side plots that there is no real main plot, and none of the relationships can develop.

I was one of the few men in the theatre in which I saw the film. When Neil finally proposed to Beth towards the end of the movie (this isn’t so much a spoiler because there’s nothing much to spoil; like I said, there’s not really a main plotline to this film, just a dozen sub-plots instead) all of the girls “aweeed” and cried but I just didn't care. Not a lick. Why should I care what happens to Neil and Beth when Ben Affleck and Jennifer Anniston have so little screen time? The movie is unfair to its audience, as it expects us to make an emotional investment into the characters and their relationships without in turn giving us anything to care about.

This isn’t the actors’ faults. They are all good and are capable (and have demonstrated before) that they can handle more in-depth material than this. Ben Affleck, for example, can play any role. Kevin Smith would cast Affleck as the shark in Jaws 5 and I wouldn’t object. But the screenplay gives them all no room to move.

Even at times when a scene has potential, the screenplay cuts it short to jump to another underdeveloped and less important story. The troubled marriage between Ben and Janine was one of only two relationships that I had any amount of interest in (the other being Gigi and Alex’s), and only because it played out as drama instead of comedy. They are in a hardware store and Ben confesses his infidelity. There was a loud gasp from the audience. I watched in curious anticipation, and we see Janine react and we sympathize, and there is a brief exchange of dialogue, but not nearly enough.

The film's ending at least is somewhat admirable. Not everybody gets the happy ending; in fact, three of the nine main characters end up being alone and miserable. The moral: some people live happily ever after and others don’t. Who would’ve thought from a romantic comedy...I think?