**Warning, this post contains spoilers for the film Playing It Cool. You’ve been warned.**
So, I recently watched the Chris Evans film Playing It Cool. I went into it knowing that the reviews were terrible, and as occasionally happens, they were completely right.
Directed by Justin Reardon and written by Chris Shafer and Paul Vicknair, Playing It Cool is a rom-com about a screenwriter (Evans) who is given the job of writing a romantic comedy. The problem? He doesn’t believe in love. The twist? He falls in love with a woman he can’t have, because she already has a boyfriend. Inner conflict ensues as he struggles with the meaning of love in his own wild imagination where he pictures himself in every presented scenario of love and also deals with his heart, which is personified as a noir-tastic chain smoker. And, of course, his relationship with this woman who had drawn his affections is based on some lies and he has a group of whacky writer friend to help him out along the way.
Obviously, as romantic comedies go, it’s bursting at the seams with clichés and tropes. That’s kind of what we expect from these kinds of movies, since there is a comfort in the predictability and formulaic happy ending. I’ll be the first to admit that I have enjoyed many rom-coms, which was one of the reasons I wanted to watch Playing It Cool. (That, and I quite like the cast, which include Aubrey Plaza, Topher Grace, Anthony Mackie, and a few others.)
For all the interesting potential of this movie’s concept, though, it failed across the board. The cast was great, but it was the storytelling that broke it. So, it is with a heavy heart and a strange critical compulsion that I explain why. Basically, it seems to break down into two components:
- The Protagonist.
- The Movie’s Goal.
THE PROTAGONIST
I wanted to like him. I really did. I mean, it’s Chris Evans for crying out loud! But the character failed every test he was presented throughout the story and only made me root against him by the end of the film. Had that been the intention of the story, it would have been wonderful. But it was painfully obvious that they wanted you to like him, to wish for a happy ending.
In the beginning, we meet him as a serial one-night-stander who scoffs at the very idea of love (due to his contrived backstory of being abandoned as a child by his mother). Even if there was such a thing as “love” he is convinced he would be incapable of it because his heart was a separate entity from him, and is depicted as one of his many personalities in the film, lurking in the corner with a suit and fedora, wearing a second suit of cigarette smoke and a smoldering look of apathy. The protagonist (called “Me” in the credits) is someone that we hopeless romantics in the audience want to see proven wrong (that love is real and attainable), or if you’re more cynical and literary, you might want to see him be proven right (love is imaginary and we’re doomed to die alone).
Neither of these things happen, exactly. When the protagonist realizes that he is, in fact, terribly in love with this woman, his only goal is to have her and be with her, regardless of the fact that she has a boyfriend and that he never once considers her feelings for him or her needs. Everything he does is selfish, which has consequences on occasion throughout the story, but he never learns from it. He never reevaluates himself and his life. Even when the climax of the story arrives, where you would expect the typical epiphany and life-changing transformation of the character, it doesn’t happen. Instead, his resolve to get what he wants no matter what is only reinforced and his “grand romantic gesture” of chasing her throughout San Francisco to stop her wedding to “the wrong guy” is infuriating.
His breakthrough of what he thinks love is involves an analogy he discovered from reading Love in the Time of Cholera (his best friend’s favorite book). Basically, he thinks love is knowing who you would want on your tiny boat in the middle of the ocean for the rest of your life. So, it was who he wanted on his boat, not whether or not that person even wanted to be there, or if he would give up his comfort to be on someone else’s boat.
I didn’t care if he didn’t accomplish his goals. I didn’t even care when the one character death occurred in the film where he lost his grandfather, who raised him after his mother abandoned him. The protagonist’s voiceover described the death in a very meta way (as he does throughout the film) as being the event to change everything. He’s right that character deaths serve that purpose in storytelling, but it failed here. It was a shell of a plot device. After losing his grandfather, he only seems to go deeper into his selfish wallowing. The only good and productive things he does is read the book his best friend always recommended, Love in the Time of Cholera, and finally sit down to write his screenplay. It made him productive, and reading the book may have helped fix the strained relationship with his best friend, but it didn’t make him a better person.
Not once did I ever get the feeling that he really knew this woman that he was in love with (she was also nameless in the film). He fell for her because she was unconventional, and perhaps because he couldn’t have her. She did nothing to contribute to his arc as a character. And after all of this, his embarrassing and rude “gestures of love” towards her, she still inexplicably cancels her wedding to be with him.
Speaking of the love interest, she was just as unsympathetic as the protagonist. This could have made them a perfect match that I could root for, but I saw no chemistry. I didn’t understand why she wanted to be with the protagonist aside from the vague fact that her marriage to the other guy “felt wrong.” The only believable part of this couple was their infatuation, the physical attraction, which is superficial at best without a deeper connection being established between them.
THE MOVIE’S GOAL
As the audience, I can only guess what they were going for here. I was sure it was a classic rom-com or an independent film satirizing rom-coms (there were moments that felt a little like parody, too). It was a clumsy combination of everything. The story was far too self-aware of itself as a romantic comedy, seeming to deconstruct the genre while forcibly playing into it. It had all the makings of originality, but when it did play into the clichés, it didn’t do it as well as more mainstream rom-coms.
In just about any romantic comedy that you watch, the character hits rock bottom and earns his or her way back to the top by learning humility, sacrifice, the true meaning of Christmas– whatever. In Playing It Cool, the protagonist simply did not earn his happy ending. He suffered because he was in love, but those were the agonies of desire and entitlement. The writers even went so far as to have his very reasonable friends point out that he was going about this selfishly, that he wasn’t considering the desires of his inamorata. They told him this and it did nothing to alter the protagonist or the story. It was as though the movie was deliberately ignoring its own common sense. I would have loved it if the protagonist ignoring reason led to his downfall and losing the woman he loved, because there would have been a lesson in that.
Yes, the movie made me laugh in places where it was meant to, and there were one or two parts that were a little emotional (no tears from me, though). As a writer, I can’t help but enjoy movies about writing and with characters who are writers. The meta storytelling and dialogue are usually a lot of fun for me and I have seen it successfully done in other films. (See Not Another Happy Ending or Words and Pictures.)
I don’t want to point fingers at Justin Reardon’s direction or the writing of Chris Shafer and Paul Vicknair, because films tend to have too many cooks in the kitchen to know whose decision is responsible for making or breaking a film. The director, however, does seem to carry the larger responsibility of making sure a story holds together well, and though it had great visuals from time to time, they didn’t save the story from itself. Also, I have to take into consideration that for all three, their filmographies have almost nothing on them. Maybe they just haven’t found their stride in the industry yet. I am definitely going to keep an eye on their future work together or apart to see if they build on their strengths and work on the weaknesses.
Playing It Cool wasn’t as self-aware as it pretended to be, because it didn’t seem to know what it wanted. It taught me what not to do when writing a romance of any kind, namely that the protagonist should be well-constructed above all. Seems like common sense, but this was a good reminder.
Di Roach 