Paper Heart

A Sundance darling? A documentary that interweves fictional and non-fictional elements? Michael Cera in love? Sounds great, right? Sadly, Paper Heartworks much better conceptually than it does on the big screen.

PH is a simple set-up. Charlyne Yi doesn’t believe in love and sets off on a quest across America to discover what it is. Don’t know who Yi is? She’s that annoying Asian girl from Knocked Up, but you’ll know her now as the annyoing Asian girl from PH. That’s probably PH’s biggest problem. Yi is more annoying than cute, and more strange than relatable. She’s a comedian, and not an actress, and it shows. During the actual documentary parts of the movie, she is a funny narrator. It is during the non-doc parts that Yi (as well as everyone else in the movie) struggles.

That leads into the other huge problem with the movie. That interview parts of the movie feel like an actual documentary, from their content to the way they are shot. They feel real, and even if they aren’t, it is presented in a believable and convicing way. The other parts of the movie, the section where Yi begins a relationship with Michael Cera, feel very staged. Not only do Yi and Cera both fail to play themselves convincingly, the movie takes on way too much production value for us to believe we are still watching a documentary. Too many camera angles tip the hand to the fact that the scene has been run multiple times. The “director” of the movie isn’t even the director, but rather an actor running a staged scene. I really wouldn’t have had a problem with this blend if it had been done successfully. District 9 is shot feux-doc for the first act and feels real (more real, actuallly, than anything in PH). Because it feels false, it loses whatever it was trying to accomplish in this style.

I did enjoy the interviews, especially the one with the children on the playground, and would have much prefered if the movie was a straight documentary. As is, Paper Heart doesn’t know what it wants to be and becomes a hodgepodge of boring and weird, that fails to compel the audience in any way or elicit any sort of emotion, in a movie all about find one.