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On paper, Music and Lyrics should be a high-voltage, antic romantic comedy that brings audiences to tears of laughter and emotional release.
Of course, on paper the New York Rangers should be the winningest team in Stanley Cup history.
Both have offered us denouements of undying love in front of frenzied crowds at Madison Square Garden. But Mark Messier's tearful love speech to the fans seemed utterly sincere. Hugh Grant's to Drew Barrymore, not so much.
Arguably the current king and queen of romantic comedies, Grant and Barrymore could each individually kindle chemistry with a crash-test dummy (we're looking at you, Andie McDowell and Jimmy Fallon).
So why are they so lifeless together in Music and Lyrics? It could be because, in the complicated game of on-screen love, Grant and Barrymore both have honed their craft as starry-eyed specialists. There might be something mechanical in their game that makes them a bad match in a romantic comedy -- like putting two back-court players together and calling it a doubles team (last sports analogy, I promise).
A more probable reason is that the movie itself presents wacky romantic events that have happened to no one on this or any other planet in the Solar System (including Pluto). Nothing about our two lovebirds seems real, not their professions, not their personae, and not their zany hangers-on -- sitcom second-bananas Brad Garrett and Kristen Johnson, who seem to have been hired to inhale helium, metaphorically speaking.
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The movie opens promisingly enough with a very funny spoof of a vintage video, from a fictitious Wham!-esque '80s band called Pop! Cannily cut and acted, the video is so silly and bouncy it probably would have been accepted unironically and put on heavy rotation in the first year of MuchMusic.
As is quickly explained, one of the duo in Pop! went on to mega-stardom. The other is Alex Fletcher (Grant), a cheerful C-list celeb who gets invited to appear in reality shows such as Battle of the '80s Has-Beens, and gyrates in lounge shows for amorous middle-aged housewives.
That is, until his pointlessly-loud agent (Garrett) improbably lands him a career-resuscitating gig -- to write a hit song for a writhingly sexual, transcendentally obsessed young pop singer named Cora Corman (Haley Bennett), who would be Shakira if Shakira were a beach blonde.
Problem is, Alex was never the lyricist in Pop!, and he's singularly bad at it. So of course, sheer chance will hook him up with Sophie (Barrymore), the girl who waters his plants, and who turns out to actually think in inane romantic pop-song lyrics.
Alex literally needs Sophie, who's messed up and uncooperative because she has been dumped by a college professor who then used her as the model for a neurotic anti-heroine of a hit novel.
Blah, blah, blah. Have we contrived enough baggage yet? Oh yeah, there's also Sophie's loud, overachieving sister (Johnson), the owner of a weight loss company who's naturally somewhat zaftig herself.
Writer-director Mark Lawrence, a sitcom veteran, doesn't really seem to know what Alex and Sophie should be doing, so he typically sits them at a piano and gives them cute zingers to throw at each other. The arc of their relationship is nearly flat, there's no real crisis (Sophie, at one point, doesn't like the sexual overtones Cora brings to their "hit" song, which sounds a lot like Head Over Heels by Tears For Fears).
All of which makes for a 96-minute film that feels a lot longer. But then love does have a way of making time stand still.
(This film is rated PG-13)