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I want to hate Paper Heart, mainly on behalf of the poor, benighted documentary form which has been beaten to death by "mock-docs," "docudrama," "reality TV," and just plain lying under the guise of truth-telling.
But Charlyne Yi, the diminutive standup comic/actress who's been playing coy about her relationship with Michael Cera, is so darn cute and self-effacing (GQ mag uses the less-flattering adjective "twee"), I can just about forgive a further battering of the line between what's real and what's scripted.
Paper Heart is a "50% documentary" about the nature of love -- inspired, so it's said, by the understated life crisis of its star Yi, an offbeat character actress and comedian of Judd Apatow rep company fame (she played the stoner girlfriend in Knocked Up). Apparently she is unable to come to grips with the Hollywood image of "true love" and worries she may even be congenitally unable to feel it.
So off she goes with a $1-million crew and production to various, mostly Red State locations (Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Albuquerque) to talk to couples who've been together for generations, who even work together (a family court judge and lawyer) for a lot of "Awwww!" moments. As a change of pace, there's a no-less-cute gay couple in New York. It's all punctuated by puppet dramatizations of each love story. Did I mention this is all relentlessly cute?
Exceptions include a gun-loving multiple marriage survivor who can't even decide whether he loved any of his exes.
It's clearly genuine material. But the mostly-scripted fake stuff -- the purported story of Yi's relationship with Cera -- is also presented as real, or at least more real than an episode of Survivor.
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Were Cera and Yi ever a real couple? She says no. Some friends say yes. The point is, they are presented as one here, in a movie where the guy identified as "Nick the director" is actually Jake Johnson, an actor playing director Nicholas Jasenovec. We watch them "meet cute" at a party with background performers such as Seth Rogen and Demetri Martin. We watch their first date and first kiss -- and we watch them agonize over the intimidating presence of cameras at these intimate moments.
Yes, if you wait for the credits, the jig is up. And, yes, Rob Reiner played fake director Marty DiBargi in Spinal Tap and no one complained. But that movie was so broadly funny, no one could confuse it with reality.
Yi and Cera, on the other hand, could stammer through Shakespeare and you'd think they were riffing, so awkwardly do words pour out of both of their mouths.
In fact, how much you still like Cera's now-trademark style will have bearing on whether you appreciate Paper Heart -- in much the same way that it's relevant whether you considered the songs in Juno too precious by half (the songs written by Yi and Cera -- including her love ballad You Smell Like Christmas -- are very much in the same vein).
In the end, whether they're a real couple or not, Yi and Cera should have been, since she seems very much a female him.
(This film is rated PG)