Last month, a genuinely charming romantic comedy came out, a balm against the recent streak of bad rom-coms. I am sorry to report the pendulum has swung back in the other direction. Written and directed by Joey Power, “Love Language” is one of those modern rom-coms where it knows what plot beats to hit and how to add just enough pop culture references (in this case, “Vanderpump Rules”) to feel relevant, but can’t seem to bother with character development beyond the broadest of strokes.
We first meet Lou (Chloë Grace Moretz) crying in the bathtub at a party as she replays the moment her fiancé left her. We quickly learn this is supposed to be her best friend Tilda’s (Billie Lourd) bachelorette party, and Lou is harshing everyone’s mellow. Later, at Tilda’s wedding, Lou catches the eye of her BFF’s cousin Dash (Anthony Ramos), but is in no place to start up a new relationship. However, when a wedding attendee learns that Lou helped Tilda write her vows, she asks Lou to help her as well. An entrepreneur himself, Dash encourages Lou to charge for the service.
Soon Lou has a lucrative business writing vows for various brides-to-be across Chicago, while also attending soul-crushing Zoom meetings for her day job, vaguely supposed to be social media marketing (though, like the characters, the specifics of her job are frustratingly broad). She also starts casually seeing Dash, though she makes it clear she doesn’t see him as a serious person. We, of course, can see what Lou can’t: she is falling for Dash, and they’re probably very good for each other.
This all gets complicated when Olivia (Isabel May), an artisan pickle importer (or some similar, completely ridiculous rich person job), hires Lou to write her vows and invites her to a pickle launch to meet her fiancé Warren (Manny Jacinto), who turns out to be Lou’s crush from college. If this sounds like a twist on the basic plot outline for “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” the Julia Roberts screwball rom-com directed by P. J. Hogan and written by Ronald Bass, you’re right. Power even adds a gay best friend, Gus (Lukas Gage), but unlike the character Rupert Everett played in the ’90s classic, Gus exists only to serve the plot and Lou’s so-called character arc.
While the relationship in college between Warren and Lou is pretty well defined with specific memories and other characteristics that define a friendship (they still have a shared Spotify playlist), Lou’s friendships with both Tilda and Gus have no weight to them, with few memories beyond the ones we already know about Lou and Warren. Nothing to show how long they’ve known each other, why they’re still friends post-college, or how they even met at Northwestern. Heck, I can’t even tell you what Tilda and Gus even do for a living, besides go to the gym and get mani-pedis with Lou when she needs to talk through plot points.
Worst of all, this film is set in Chicago; we know this because the group went to Northwestern, there are b-roll shots of the CTA, and at one point Lou walks past the corncob towers near the Chicago River, yet it never tells you why. What makes the many, many Chicago-set rom-coms (like “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” “While You Were Sleeping,” “Return to Me,” “Prelude to a Kiss,” etc.) so special is their distinct sense of place. Anyone who’s lived in Chicago knows the city is its own character, and that where you live and work within it is an integral part of your life. I can’t tell you where Lou lives (she works from home in a big, spacious loft space and we never really see her in her neighborhood). I can’t tell where her friends live or where they go to work out and gab in the city (these spaces are so nondescript and removed from any sense of geography they may as well be taking place in the “Backrooms”). They must all be pretty rich because their weddings take place in the city’s most luxe historic venues, seemingly at the drop of a hat.
The lack of care in thinking of Chicago as a character in and of itself isn’t surprising for a movie filled with characters who speak like movie characters, i.e., directly, without nuance, flavor, or a distinct voice. Jacinto is one of the most charming actors of his generation and does his best to elevate his underwritten character with his natural charisma, but charm alone can’t save the film. Same goes for Ramos, who finds layers of vulnerability beneath the hackneyed dialogue that hampers him.
Lourd is once again playing an iteration of the same stock character she’s played since “Booksmart“; one can only hope she gets a chance to show what she can really do someday. May fares best as Olivia, mostly because her character has the most to lose; thanks to some of the film’s best writing, she shows pretty early on how much she truly loves Warren. Much like Cameron Diaz in “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” when she finally discovers the situation between Warren and Lou, it’s a gut-punch.
This leaves Moretz stranded as the least interesting component of a film she is supposed to lead. And while she does her best to get a handle on Lou, she’s never funny enough on her own to make Power’s weak writing sing; she’s never dynamic enough to make the audience care about her predicament, and she can’t manage to generate enough heat between either Warren or Gus for us to give a shit who she is ultimately going to choose in the end.
It doesn’t help that the final sequence curbs from one of the all-time great rom-coms, “When Harry Met Sally…” It goes without saying, Powers is no Nora Ephron. Nor should he try to be. Much like the brides hiring Lou to write their vows, Powers may not know what he loves about this genre, or what makes it so special, enough to write something uniquely his own.
