People Places Things

Starring: Jemaine Clement, Regina Hall, Jessica Williams

Flight Of The Conchords’ Jemaine Clement tries his hand as the lead in a romantic comedy set in New York…keeping his Kiwi accent intact.

The romantic comedy is a peculiar beast. If done well, it feels easy and natural, but so often it fails thanks to a weak script, bad casting, clumsy directing or simply getting the tone wrong. For the most part, People Places Things gets it right, despite one of the most innocuous and wishy-washy titles in movie history.

The story begins as 40-year-old Will Henry (Clement) walks in on his wife, Charlie (Stephanie Allynne) and best buddy Gary (Michael Chernus) makin’ whoopee at their twin daughters’ 5^th birthday party. Will is clearly hurt but that doesn’t stop him from engaging in a goofy wrestling match with the shirtless and flabby Gary. In this film the characters are hurt emotionally, but not physically…instead they lash out with sarcasm and wisecracks…and so the tone is set.

Fast-forward one year and Will is still licking his emotional wounds, but doing his best to be a single dad, while his ex-wife and buddy are shacked up and expecting a baby.

This is where director James Strouse (The Winning Season), who also wrote the script, lapses into stereotypes. Will is a well-meaning but bumbling parent who runs out of food, sleeps in and can’t seem to get the kids to school on time. Fortunately, Clement handles the mundane material well, and we’re still on his side.

Things get better when we meet Kat, one of Will’s students in his visual arts, i.e. comic book, class. Kat, played by The Daily Show’s Jessica Williams, invites Will to dinner, but not as a date with her (Kat is supposed to be 19, but Williams seems too old for the part) but to meet her mother Diane, played by Regina Hall.

Despite their awkward first encounter…Diane is a literature professor at Columbia, while Will, the comic book teacher can’t tell pork from swordfish at their dinner…the two establish some chemistry and we find ourselves rooting for them to somehow find a way to be happy together.

But Strouse is reluctant to present a tidy ending, leaving his characters and his audience relatively unfulfilled with an ambiguous ending that fizzles.

So, nothing profound enough to justify a title like People Place Things actually comes to light, but to be fair, this could have been a lot worse. Fortunately Clement’s goofy, easy-going nature wins the audience over and Regina Hall lights up the screen whenever she’s on…which is not nearly enough.

And so, the romantic comedy remains a conundrum with writer/director Strouse getting most of the ingredients correct…but the script has its share of problems.

Marty Duda