VIDEO OF THE WEEK
The Broken Hearts Club (2000,R)
QQ1/2
Director: Greg Berlanti
Director Greg Berlanti told me that his greatest hope with The Broken Hearts Club was to make a film featuring mostly gay characters avoiding the stereotypical conceit of having their lives center on sex. Instead, he traded it for another stereotypical conceit, in which whiny, seemingly unemployed, well-dressed gay men hang out in West Hollywood haunts complaining about how none of them are in fulfilling "relationships."
The trouble is, they're still talking about sex, they're just not getting any. And after sitting through the first half of this Big Chill Comes Out wannabe, you'll be begging for any of them to get a little action just to liven up the proceedings. Heralded as the first major-studio-funded picture to feature a cast of mostly gay characters since Mart Crowley's ground-breaking but crushingly depressing 1970 film Boys in the Band, Broken Hearts Club has more in common with that film than it cares to admit.
Both feature likable gay stereotypes griping about their lives - drain off the '70s-era self-loathing and update the outfits, and they're almost the same picture. But where Boys was dangerous and ground-breaking, Broken Hearts is safe and familiar. Fortunately, Berlanti was smart enough to populate his picture with attractive, competent players. Timothy Olyphant is Dennis, a promising photographer whose unlucky-at-love status is only heightened by the fact that his aspiring actor roommate Cole (Dean Cain) seems to go home with anyone he pleases.
The club also includes wise-cracking Patrick (Ben Weber), a self-deprecating cynic; Benji (Zach Braff]), a pierced punkette with a taste for bad boys; Howie (Matt McGrath), who's too preoccupied to realize he already has the perfect guy; Taylor (Billy Porter), the shattered half of a recently dissolved long-term relationship; and finally Jack (John Mahoney), the patriarchal figure whose restaurant serves as the gang's clubhouse.
Berlanti's tenure as head writer on the WB's high school soap opera Dawson's Creek, (including one character's highly publicized coming-out episodes) comes across in over-dramatized moments such as one character's descent into drugs and another's inevitable death. But it's difficult to muster any real animosity for a picture that means so well. Olyphant is utterly charming as a guy so lovable, you'll be hard-pressed to believe he doesn't have a boyfriend, and Mahoney shines in what could have been a rather dismissive role as the aging queen who acts both the fairy godmother and Jiminy Crickett to this lonely lot.
The importance of friendship may not be the most original movie moral, but within the "alternative family" world of most gay audiences, it should strike a powerful chord.
INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR GREG BERLANTI