TEXTUALITY (Warren P. Sonoda). 94 minutes. Opens Friday (April 22). See listing. Rating: N
No point mincing words: Textuality is a sorry excuse for a romantic comedy. The characters are one-dimensional, the script is banal, and the social media angle the movie works so hard to establish in its opening reel isn’t even relevant to the plot in the end.
In that opening reel, though, Textuality flirts with the notion that texting, Facebooking and blogging push people even further away from engaging with one another in the real world. (It’s nothing Andy Rooney didn’t say about the VCR, the answering machine or the cellular phone back in the day, but it’s still an intriguing idea for a movie.) But this is not that movie. Textuality’s script, written by co-star Liam Card, just rehashes ancient rom-com tropes and throws in a few Twitter references to seem contemporary.
The very wooden Jason Lewis (Samantha’s boy toy in Sex And The City) and the considerably more expressive Carly Pope (Young People Fucking) play Toronto downtowners whose ability to multi-task extends to juggling a trio of lovers apiece – including a married man, in Pope’s case. But when they meet cute – he hits her bike with his Lexus, because he’s a financial adviser and she’s a boho artist type – and find themselves in an ongoing flirtation, they start to wonder whether their new relationship might be worth an exclusivity clause.
Director Warren P. Sonoda made the cutting comedies Ham & Cheese and Coopers’ Camera with Jason Jones and Mike Beaver now, somehow, he’s ended up in charge of this calculated dud, which forces winning actors like Pope, Kristen Hager and Kris Holden-Reid to gum their way through one generic conversation after another.
At least Toronto gets to play itself in Textuality, in an offhanded way that feels much less forced than the name-checking of specific locations in Chloe. I especially appreciated the scene at the Distillery’s Balzac’s Coffee where screenwriter Card gives his character a speech taking a moral stand against $5 coffees. That’s some cutting-edge observational writing right there.
