Gray Matters: the RomCom for people who hate RomComs

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***

For the record, my bar for romantic comedies is so low that all a director needs to do to eclipse my expectations is keep the camera focused and not exceed a 90 minute runtime. But by the same token, I see about three romantic comedies a year and immediately afterwards my soul begins defensively cleansing any memory of it from my mind.

Gray Matters opens on a montage of a loving, devoted couple who live, dance, jog and eat in Manhattan all set to Irving Berlin (Woody Allen references, anyone?) He (Tom Cavanagh) is a resident doctor at a hospital and she, Gray (Heather Graham), works at an ad agency with a wacky, dieting co-worker (Molly Shannon) and has an even wackier, new-age psychiatrist (Sissy Spacek). But surprise! This perfect couple are actually brother and sister. When they get fed up with people being so weirded out by their intimacy they come up with the solution to parlay their dysfunction into romantic relationships. He meets the ideal woman (Bridget Moynahan) in a dog park and marries her three days later. Gray is jealous, not that her brother suddenly has no time for his once best friend, but that he gets to have sex with Bridget Moynahan... because, holy smokes, Gray is gay! After a bloated, atonal plotline about her brother coming to terms with her gayness, Heather Graham's Gray awkwardly enters the lesbian dating scene. All this and Alan Cumming playing a taxi driver who is always around telling strange ethnic stories.

It would be too easy for me to criticize the muddled false starts, cheesy entendres, or the utterly baffling karaoke scene with a cameo by Gloria Gaynor (foreshadowing, in a rom-com?) but as I've already said, the metrics for success in the genre are not demanding. Gray Matters has a stellar cast, a genuine affection of 1940's screwball comedies and beautiful scenes of New York. It's also nice to be reminded that Heather Graham can actually act (and dance!) In a startlingly affecting scene Graham is unceremoniously outted at her job and is forced to articulate something she's been hiding from all her life: that as she becomes more herself she will be seen as less of a person in our society. First time writer/director Sue Kramer outshines some of the punishing tropes of the genre to make a film that is sincerely sweet--and doesn't require a total brain purge.

See also: Imagine Me and You, Keeping the Faith, Down With Love, D.E.B.S., Show Me Love.