N0-ROM-COM
Cash, Harper tell of love lost in ‘Broke Up’
For a movie that’s labeled a romantic comedy, “We Broke Up” barely has any romance at all.
Instead, the twisted tale begins almost at the end, just minutes before Lori (Aya Cash) and Doug (William Jackson Harper) break up after 10 years together when Doug spontaneously proposes and Lori responds by puking on him in a Chinese restaurant.
The other 80 or so minutes of the movie, premiering in theaters Friday and on video on demand on April 23, are spent in a messy deception as Lori and Doug hide their breakup in a fruitless attempt not to ruin her sister’s wedding and try to figure out what went wrong.
“We have this idea of riding off into the sunset, and sometimes that’s just not the way it works out,” Harper, 41, fresh off a critically acclaimed role as Chidi Anagonye on “The Good Place,” told the Daily News. “The relationship is over, but they’re not finished with each other.”
“We Broke Up,” like Cash’s “You’re the Worst,” takes a more realistic look at love than typical Hollywood rom-com fare — and a less uplifting one. Instead of happily ever after and wedding bells, the main message of the movie seems to be that sometimes things just fall apart.
“I think love is bigger than we like to admit,” Cash, 38, told The News. “You can love someone and spend 10 years with someone and that love is real. Even if you don’t end up with that person, that love was true.”
Lori and Doug’s breakup isn’t loud or angry, but a quiet, sad separation. Nothing particularly went wrong. No one cheated or lied. There are no fireworks. Their relationship just ran its course.
“My relationships end with burning the house down, but more healthy relationships don’t. When there’s genuine love and care, exiting is much more complicated,” Cash said. “Breaking up is often many breakdowns instead of one clean ending.”
Cash and Harper, who ran in the same New York theater circles for years before being cast together, both believe in the messiness, not because it’s more fun because it’s more real than fairy tales. “Love is warty,” Cash said. Both of the stars’ best-known roles may better tell of the shift away from the traditional take on romance: in “The Good Place,” Harper’s Chidi found his soulmate in the afterlife and was forced to keep finding her through hundreds of iterations of hell, while Cash starred in “You’re the Worst,” a dark comedy that insisted time and time again that love doesn’t last. Both, ostensibly, had happy endings, but not in a way that Hollywood tends to write.
“We Broke Up” doesn’t try to rewrite the romantic comedy, but rather paint it with a more honest brush. It’s funny, with sleepaway camp gags and overbearing parents. And there is love, as well.
“You’re watching the transition,” Cash told The News. “It’s about the process that they go through to get there.”