Mark Reviews Movies: WE BROKE UP

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 15, 2021

We Broke Up has a premise that makes it seem like a farce. A couple of ten years breaks up the day before the weekend festivities for a relative's wedding. They're both invited. They're both part of the wedding ceremony to one degree or another. What is there to do but for the two to attend the wedding and to pretend that nothing is wrong with their relationship.

The screenplay by Laura Jacqmin and director Jeff Rosenberg, though, is kind of smart in the way it sees the overall scenario as a comedy, while not treating the couple or their deceit or their confusion as a joke. This film genuinely cares about its characters, revealing just enough depth in their mixed emotions about what they want for themselves and from each other that we're invested in their futures—whether they end up together or not. It's a comedy, yes, but one of bittersweet feelings and romance.

It all begins as a joke. Lori (Aya Cash) and Doug (William Jackson Harper) make up our soon-to-be-separated couple. They've been dating for ten years—a third of their lives, as Doug points out later—and have an apartment together. Everything seems fine and happy and content from the opening scene, as the two smile and laugh while waiting for their takeout order at a restaurant.

Watching Lori dance for the fun of it, Doug has a revelation. "Marry me," he says to her, in the tone of a declarative statement, as if he already knows the answer.

Lori doesn't respond. Well, she doesn't verbally, at least. She vomits on the floor.

Moments later, they're sitting in silence in the car. After a few beats, the title appears, and we get it.

The hitch to the break-up is that Lori's sister Bea (Sarah Bolger) is getting married in a couple of days. Lori is the maid of honor, and Doug is the "king of the ushers." Doug has to attend, not because of that made-up position, but because he has become part of Lori's family over the last decade. Bea is like the little sister he never had. The sisters' mother Adelaide (Peri Gilpin) has been waiting for Doug to become an official part of the family. It appears that will never happen now, but Doug breaking up with Lori doesn't change the way he feels about these bonds.

That's the underlying emotional current of this story. Lori and Doug are technically no longer a couple. With the two stuck together for a long weekend at an old summer camp transformed into a resort and surrounded by loved ones or strangers focused on the forthcoming nuptials, though, there's no avoiding what was, what could have been, and what emptiness the break-up has left for each of them. Rosenberg handles that dichotomy of tone—the cheerfulness of the setting and the melancholy of our protagonists—in the right way. The characters and their feelings are the top priority here.

We watch as the two come up with the plan to pretend that everything is fine, hang out with a bunch of family members and friends and complete strangers, and try to put on something as close to a happy face as possible, even while their hearts find new ways to break. Taking a quick shower in the cabin she's sharing with Doug, Lori debates whether or not to lock the door, and Doug has to quietly confront what her choice means. Some drinking games are played, pitting the two against each other and giving Lori an excuse to drown her sorrows.

Doug spends some alone time with Roya (Azita Ghanizada), who's there to represent the groom's side of the wedding, and finds himself imagining what life would be like, not with her, but in the kind of life she has—an actual house with plenty of room to grow. A jealous Lori invites Eric (Zak Steiner), an old acquaintance, to drink together and play a game of spin-the-bottle. When the moment arrives, she can't follow through with the objective of the game.

Jacqmin and Rosenberg give us a lot of little moments, telling us the bigger story of what this couple has been and how each of them is—or isn't—dealing with the break-up through those scenes. Through the sisters' mother, we get a sense of why, perhaps, Lori is so hesitant to marry Doug or anyone for that matter.

There's the absence of the sisters' father, and there's the fact that Adelaide can't stand Bea's husband-to-be Jayson (Tony Cavalero), an older man who is once-divorced and has a 9-year-old son. Jayson, by the way, seems like a shallow fun-seeker, irresponsible and irrepressible in his ways, but there comes a moment, as the wedding slides toward jeopardy, when he rises to the occasion—standing up for himself, to his future mother-in-law, and, mostly importantly, for the woman he truly loves. We wouldn't expect it, except that the filmmakers already have displayed how committed they are to giving us more than the superficial in terms of this story and these characters.

We never get a solid answer as to why Lori and Doug are no longer a couple, except that they have grown apart in terms of their goals, even as they have grown together in their love for each other. That might be smartest thing about We Broke Up. The mysteries of that thing we call love don't have simple answers. Why should a story about the end of love have them? This film allows the questions and the answers to be as complicated as they need to and would be in this situation.

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