The Broken Hearts Club

The club is like this big, gay support group thing: they meet and hang out, play softball, drink, gossip, bitch and joke around. The club has its own code language, its rituals, and its own elastic membership standards, encompassing half a dozen guys of mixed dispositions, augmented by the occasional 'newbie'. Berlanti's moderately diverting movie, subtitled 'a Romantic Comedy', speaks the smart, self-obsessed language of the hip twenty-something set, pores over their dating rituals, and ignores everything outside this narrow range of comfortable urban angst. The characters here are homosexual, but the film contains them - constrains them - as if it were television: it's like ER without the white coats. It's precisely this blandness that makes the film easy to watch and even enjoy. Like better American television, it's utterly inclusive and non-threatening, scripted with a patina of wit, unobtrusively crafted and cast with attractive nonentities.