Sweethearts Is the Thanksgiving Leftovers Meal of Aimless Rom-Coms

There are times when the specificity of a film premise is the hook that draws you in: The hope that by zeroing in on a specific aspect of a familiar moment, the writer-director can tap into some universal experience that hasn’t already been well articulated a hundred times before. Looking at Max’s new young adult romantic comedy Sweethearts, this was the pitch that caught my eye–it’s a comedy about breakups, taking place primarily during one of the most awkward nights of the year for a new college student: The evening before Thanksgiving, when you meet up with all your high school friends in your home town and realize that your relationships are never going to be the same as they were before.

This particular experience feels almost like a right of passage to your stock-standard Midwestern college student attending a big state university, and indeed Sweethearts is set in suburban Ohio, though it hardly evokes the Midwestern mentality in earnest. It’s a night of the year that has both humor and pathos waiting to be mined from it; I’m confident of that. There’s a deep, inherent strangeness to being home from college after the first few months of adapting to new friends and new freedoms, thrusting you suddenly back into interaction with the same collection of people who you spent your high school years palling around with. On this night, familiar things and people take on a tone of alien weirdness almost immediately as you realize–with the aid of booze, traditionally–that the slightest bit of distance from them has recast the nature of each relationship. People drift apart. High school romantic relationships wither. Everyone turns their eyes toward the future.

This dynamic is meant to be at the heart of Jordan Weiss’s Sweethearts, but in execution the film is too much of a warmed-over leftovers plate of unfocused cliches and paper-thin characters to tap into anything genuinely elemental or effective. It’s telling that even the title has nothing to do with the theme in any specifics: It reads as just one of 1,000 words tangential to “love” that were probably scrawled in a whiteboard, run by the copyright department, and finally selected at random. Call the same film Heartbreakers, Paramours, or even Dumpsgiving–it all would have been equally valid.

Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) and Ben (Nico Hiraga) are freshmen college students who appear to be attending Party U, the kind of school where kids walk through the quad chugging from handles of cheap vodka and no one notices or cares. The two of them have been inseparable, platonic companions since 8th grade, the kind of friends who are so close and inured to each other’s weirdness that awkwardness between them is almost impossible. As the film begins, Ben walks into Jamie’s dorm room as she’s in the midst of faking her involvement in phone sex with her long-distance boyfriend Simon (Charlie Hall), and she doesn’t even bat an eye as she takes it to completion. That she’s quite literally phoning in her sexuality already is an immediate indicator that this high school-era relationship is on the ropes. Ben, meanwhile, is equally flustered by his own vain high school long-distance girlfriend Claire’s (Ava DeMary) overdependence and constant calls and messages, as he attempts to acclimate to the drunken college social life and considers the possibility of studying abroad in Europe. Both of our leads have an old relationship, hanging as an albatross around their neck–what choice do they have but to plot a synchronous dump over Thanksgiving break, when they’ll both be home with their partners?

The obvious question, of course, that Sweethearts must eventually get around to asking is addressing the elephant in the room: Is there a reason why Jamie and Ben have never considered each other as romantic partners? They each want someone more on their own wavelength; someone more easily accessible at their college. Have they been overlooking their perfect matches sitting right under their noses, in hoary old romantic comedy fashion? We all know that this angle must eventually be explored, which makes Sweethearts’ reticence to get on with it or even bring it up particularly frustrating–the topic is never even really broached in earnest for 80 minutes of runtime. To its credit, Weiss eventually does make the right call here as screenwriter–she’s also written the upcoming legacy sequel Freakier Friday–but so much time is spent dilly-dallying on the way to addressing the unavoidable plot point we can all see coming that it feels like it would have been more effective to simply have it out earlier, to clear the air and open up new avenues to explore.