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.

This is a shame, because the actual humor writing and gags of Sweethearts do work at least part of the time, in fits and starts. There’s some amusing morbid humor, such as Ben carrying around a fake ID, not because he bought it but because he found it in the gym locker of an older student who died in a tragic accident. He rightfully and repeatedly gets called out about the macabre nature of using this tragic memento as a tool to get into bars and buy alcohol, but it’s such an oddly specific scenario that it rings true–it feels like something you’d remember from a particularly unscrupulous college roommate. The playfully acerbic dynamic of the central relationship between Jamie and Ben also works, but Sweethearts can’t build any momentum when there’s so little impetus to each individual scene, which slow-walk the intended plot that is established. Halfway through the film, this primary duo hasn’t even gotten to their home town and begun interacting with high school acquaintances yet–we’ve mostly watched them talk about their breakups at college, and talk about their breakups some more in an interminable bus ride.

And by the way, there’s a third main character as well: Palmer (Caleb Hearon), the additional best friend/third wheel of what is actually a trio, who took a gap year after high school and has been living abroad in Paris, attempting to live out his dreams of being a worldly and cultured young gay man. His story heads in an entirely different direction, dominating the second act as he considers what it means to be fulfilled, and starts down the path of realizing that he doesn’t need to live up to the unknowingly stereotypical big city vision of happiness as a gay man that he had always envisioned. Frankly, the story of self-acceptance and expectation vs. reality here feels like something from an entirely different movie, and Palmer’s storyline is so disconnected from that of Jamie and Ben–it’s not even primarily romantic–that the travails of this naive, deluded theater kid feel entirely out of place within Sweethearts, which sold itself on the premise of its dual breakup. Would that the film could have focused itself more intently on its primary relationship instead, rather than spreading itself so thin. It’s easy to imagine Hearon fronting an entire, potentially better film as this character.

At the end of the day, Sweethearts just feels wan and inconsequential as a result of its lack of focus. In particular, it’s nowhere near debauched enough to be memorable or realistic, even in comparison with its closest teen comedy comparison points, like Superbad or Booksmart. Does this reflect the difficulties of Gen Z in enjoying even casual, sexual relationships because they’re burdened by performative ethical standards they’re attempting to live up to? Perhaps, but Sweethearts can’t hold a thought like that in its mind for more than a moment. Its stakes are extremely low; its characters encounter mild inconveniences as they drift from location to location; there’s never an element of danger, trespass or even more intense emotional catharsis. Conflict is practically absent, and nearly everyone is unintelligent to the point that it verges on irritating. It holds these characters back from evoking any of the specific people or archetypes you might remember from passing the barrier between high school and college–all you can think of is that these people are names on the page of a screenplay.

But hey, it can boast a decent exchange of dialogue or a smile-cracking joke, now and then. It’s just that none of them are quite memorable enough that you’ll be likely to remember after a Wednesday night before Thanksgiving spent blacking out at a suburban bar and grill with the people you once saw in homeroom. And if that misadventure were to erase all memory of Sweethearts entirely, you’d be hard-pressed to say that anything of value had been lost.

Director: Jordan Weiss
Writer: Jordan Weiss, Dan Brier
Stars: Kiernan Shipka, Nico Hiraga, Caleb Hearon, Charlie Hall, Ava DeMary
Release date: Nov. 28, 2024 (Max)

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.