He's Just Not That Into You (2009)

He's Just Not That Into You arrives in 2009 as a nine-person ensemble comedy adapted from a self-help book, a provenance that announces its intentions before a single frame unspools. The characters do not converse so much as recite. Each scene functions as a case study, and each case study resolves into a maxim about calling, texting, and the interpretation of ambiguous signals. Moira Macdonald of the Seattle Times observed that these are not people but pages from self-help manuals, and the film does little to dispute her. The lecturing is gentle, but it is constant, and it earns its modest place on the ledger of sermonizing entertainment.

The romantic architecture is aggressively traditional. Marriage is the finish line, wedding bells are the prize, and the women who fail to secure either are treated as projects requiring correction. Manohla Dargis called it a grotesque representation of female desire, reserved for shoes, wedding bells, and babies, a harsh verdict delivered by a critic who had clearly done the math. A gay newspaper office supplies the film's only recurring brush with diversity, largely as a source of comedic advice for a straight real estate agent. The cast is otherwise white and affluent, and the affluence goes unexamined. Nobody worries about money. Nobody worries about anything except whether a phone will ring.

The film is a period piece about a specific strain of late-2000s courtship anxiety, competently assembled and culturally inert. It topped the box office, which tells us something about the audience and perhaps less about the film. The progressive content here is thin, incidental, and mostly confined to a supporting character's workplace. We classify it accordingly, without malice, and move on to the next screening.