The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy

In Los Angeles, a group of gay friends work at the same restaurant and play on the same softball team. Dennis wants to be a photographer, is turning thirty and has done nothing. Cole is an actor who stays with nobody. Patrick is sardonic and lets no one near. What the group turns on is not love but putting up with each other. The subject is not romance but a circle of friends standing in for family. The best passages are not the couple scenes but the talk around a table, where everybody knows everybody and nobody can lie. The form is light and conversational, moving between restaurant, house and pitch. It is Greg Berlanti's first film as a director and he wrote it out of his own circle. The production is regarded as an early instance of showing gay characters inside an ordinary friendship comedy rather than a narrative of illness or struggle, which was not the usual register then. Berlanti would later be known as a major television producer. Timothy Olyphant, Zach Braff, Ben Weber and John Mahoney are in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like ensemble friendship comedy and American independent cinema of the 2000s. Who it is not for: anyone wanting story; the film builds no plot and proceeds in episodes.