“People Places Things” Is Unmemorable, Uninteresting, and Unamusing

For how unmemorable and uninteresting it is, writer/director James Strouse’s People Places Things may well have been called “Noun.” Having premiered at Sundance with little fanfare, likely amid a cacophony of similarly sickly twee dramedies, Strouse’s story of a newly single father (Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement) adjusting to his post-breakup life fails to amuse.

Cartoonist/part-time art-school professor Will Henry (Clement) is so very confused when his girlfriend Charlie (Stephanie Allynne) unceremoniously dumps him during their identical twin daughters’ fifth birthday party. He thought they were happy, you see, in their pretty brownstone with their adorable cello-playing girls. But alas, turns out Charlie has been harboring unrealized dreams of being an improv actress and has fallen in love with a dramatic monologist (Michael Chernus). Will spends the next sad-sack year learning to move on. But hey! Maybe the smart Columbia professor mother (Regina Hall) of one of his smart students (celebrated The Daily Show correspondent Jessica Williams) will be the key to his happiness. Life is full of surprises, so who knows?

Or rather, who cares? The characters in Strouse’s third feature are so thinly sketched out, they more closely resemble the cartoon versions of themselves in Will’s semi-autobiographical graphic novel than they do actual human beings. Allynne’s Charlie is the worst offender, a flailing, insecure cypher meant to function as the unsympathetic antagonist in Will’s story. Only Clement is afforded the real estate for nuance as a newly single father navigating his work/life balance in a shitty Astoria studio apartment. But despite his easy charm and effortless comic timing, even he can’t manage to carry such ho-hum material for the full 85-minute running time. And the total waste of Hall and Williams as a mother-daughter duo is an egregious misstep—from the little glimpses we get into their lives, it begs the question whether their story would have been more interesting than the sad-sack white dude ennui we ended up getting.

A series of comic panels recurring throughout People, Places, Things are meant to be signposts for Will’s emotional state, depicting Will and Charlie building a literal wall between themselves. The subtlety doesn’t improve from there. “In some ways, those little gaps between the panels are just as important as the panels themselves,” Will tells his illustration class during one of his lectures, a sorry stab at meta-insight into the goings-on of his own life. What a shame that we don’t actually get to see what happened in those gaps—surely it must be more interesting than what ended up onscreen.