No worry there. It’s Yi’s movie, after all, necessitated by an alleged crisis over her inability to love. Sort of. Co-scripted and directed by Nicholas Jasenovec—played in the film by actor Jake M. Johnson—it mixes unscripted segments in which Yi interviews famous friends from her film roles and stand-up career (Seth Rogen, Demetri Martin, etc.) and apparent strangers across America on the subject of true love, occasionally recreating their stories with puppets and miniature sets. A subplot quickly swallows the movie with the introduction of Michael Cera. Here, he plays the part of Michael Cera, a young actor who falls in love with Yi.
It’s a clever, though precious, setup for a movie. So why does so much of it feel like soft torture? Some of the blame goes to Yi’s performance. Her childlike bubbliness plays winningly a few minutes at a time, but turns toxic over long stretches. It also can’t bend too far. Yi looks at home goofing with a bunch of kids on a playground, but lost in scenes requiring her to emote; it’s like asking viewers to feel Sonic The Hedgehog’s pain. And Paper Heart’s inability to sell its central conceit does it in. A fine line divides “artificial” from “phony,” and the film never finds the right side of that line. Every beat of Yi’s manufactured crisis of faith feels as pre-programmed in its own way as a Michael Bay movie. Some of the interview segments breathe a bit, but the cutesy vignettes, ripped-from-home-movies love story, and goofing-for-the-camera padding add up to nothing but annoyance. This isn’t a movie. It’s a MySpace page.
