This is an abridged version of a review I wrote for Christianity Today Movies. To read this review at its original source, click here.

We’ve all heard it. Some of us have said it: “I’m so glad I’m not out there anymore.” It’s the kind of statement that is made after observing the elaborately convoluted nature of the modern mating ritual. He’s Just Not That Into You will evoke that sentiment in spades, a humorous and heartfelt take on the sometimes excruciating and frequently exhilarating nature of love.

Witty and clever, the film offers observations about the awkwardness of first dates, anxiety-ridden days spent waiting for the telephone to ring, the obsession with achieving the perfect marriage and the temptations that arise to violate the sanctity of that commitment. He’s Just Not… is like an American version of Love Actually, a tragicomedy that doles out romantic success and failure in equal measure.

The plot of the film is episodic, structurally linked by When Harry Met Sally-style interludes in which characters not part of the narrative relay funny anecdotes before a title card announces the start of a new chapter: “He’s just not that into you if he’s not calling you,” or “…if he’s sleeping with someone else,” or “…if he’s not marrying you,” etc.

See if you can keep this all straight. Ben (Bradley Cooper) is married to Janine (Jennifer Connelly) but is teetering on the edge of having an affair with Anna (Scarlett Johansson) whom Conor (Kevin Connolly) is also pining for when he’s not fending off Gigi (Ginnifer Goodwin) who only went out with him once but thinks she may have met her soul mate (she always thinks that), despite the fact that Conor’s friend Alex (Justin Long) has been advising her to stop sitting next to the phone and wise up. Stop and catch your breath here. Meanwhile, Neil (Ben Affleck) and Beth (Jennifer Anniston) share a long-term, stable, faithful relationship, but no matter how much Beth pleads, Neil refuses to take the next step and commit to marriage, the sort of fairytale pledge Mary (Drew Barrymore) would love to see come to pass if she can just find the one straight guy among her vast support network of gay men. Got all that?

Given that He’s Just Not That Into You is based on the book by ex-Sex and the City scribes Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo, you may find it surprising how little it’s about sex. This is a film about longing more than anything else. It is about the lies we tell others and ourselves. And it is about that moment when we truly become adults and learn to love without pretext or qualification.

Gigi is the film’s everywoman, our anthropological guide to this 20/30-something world of Baltimoreites caught up in the agony and ecstasy of modern romance. Gigi isn’t expecting too much: if a guy says he’s going to call her, she expects him to call. She doesn’t understand the rules of the game and needs someone like Alex to set her straight. If Gigi is the naive innocent, Alex has seen and done it all. He is the wise sage, blowing the cover of men everywhere. When Gigi insists that perhaps that week’s uncommunicative beau didn’t call because he lost her number or she missed his message, Alex unemotionally and factually responds, “Or maybe he just didn’t call because he has no interest in seeing you again.”

Gigi finds Alex’s merciless truth telling strangely liberating. Rather than crushing her spirit, she finds Alex’s advice — which she mines again and again — like a relationship decoder ring, deciphering the inscrutable behavior of the men she meets. Why is it, He’s Just Not That Into You asks, that we are so bad at communicating with each other? Why do we so misread the signals others send? And why do we play games with each other’s fragile hearts?

Ultimately, the carousing Alex is hoisted on his own petard when the student becomes the teacher. Alex may understand how the game is played, but that is only because he has so often played it. He may know the ins and outs of how men and woman hook up, but he is ignorant of how they fall in love. As a result, his every relationship is vapid and shallow. Gigi may have made her fair share of mistakes and will probably make more in the future, but her splintered love life is far richer than the hollowness that comes with Alex’s well-informed superficiality.

He’s Just Not… is a laboratory experiment in human miscommunication, illuminating the dysfunction of a system that is arguably indispensable, but no less broken. Each character has a fundamental inability to express themselves or, in some cases, simply tell the truth. We bring so much pain on ourselves, the film rightly argues, by calling what we do civility and good manners when it is little more than a smokescreen for our own selfishness and incapacity to be sincere. We hide our disinterest behind false pretense and misconstrue politeness as affection.

No one in this film wants to be average. Like the protagonists in Revolutionary Road, everyone likes to think they are unique, the exception to the rule, when it is far more likely that they are the rule personified. This makes them no less special or valuable. It simply illuminates a powerful reality — love is not an effortless and undemanding fairytale. It is laborious, succeeding only because we work on it day in and day out.

He’s Just Not That Into You wimps out a bit in the end. Having made some very good points about the individual belief in exceptionalism and even the rationale behind the institution of marriage, the film cannot help but cave to stereotypes and offer the very things it spent two hours opposing. It’s pleasing to the part of us that loves happy endings but is, alas, not very honest. One wishes the film would stand on principle or at least offer us some rationale as to why it deviated.

It strikes me that my analysis hardly sounds like that of a romantic comedy. And yet He’s Just Not That Into You is habitually and pervasively funny. But it uses humor as the sugar that helps the very real medicine go down. He’s Just Not That Into You stands as an amusing, yet potent reminder than when we live for ourselves instead of others, everyone loses.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.