Wain’s absurdist rom-com parody displays affection alongside derision as it mocks, honors, and dismantles the genre

“I can’t let you rent that.” In the opening montage of Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later (2017), the limited series sequel to David Wain’s stone-cold cult classic 2001 comedy spoof Wet Hot American Summer, a woman tries to check out When Harry Met Sally from an “alternative” video store. J.J. (Zak Orth), the former Camp Firewood counselor turned circa-1991 NYC Kim’s Video & Music clerk immediately shoots down the customer:“I have a moral obligation to prevent any further decay of romantic expectations provided by the fallacy perpetuated by Hollywood romantic comedies,” he rattles off at her. The joke is that he’s obviously spouting gibberish and being that clichéd armchair cinephile guy — the archetypal jerk clerk with an ironic t-shirt, supposedly discerning tastes, a bad attitude, and hostility toward anyone who deviates from the established canon in his head. It’s a front of course; once he returns to camp, he fawns over the hunky indie movie star du jour, gets embroiled in a romantic-comedy subplot of his own, and is torn up over telling his best friend the truth about her boyfriend’s philandering and revealing his true feelings. 

Point is, Wain, and his partner in crime, co-writer and Stella mate Michael Showalter, tend to mock and indulge rom-coms in equal measure. They display affection alongside derision. The balance sometimes varies wildly between these poles throughout their respective filmographies, and it’s fun and fascinating to watch the scales tip. They Came Together (2014) is the most extreme result of their meandering, a project they’d been kicking around for a decade as a more broadly appealing follow-up to the hyper-specific microgenre parody of Wet Hot American Summer. It takes Wain and Showalter’s professed love of the romantic comedy genre to a dead end. Wain and Showalter freely cherry pick from rom-com tropes and vibes. Think of Danny (Paul Rudd) singing an impromptu, pitchy rendition of KISS’ “Beth” in Role Models (2008) or the arc of Wanderlust (2012) charting a path back to stability and happiness for George (Rudd, again) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston). Or factor in Showalter’s solo screwball riff The Baxter (2004), a warm-hearted and sincere take on the genre, as well as his honest-to-god recent rom-com efforts like The Big Sick (2017) and now Spoiler Alert (2022). But They Came Together is the coldest, meanest piece that either Wain or Showalter has ever produced. It’s the dark underbelly of the Wain/Rudd continuum, and a release valve for the silly season when Hallmark, Netflix, and Lifetime — and whatever unholy corporate synergy exists between them — are in an arms race for assembly lining romantic comedies and mainlining them directly into the audience’s bloodstream between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Unlike so many of the absurdist parodies descended from the classic era Zucker-Abrams-Zucker run, Wet Hot American Summer and They Came Together stand out because there is a distinctive voice behind them, an unmistakable comic sensibility that’s undeniable even if it’s not your bag. Romantic comedy isn’t a movie genre that takes itself very seriously. It’s all about embracing fantasy and shamelessly indulging escapism. They traffic in artificiality, superficiality, and interchangeable parts. They seek out emotional shortcuts. Formula is encouraged to achieve preordained character arrangements and narrative outcomes. It’s all buildup and follow through; mild, manageable tension and release; complication and resolution; contrivance and cleanup. So romantic comedies, generally speaking, are knowing — maybe even self-aware — from the jump. They’re earnest but mercenary, coming in with a heartstring-tugging objective and setting about accomplishing just that and nothing more. They Came Together is a profoundly cynical movie that bares the emptiness beneath the confections. It is all surface by design, barely concealing the void where sentiment, pathos, and audience investment are supposed to be. If rom-coms on the whole are meant to be high-glycemic comfort food, then They Came Together sets about removing “comfort” from the equation.

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They Came Together begins in media res during a double-date dinner scene as one character is recounting a terrible anecdote that ends in a pig Latin punchline. This is our introduction to the framing device: two couples sharing an upscale Manhattan meal. The rest of the movie is one couple — Joel (Rudd, again) and Molly (Amy Poehler) — telling the other — Kyle (Bill Hader) and Karen (Ellie Kemper) — the unnecessarily convoluted story of how they met. The long and the short of it: Molly owns and operates a boutique candy shop and Joel works at the megacorp Candy Systems and Research that threatens her business; as if that wasn’t enough to set them on a collision course, their mutual friends also set them up at a disastrous Halloween party where they both show up dressed as Ben Franklin. Basically, they hate each other at first then they find a spark after a chance encounter at Strand Bookstore and their hot and cold streak — with misunderstandings, family drama, and romantic rivals — eventually leads to a grand overture from Joel at the heavily foreshadowed Brooklyn Promenade, where they reconcile and, a year later, get hitched. But, as Wain told NPR, “If you talk about this movie by talking about the storyline, then you’ve missed the point.”

They Came Together is a romantic comedy that doesn’t work as romantic or emotionally compelling, and sometimes has conflicted feelings about being a comedy. This is an odd outcome. Wain and Showalter have conceded that They Came Together is meant to be an intentionally bad romantic comedy, but they still see it as a love letter to the form. But, strangely, the movie doesn’t seem interested in actually being an authentic rom-com. It’s the very definition of ersatz, an intentionally anodyne creation. Sure, Rudd and Poehler have chemistry and it’s a minor, niche thrill to see the Wet Hot American Summer alums reunite. But romance is entirely beside the point here; their rapport is based purely on the melding of their comedic styles. They Came Together is uncanny and synthetic, a waxworks replica of a carbon copy — swiped wholesale, admittedly, from the bones of You’ve Got Mail (1998), which itself was a modern-now-dated reimagining of The Shop Around the Corner (1940), which adapted the Hungarian play Parfumerie (1937). The movie basically creates a platonic ideal then deliberately cracks the façade. 

The pairing of Wain’s and Rudd’s sensibilities here is perfection. They Came Together pegs him as the ideal leading man right in the dialogue (“handsome but in a non-threatening way, vaguely but not overtly Jewish”) and reveals the layers of generic attractiveness Wain has played with since Rudd’s gloriously prickish turn in Wet Hot American Summer. In They Came Together, Rudd goes for everything full bore. His commitment to the cheese and earnestness is borderline psychotic. Poehler, for her part, taps both her saccharine, overeager Leslie Knope side as well as the darker elements of her sensibility that have often been sanded down since Upright Citizens Brigade — her reading of “Sit your fucking ass down, Karen, and listen to the story” makes you wistful for her more anarchic days. And actors who inhabit the rom-com extended universe in roles that repeat ad nauseum fill out a cast of ringers. Melanie Lynsky, Bill Hader, Ed Helms, Cobie Smulders, and Jason Mantzoukas are given room to improvise and send up their stock participation in paycheck parts.

So many clever touches jump out: the cheesy swing jazz music, the clashing title fonts, New York City as a character, bad wigs and flimsy props, overlit sets, singing in the shower, split screens, the Big Promotion, the obvious NYC landmarks, asinine business models, the parade of holiday parties from Halloween to New Year’s, a grocery bag with three baguettes jutting out. This masquerade is tempered by copious absurdist details: a bowl full of condoms at Joel’s office (aka “the rubber bowl”), arrows around a door handle to indicating which way to turn, Rudd wrapping his whole mouth around a wine glass, a waiter with a flagpole jutting out from his ass, and explicit anatomically incorrect sex scenes. And let’s not forget to mention the inserted Norah Jones music video that doubles down on the Herman’s Hermits bit in The Naked Gun (1988), with cameos from Adam Scott and John Stamos as well as “Paul Rudd” and “Amy Poehler.” This extended interlude somehow, confusingly, still exists within the established reality of the main plot.

And there are moments that skirt anti-comedy, bordering avant-garde, like the looped back-and-forth with a bartender (“you can say that again”), where the two repeat the same lines into the ground, or when Joel and his brother repeatedly give each other heartfelt thanks as they part ways. Rarely is a genre parody so invested in the generic, hammering you over the head with cliche and irony. Molly and Joel bonding over “fiction books” at the bookstore is ridiculous, priceless, and a perfect example of Wain and Showalter weaponizing genre laziness. They Came Together feels like a bit of a paradox: it somehow crafts a compelling comedy without a compelling story; it’s convincingly sincere while also being an intellectual exercise. If the comedy doesn’t click, you’re not left with much of anything to cling to. The fact that some contemporary critics came away craving a real rom-com — with heart and sentiment and schmaltz, perfunctory as they often are — is both damning and entirely the point. That the movie can elicit and activate a latent desire for a straightforward, prototypical genre take is the only real inkling that there is residual feeling and affection lurking at the edges of They Came Together. Its emotional core is only really accessible on a subconscious level.

If rom-coms live and die by their climactic moment of catharsis — the withheld kiss, the grand romantic gesture, etc. — then what are we supposed to make of the conclusion here? There are two endings, actually: one in the meet-cute flashback story and one at the bookend dinner scene. In the first, Joel crashes Molly’s wedding then tracks her down at the designated spot for their romantic crescendo. After a mistaken detour to Boston, Joel finds her on the Brooklyn Promenade and professes his love, but not before two other men do the same, including Molly’s ex-husband (Michael Shannon), the father of her son, who was just released from prison. He brandishes a sword and a clearly overmatched Joel takes him down. But as the police take him away, he resists, and is shot in the face, with no reaction from the wedding crowd that followed the couple to this spectacle. Joel and Molly then have their moment and agree to start fresh.

Fast-forward a year and the two are getting married in the very same spot, a climactic moment that is entirely undermined by the off-putting scenario that made this union possible. After the wedding on the waterfront, we snap back to the present and we get the second ending, a more complicated and human portrait of a relationship in miniature. After spinning a pointless account of the beginning of their relationship Joel and Molly speed through their disintegration: Molly descending into drug abuse and sleeping with her old boyfriend Frank (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Molly’s son traumatized from witnessing his father shot, both of their businesses going under, and their inevitable divorce. They Came Together is one of those movies that pulls the trick of negating itself, which reveals some sly narrative sophistication in what often feels incoherent, indifferent, and shapeless. But then, again, they decide to start fresh right then and there; the self-destructive relationship whirlwind begins anew.

In one great recurring bit from the underrated, short-lived series Stella (2005) on Comedy Central, characters, often Wain himself, would frequently find themselves enraptured, caught in a lingering embrace as romantic passion overwhelms reason. “What are we doing?” one of them invariably asks. Sometimes this fizzles but other times it quickly transitions into something carnal, set to screaming off-brand “Careless Whisper” sax. The pairing doesn’t matter — often, the two people have just met — but the whiplash sensation of what is happening and what we’ve suddenly, unexpectedly been thrown into is obvious immediately, a randomly occurring romantic booby trap. There are two such moments in They Came Together: one between the leads in Strand Bookstore and one between Joel and his grandmother, aka Bubby. The first propels the will-they-won’t-they plot forward in a silly, clumsy manner; the second is a rancid exchange that threatens to derail the entire movie. These two warring impulses embody what is so great and potentially alienating about this bitter rom-com cyanide capsule — it swoons as it destroys.

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