Probably the most vanilla character I can recall watching in a film in a while

Cooper Raiff’s “Cha Cha Real Smooth” won the audience award at Sundance earlier this year and it’s easy to see why. The sophomore filmmaker, who also takes lead in the film, is a winning combination of genuine heart and eager to pleasisms. The film is as pure and sweet a romance as one is likely to find, with just a smidgen of life lesson thrown in for good measure. I also found it fairly innocuous.

Raiff is Andrew, a 22 year old kid trying to work through the usual problems inherent in being a post-college grad. He has no idea what he wants to do and still works a shitty job in fast food. His personality makes us believe everything will turn out ok for him though- he gives of himself freely, is fun-loving and kind, and is so enthusiastic as to be the life of any party.

In fact his ability to get everybody, including nervous pre-teens, hopping on the dance floor brings him to the attention of a group of Jewish mothers, who hire him to be what’s called a party starter at Bat Mitzvahs. It’s here where he eventually meets Domino (Dakota Johnson), the mother of an autistic teen daughter named Lola (Vanessa Burghardt).

It’s worth mentioning that Andrew usually falls hard for the women in his life. The one thing he knows for sure is that he wants to make enough money to travel to Barcelona to be with a former girlfriend, who has presumably already moved on. He also has a thing for white knighting, which makes him not only drawn to helping with Lola but also Domino, who despite having a fiance and being pregnant with a second child, still seems sad and disconnected from the adult world.

The film is being called a romance, but I find that misleading. What it should be about anyway is Andrew’s uncontrollable need to be a people pleaser, a disorder which extends to helping out his younger brother with dating and his bipolar mother (Leslie Mann). He’ll eventually learn taking time for one’s self is important, but the film seems absent a lot of the soul-searching and conflict to make that transition compelling.

Instead the film leaves him eventually pining for the 10 years older Domino, played by Johnson with a veiled sense of sadness and grief over a variety of different reasons. The relationship is a cut above a will-they-won’t-they situation because it also asks should they? Since she already has a fiance, the two already know there’s a line to cross, but emotionally, too, there are all sorts of drawbacks between them that hinder relationship.

Raiff is a charmer; a noble, sweet, endearing kid who genuinely seems like he would be the first to come to cheer up the sad or come to the defense of the needy. He’s also as vanilla a character as i’ve seen on film in a long time. In fact rather than treat Andrew’s numerous attempts at people-pleasing for the exhausting and unrealistic goals that they are, he seems to think Andrew somewhat monstrous for feeling a bit tired of it all later on and even then, those scenes only last a couple minutes.

Johnson’s performance is better but she never feels as much a character as just a problem Andrew tries to solve. That goes double for Mann’s bi-polar mom, Burghardt’s autistic daughter, Evan Assante’s needy little bro, and Brad Garrett (shamefully underused) as the step-father Andrew never feels is good enough for his mom. They’re all here, not to be three-dimensional, but to give Andrew another notch on his altruistic belt. For such a selfless character, the writer-director can’t help but prop himself up.

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