‘Love Language’ Review: Chloë Grace Moretz Stars in Romantic Dramedy

It is fitting, I guess, that a film about a writer who spends more of her time intellectualizing life than allowing herself to experience it would be better at telling than showing.

Lou (Chloë Grace Moretz) is an aspiring YA novelist who stumbles into a lucrative side hustle writing personalized wedding vows. Despite never having been married herself (in fact, she’s fresh off a broken engagement), she discovers a real knack for putting into words both the enormity and specificity of a couple’s love.

But if the film, like its heroine, does a decent job of explaining emotions, it has a harder time projecting them — such that even the grand third-act gesture feels more like a concession to a tried-and-true narrative formula than a spontaneous act of ardor.

Lou begins Love Language, written and directed by Joey Power and debuting at SXSW, in no mood to engage with the trappings of romance. Still reeling from her recent heartbreak, she spends the bachelorette party for her best friend, Tilda (Billie Lourd), chugging champagne alone in the bathtub, and the ceremony choking back tears as Tilda reads the vows Lou had only very reluctantly helped her write.

But love, in films like these, has a way of finding a gal anyway. One potential suitor materializes in the form of Tilda’s fuckboy cousin, Dash (Anthony Ramos), who catches her eye at the reception. And once she starts, with Dash’s encouragement, to make a real business of her wordsmith services, another, more intriguing possibility pops up in the form of Warren (Manny Jacinto) — the college crush who got away and is now betrothed to a sweet but “basic” Pilates princess type (Isabel May’s Olivia), who’d prefer her fiancé not find out she’s employed Lou as a wedding ghostwriter.

A woman finding herself in a complicated love triangle is classic rom-com stuff, to which Power tries to add a naturalistic, slightly melancholic indie sheen. But the tone never quite gels. Love Language does a fine job of showing us how messy Lou can be, toying with Dash and Olivia and Warren without quite meaning to. But it forgets to make her charismatic enough to feel deeply for her anyway. If she’s generally a hoot at parties or a true-blue friend, we don’t see it. We only see the side of her that huffs “Literally, who cares” at a friend’s wedding fitting because she’s upset he’s found happiness when she hasn’t yet.

Nor does Lou have enough chemistry with either of the leads to make us root for her happily ever after in spite of these flaws. To its credit, Love Language does know its way around a “magical date” montage. Cinematographer Andrew Wehde captures Chicago with an almost dreamy eye, and from a distance, Lou and Warren look right together wandering the city at twilight, just as Lou and Dash appear adorably cozy reading together from opposite ends of a couch.

The problems come when we get up close. Moretz has some sparks with Jacinto, maybe aided by the fact that (as seen in projects like The Acolyte) he’s just reliably good at conjuring chemistry with his costars. But she has not very much with Ramos, who is not helped by a script that seems intent in only gesturing at Dash’s hidden depths without actually letting us into them.

In neither case is the pairing able to generate enough heat to convince us of the pull between them. When, late in the film, she has the epiphany that she’s been hiding from her own romantic desires, it hits like news coming from the blue, rather than confirmation of something we’ve been watching build this whole time.

If anything, Love Language is more convincing as a portrait of a young and adrift writer than as one of a lover waiting to have her heart cracked open. Lou’s day job being in marketing for a “cool” potato chip company, where she reluctantly applies her gift with words to coming up with slogans for a nonsensical mascot, is one ruefully perfect touch. Her methods of avoiding deadlines — cleaning her whole house, learning to make tortillas from scratch — are another. (I’m less into the proposed title of her unpublished YA novel, Catherine and the Downbeat, but maybe that’s why it’s had no takers so far.)

It’s no wonder she takes so well to playing “the Cyrano of Chicago,” as her friend Gus (Lukas Gage) puts it. “You know how long I’ve been waiting for someone to give a shit about my writing?” she asks him. She’s seen for herself how her lines move people — how they can break the tension of an intense moment, or move a groom to tears, or bring the whole party into the couple’s embrace. But finding the right words has never been her problem, or the film’s. It’s the ability, or inability, to lose itself in the feelings underneath them that is.