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Gray (Heather Graham) and her brother, Sam (Tom Cavanagh), are the best of friends. In fact, they’re inseparable. They go running in the park together. They dance together. They live together. And they go to dinner parties together. They’re so inseparable that people actually think they’re together. You know…like a couple. So Gray and Sam decide that it’s about time they got out there and found someone.
One day, on a walk through the park, Gray finds Charlie (Bridget Moynahan), a gorgeous woman who’s new in town. Gray introduces Charlie to Sam—and by the next afternoon, the two are engaged and planning a quickie Vegas wedding. On the night before the wedding, though, Gray and Charlie go out and have a few too many drinks and share a…moment. The next morning, Charlie doesn’t remember a thing—but Gray can’t forget. She begins to worry that she might not be the person she’s spent her whole life pretending to be—and, even worse yet, she’s afraid that she might be in love with her brother’s wife.
Gray Matters is what happens when you take a handful of the world’s most irritating actors, give them equally irritating characters to play, hand them a supposedly edgy yet strangely cliché and wildly unrealistic script, and make them read through it in half the time it would normally take. Graham’s character is bubble-headed and wishy-washy, not to mention exhaustingly hyperactive. Cavanagh’s character is equally hyperactive (which is a little scary, since he’s supposed to be a surgeon), and he appears to spend the majority of the movie doing a bad Jerry Seinfeld impersonation. Graham and Cavanagh’s performances are so jittery and hyperactive, in fact, that they actually make Molly Shannon look like the calm and collected one in the movie. And that’s saying something. Moynahan does the best she can with what she’s given, but, as with the rest of the cast, there’s nothing the slightest bit realistic or believable about her character. (At the risk of disappointing my male readers, I have to tell you that women don’t tend to take baths together—or run around naked together. Especially not after they’ve just met. Sorry to let you down.)
Probably the least irritating cast member is Alan Cumming, who plays Gordy, the painfully stereotypical Scotsman. He does have some horrible lines, which, apparently, are meant to make him sound really Scottish (they could have just as well put a kilt on the poor guy, called him Hamish, and filmed him eating haggis). But at least he’s funny. And that’s more than I can say for the rest of the cast. The only laughs they get are pity laughs—the awkward, half-hearted laughs of a few audience members who are trying to make the most of a horrible situation.
When it comes to a movie this plagued by bad acting and worse writing, however, the only good way to make the most of the situation is to avoid it completely.
