Gray Matters 2006

Critics score:
8 / 100

Reviews provided by RottenTomatoes

Peter Debruge, Miami Herald: [Heather Graham's] never looked better, despite the unflattering digital video format, which makes it all the more tragic that she's not appearing in better material. Read more

Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times: The writing isn't sharp enough for the film to work as comedy, nor are the characters real enough for the audience to connect emotionally. Read more

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: In its genre writer-director Sue Kramer's film sets a new record for bright shining peepers and dimply smirks. It's enough to kill Buster Keaton's entire family. Read more

J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: Graham carries this for a while, but Kramer spends entirely too much time weakly satirizing Graham's job at an advertising agency, where Molly Shannon's a kvetching coworker. Read more

Ruthe Stein, San Francisco Chronicle: [The characters'] goings-on are so implausible that you quickly lose patience with, and interest in, any of this motley crew, despite the best efforts of an attractive cast and the diversion of fabulous clothes and shots of a glistening New York skyline. Read more

Scott Tobias, AV Club: Attempts to do Woody Allen by way of Nora Ephron, but romantic comedies in that vein are only as good as their banter, and Gray Matters' banter is conspicuously sub-par. Read more

Randy Cordova, Arizona Republic: It's so awful that it enters that weird realm in which it becomes actively annoying. The moviegoer sits there, hoping the characters will be tortured and die horrible deaths. Read more

Sam Adams, Los Angeles Times: Drawing on their sitcom chops, Graham and Cavanagh cover for their cloth-eared dialogue with trumped-up camaraderie, pushing and pulling at each other like toddlers in playgroup. Read more

Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: [Heather Graham] needs something to counteract her wholesomeness. In Gray Matters -- her name is Gray, get it? -- what you see is what you get. The fact that her character 'discovers' she is gay is as unbelievable as it is contrived. Read more

Tom Long, Detroit News: One of those completely disposable and clumsy attempts to make a gay romantic comedy that constantly slips on its own good intentions. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: Graham makes the coming-out dithering bearable, but not before she has jumped through hoops of contrivance. Read more

Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press: There is, one has to assume, a pretty good old-fashioned screwball comedy in all this, but director-writer Sue Kramer seems to have grown up watching Rhoda so Graham, usually a capable actress, has not a word of actual dialogue, only gag lines. Read more

Jan Stuart, Newsday: Gray Matters could be recommended to gay women whose erotic fantasies are located in the stuffed French poodle department of FAO Schwarz. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: The movie really depends on Heather Graham, and she just doesn't deliver. There's always been a sort of mannequin quality to her performances, as if she had been posed just seconds before the cameras rolled. Read more

Lou Lumenick, New York Post: There isn't a remotely believable moment in the script here, and [writer/director] Kramer's leaden direction only helps strand a capable cast headed by Heather Graham in an hour and a half of virtual laugh-free tedium. Read more

Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel: Everybody talks so fast that you'd swear you were hearing snappy banter. You aren't. Not really. Read more

Bill Zwecker, Chicago Sun-Times: Nearly every scene of this movie rings hollow, mainly because we can never really believe that what we're seeing up on the screen could truly happen. Read more

Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out: Gray Matters is trying so hard to be charming and screwball (not to mention politically correct) that it trips all over itself. Read more

Christy Lemire, Associated Press: Sitcommy, forced and forgettable. Read more

Ronnie Scheib, Variety: The camera never strays far from Graham, who, decked out in well-fitted outfits that make the most of her anything-but-boyish figure, sweetly leavens her heroine's ditzy sexual confusion without trivializing or overly normalizing it. Read more

Michelle Orange, Village Voice: Heather Graham seems resigned to mugging and shrugging out the remainder of her thirties through a series of undercooked romantic comedies. Read more

Desson Thomson, Washington Post: Gray's identity issues -- presumably the movie's main focus -- share time with too many subsidiary scenes that seem (rightly or wrongly) to have been written for as many actor-friends of the filmmakers as possible. Read more