I feel like people sleep on Nicholas Stoller as a filmmaker. Sure, he has a few duds to his name (Sex Tape, Night School, the missed opportunity of Storks), but both as a director and as a writer, the man has been putting in work for damn-near two decades. It was his efforts in 2014’s Neighbors that first got me hooked on the Point Grey Pictures aesthetic, and his contributions to family films like the Captain Underpants movie, Dora And The Lost City Of Gold, and even helping to produce the little miracle of Smallfoot, have shown him to be quite versatile in appealing to different audiences. And now, it seems like he's met his ultimate challenge as the only straight man helming a film that is predominantly about, and majority-starring, Queer people. And holy shit, I fell head over heels for this like you wouldn’t believe.
Let’s get the most important thing out of the way first: Is it funny? Well, between Stoller and star Billy Eichner’s writing efforts and the plentiful evidence of improv on-set (complete with on-screen corpsing, one of the little perks of a Judd Apatow production), there’s a lot of funny moments here. The bit where Eichner’s Bobby shaves his arse so he could send a nude had me wheezing in my seat (“I can’t shit, I can’t fuck, I’m not human” is prime T-shirt material; someone get on that), and the chemistry between all the cast members is at once warm and delightfully bitchy.
Beyond just the individual interactions, there’s a lot of shade being thrown at other movies in the process. Both the text and the subtext of the film build this production up as something long overdue, between historical erasure of Queerness and the norms for Queer-leaning cinema in the mainstream, and Eichner is hiding none of it. From straight actors passing for Oscar bait, to how deep the fandom goes for semi-modern Gay representation, to studios only showing representation because there’s a ‘new’ demographic to pander to (the Hallmark parodies are just… wowzers), it is both vicious and quite accurate.
Admittedly, it still plays by rom-com rules, and there are still some of the bigger cliches on display to deal with… but the specifics in their handling show that these people are following through with what they’re saying. One of the main statements of the film is ‘love is not love’; specifically, that romance between straight people and romance between Queer people isn’t a 1:1 comparison. There are inherent differences to it, and what is shown here are basically familiar ideas, but filtered through a strictly Queer understanding of things. The courtship between Bobby and Luke Macfarlane as Aaron involves some very not-vanilla scenarios, from group sex to recurring conversations about where they both fit into wider Gay stereotypes (scrawny theatre boy vs. bench-pressing straight-passing bro), and when they get deeper into their own baggage, none of it feels sanitized for the sake of straight audiences (or, if we’re being honest, straight women that engage with these stories for the same reason straight men watch lesbian porn).
Hell, even when it gets to my biggest pet peeve with these kinds of films, the third-act break-up, it not only feels genuine because it isn’t just a basic-bitch misunderstanding that causes it, but it even takes on a meta context when it gets to Aaron basically arguing with Bobby (AKA the guy who caused this to happen as a screenwriter) about why it’s even happening. This is the kind of shit I like seeing in rom-coms.
So, it succeeds as comedy and as romance (it is almost unbearable just how cute Eichner and Macfarlane are together, along with every other coupling/throupling in this)… but what about as representation? This is the kind of filmmaking aspect that can mean the world for the people it speaks to, but can be a bit much for others through sheer volume (let’s be charitable with this and not just bottom out into the more cynical reasons why someone would reject this at face value).
Well, for whatever my opinion on this may be worth, I think this works really well as a film about Queerness by Queers. The amount of in-fighting among the board for Bobby’s LGBTQ+ Museum feels accurate to what I’ve seen for myself and dealt with from others directly, and the way the film at large treats Gay history hits some appropriately melancholic notes.
But it also takes the time to reiterate that this grouping isn’t a monolith under a single banner, it is much more complicated than that (it’s why the whole ‘alphabet’ thing exists in the first place). And that a lot of their… a lot of our understanding of ourselves, our allies, and those who came before us, is coloured by how much trauma and erasure and the struggle to be our true selves exists in our history and the ways that it informs how we operate day-by-day. But even with how much of our own history has been left out of the books, and that it seems like we are only just getting the chance to tell our own stories… while wishing that those we lost along the way could enjoy this moment alongside us, we all deserve happiness.
I just love the hell out of this whole thing. I love its sense of humour, I love its approach to the rom-com formula, I love the cast with its blend of old and new Queer performers (getting to see Amanda Bearse on the big screen is officially one of my favourite moments of 2022), I love how warm and inviting its depiction of romance is, and I love its honesty about the larger LGBTQ+ community and how our own arguing about the ways we love can become the obstacle to actually loving. Eichner seems to have dug deep into his own neuroses to tell this story, and it reaches honest emotionality because of that, while Nicholas Stoller does what any self-respecting ally should: Let us talk, not talk over us.
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