This is such a curious flick. The first half is built like an early 2000s rom com. Like if Judd Apatow was gay maybe he woulda made this movie 20 years ago. [turns out he's a producer] It's got the meet cute, generically emotional scoring, grand romantic gestures and the love interest is smoking hot. [perhaps a bit more so than our protagonist]
Billy Eichner's character Bobby remarks that big Hollywood movies like their gays to be sad. Dallas Buyers Club. Brokeback Mountain. Have we ever seen a big gay Hollywood rom com?
I want to be a bit harsh on the film because I think what it wants to accomplish is possible and would be a smash hit. My hot take is that some funny gay kid will see it and make it better someday. The film has a chip on its shoulder that nearly undermines it. 'Bros' might be right to point the finger, but in art and comedy I think there's a better way. May I draw this comparison? Chappelle Show succeeded in part because you either laughed or didn't know if you were allowed to laugh.
Bobby's love interest is Aaron and Aaron is hot and nice. What's so funny is that he functions exactly like a lot of the women from the early 2000s rom coms. He is a sink for Bobby's insecurities. He's there to fix Bobby but of course he doesn't because he cannot. Bobby actually says at one point "Just say it... because I already know. You're not attracted to me." [Surely Jay Baruchel said something like that in 'She's Out of My League' or Jonah Hill in Superbad or Michael Cera in Superbad] Yes, Aaron has insecurities too, he always pictured himself with another hot guy. But his character doesn't really move beyond archetype and for all his bluster I'm not sure that Bobby's does either. [maybe gay fantasy and straight fantasy are both equally flawed, or maybe Billy Eichner thinks he needs to use the Hollywood formula to make gay ok, or maybe he like me has a great fondness for those early 2000s rom coms, or who knows]
But I don't think that's good enough now. Am I crazy to think that this film would have actually done better at the box office in 2009? Would critics have called it subversive in its non-subversiveness. Would the jokes have seemed punchier? Would homophobic southerners and northerners have said 'I'll be darned if them fags wasn't funny as hell.' [At one point, Aaron tells Bobby that 'The Hangover' is his favorite movie and Bobby laments that no one batted an eye at the line 'Paging Dr. Faggot.' And later Bobby uses the word 'faggy' and of course it's different but my point is that it's not the word that's offensive necessarily, it's how you use it. But don't we all understand its usage in The Hangover? Don't we?]
That's too gay, they said. No one wants to hear it, they said. All his life he's dealt with it and you can see that it hurts him. You can see real pain, not just in his acting. He wrote this film too. I feel that I can so clearly see at the center of this film a person that just wants to be a person. There's a moment where Bobby tells Aaron that he just put his head down and worked hard and hoped they were all wrong and that ultimately they were. But being right doesn't really heal you does it? And I don't think his insecurities have anything to do with his sexuality. Everyone battles with self-acceptance.
There really are some funny scenes in here. But wouldn't this film be better if I said there are some really funny scenes in here. And that's a perfectly shit pair of sentences to end on.
[Oh. Also. I need not remind anyone that a lot of 'love' and a lot of 'hate' for this movie stems from a particularly polarized social/political climate and so you cannot listen to most of the shit that people are saying about it because they're being silly.]