Michelle Leigh | More Than Only / 2017

when more is too little and less not enough

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michelle Leigh (screenwriter and director) More Than Only / 2017

 

Although the central figure of this film, Justin Johson (Jonathan Miles) is supposed to be clever and cute, as his roommate describes him he is also terribly annoying. At 20 years of age, a junior in college, he’s a rich boy who is still locked up in his father’s demands: that he get straight A’s and he remain sexually straight as well. He has achieved the first, but has endless difficulties maintaining the latter, although he has pretend-dated unknowing girls all of his high school days.

      Justin, we’re led to believe, lives an active gay sexual life, but cannot, even as an apparently promiscuous college boy, escape his father’s authoritarian requirements, which are tied to Justin’s financial support, from which the boy is threated to immediately be cut if he doesn’t continue to meet the criteria.

  

    How he has managed to remain friends with two or three individuals, including Brooke Zimmerman (Beth Dodge)—whom the movie hints may be a lesbian—is almost inexplicable, particularly since he is nearly suicidal (the film argues he’s simply prone to intentional accidents like jumping out of his second-story dorm window and running into walls, usually after a phone call his father), and has built up a wall of wise cracks around him which presumably make him loveable to those who want only to laugh away their being gay.

      For some reason, Justin becomes infatuated with his male nurse, Michael Garner (Bjorn Anderson), who also just happens to play piano at the local bar. He begins flirting with him the moment he encounters him in the Emergency Room—even though he has no evidence yet that the man is actually gay—and doesn’t stop until he has stalked him and fulfilled three nearly impossible challenges from Michael: 1) That he make Michael defy gravity, 2) that he bring him a purple ghost orchid, a very rare plant that grows only in Cuba, and 3) that he take him to the seven wonders of the world.

 

     How Justin achieves those three requests, a bit like Harry Potter or the characters of the Wizard of Oz, takes up the first half of the movie, and supposedly disarms Michael’s initial dislike of Justin even if it doesn’t quite answer for our abhorrence of this character. The two fall in love and, of course, finally face off with mom and dad, Greg (Dennis Wells) and Cynthia Johnson (Gina Summers)—perhaps two of the most unloving and unsympathetic parents ever represented on film outside of Snow White’s dreadful step-mama. Why their son hasn’t long ago ditched them—financial support aside—is nearly incomprehensible.

     Even more difficult to wrap your head around, however, is the script’s suggestion that these gay boys date for two months, and even take a trip to the ocean where they share a bed before finally having sex. This simply doesn’t read to me like any male gay relationship I’ve encountered, although I admit I am of the old school when gay men took anyone in pants home to fuck.

     But Michelle Leigh clearly sees her film as a feel-good movie, determined to make you realize that difference is good, and steam-rolls on with her picture as the now loving couple of Justin and

Michael finally get the nerve to tell off the Johnsons, putting them, evidently, out of their son’s life forever—the couple being so homophobic that they cannot even imagine the concept of gay love, let alone tolerate a kiss between two men.

 

    I will say that by film’s end Justin’s obnoxiousness finally wears you down, and you’re even tempted to forgive him—along with the rather bland but certainly nice Michael and the always there-for-her-friend Brooke—for his endless one-liners and his inability to grow up and give up his family’s financial carrot-on-a-stick.

     Justin finally learns that there is such a thing as financial aid for students, perceives that his daddy is just not a nice person, and marries his lover. And everyone lives happily ever after—apparently even the Johnsons who seem overjoyed to get their son out of their lives.

 

Los Angeles, March 1, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).