David Scala | Engaged / 2019

the frustrations and imperfections of marriage

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Scala (screenwriter and director) Engaged / 2019 [17 minutes]

 

There they are: Darren (Daniel K. Isaac) and Elliot (Ryan Jamaal Swain) in a romantic and expensive restaurant, flan having just been served for dessert. It’s time for Darren to get truly romantic and he starts on a clearly rehearsed speech about how much he’s enjoyed their years together, and how, despite talking about moving and changing careers, the more he thinks about their lives and where they’re heading is…..A busybody server interrupts to ask if they want more water.

     Darren sneaks the ring case out of his pocket, perhaps more for courage than anything else. He continues but as he gets to the last phrase, “Elliot,” a woman at a nearby table jumps up in joy. “Yes, yes of course!” she yells out. She’s just had marriage proposed to her.

      Several diners applaud, and even Elliot responds, “How cute is that!”

      But still Darren attempts to soldier on. “I was just wondering if you….”

      In the next room another woman leaps up to her feet, “I do! I do!”

      It’s as if in this romantic restaurant a disease is spreading fast. Still Darren starts again, “What I was trying to say….” This time a male waiter screams out that he’s been waiting his whole life for Lucia, a fellow waiter.

     For Darren, it’s just too much. How can he be the fourth man to ask someone to marry him in the same room?

    With his best female friend, Lara (Victoria Meade) Darren tries to talk about the situation, suggesting Elliot didn’t even notice what he was trying to do. But the friend argues that he still might have proposed. It’s not like he got cold feet—or as she continues to patter on, did he? “Well, you know how you can get. You know, you have to make big decision and suddenly all the possibilities start going through your head….” After all he brought the ring, she reminds, six months ago.

     Darren insists he loves his partner, and wonders why she might even imagine that he wouldn’t want to get married.

     Soon after, Darren makes lunch reservations to try the proposal all over again. But just as suddenly Elliot receives a call from his sister Kayla (Candace Maxwell) who reminds her brother that she has an engagement party that very day. Elliot insists they’ll just have to change their plans, and what’s more Darren will have to join him—even though Darren is not at all comfortable at such events.

    That party is, indeed, a true disaster, with everything supper cute, with “him” and “hers” posted around the room and a big game that Darren will have to participate in, a version of “The Newlywed Game,” wherein couples have to guess what other might like or do or in the future want. Darren is least comfortable in such a public space. “It’s not that big of a deal,” Elliot assures him.

 

   But it is a big deal. First of all, each couple, gets blue or pink leis to wear. That means Darren is forced to wear pink. We’ll start with the ladies. But seeing Darren there, she changes to the color, “We’ll start with pink.”

     In the first two rounds Darren guesses correctly; he remembers where they had their first date and Elliot agrees that it is Darren who want “kids more.” But the third question, “Where is your dream wedding destination,” results in his and Elliot’s downfall: Darren posits “Upstate,” while Elliot shouts out “Punta Cana!” a tourist destination in the Dominican Republic. Perhaps if they’d had the chance to talk about it, Elliot might have been able to share his preference for a touristy spot. It stands to reason that Darren might seek out a quieter spot.

     If up until now things have been relatively light in this comedy, they now grow a bit more serious. Elliot feels that at least they were in the spotlight as a couple, but Darren wonders why it has to be so humiliating.

     It now becomes clear to Darren that Elliot has perfectly well known that he’s been just about to ask the question, and has been amazed that Darren hasn’t yet gone through with it. What’s holding him back, he asks, just as had Darren’s female friend.

     And if that isn’t bad enough, Darren has accidently ingested some nuts, to which he’s deadly allergic. Out comes the EpiPen, and he is saved.

     As they walk home, however, Darren choses to go see his friend Lara, just to clear his head, resulting perhaps in one of the best scenes in this short film.

      To Lara he finally explains why such events such as the party so upset him. “I came out when I was 17, right, but I feel like I still have to come out all the time. Like at the grocery some little lady says, ‘You’re going to make some lucky lady happy one day.’ Or the guy at the deli asks if the flowers I’m buying are for my girlfriend. …And even though it’s nothing I hide, I feel like I’m always micro-coming out over and over again.”

      “Just tell them you’re gay,” Lara blithely replies.

      “It’s not about that. It’s one think to make small talk about the weather or something. But this is, this is….”

       “Different?”

       “Personal,” he spits out. “People are always talking about me, or looking at me weirdly on the street.”

       The insensitive Lara, declares, “So that’s why you don’t want to get married!” Basically, she argues, he’s afraid of being the center of attention, which, of course, he will before and during the wedding ceremony.

        Finally, Darren justifiably goes on the offensive. “I’m sorry that if you decide to get married, everything would already be figured out. All the little details. You’d wear a white dress and he’d wear a black tux. And all the bridesmaids would be on one side and the groomsmen on the other.”

       But finally, he admits his real fear: “Just because I want it to be perfect.”

       “But it’s not supposed to be perfect,” Lara responds.

     Before, I go any further, however, I need to make authorial intrusion just to you that Darren’s speech really rang true for me. Our society is understandably heterosexually primed, and gay men, lesbians, trans-individuals, and perhaps mostly bisexuals find themselves always on the outside attempting to explain themselves, to express their preferences, are asked to declare what they do in bed in order the justify their difference.

       Even this film, moreover, seems to have made some presumptions that I don’t quite comprehend. Why is it Darren’s role to ask Elliot to marry him? Can’t Elliot ask Darren? For a man who doesn’t like playing standard roles, why is Darren being asked by writer/director David Scala to play one? Is it an issue of age, of financial stability (after all, he bought those expensive rings), of who first suggested that they live together? I don’t understand the roles this otherwise comic film is forcing upon one character over the other.

       Lara rightfully argues that marriage is about commitment, who you want to be with for the rest of your life, not with who you walk with down the aisle.

      Darren leaves her more than little angry and, perhaps, confused. He returns home to an empty apartment, emailing Elliot to discover he’s gone to the deli. To end this conundrum, Darren returns, rings in hand, walks toward the deli, standing in the middle of the street to greet the returning Elliot, finally ready to pop the question or be killed by a passing car. Perhaps he has decided to leave things to fate.

       Yet my questions, important ones I believe, and Darren’s frustrations have not been resolved.

For the record, when Howard and I after 40 some years decided to get married, if I remember correctly, after the Supreme Court had found same-sex marriages to be legal, we both asked one another at about the same moment. I truly believe had either of said, no I don’t need the state’s authority, it wouldn’t have mattered. We’d be where we are now after having lived 55 years together. We determined to get married as unpretentiously as possible, in the Beverly Hills courthouse with two straight friends, married to one another, as our witnesses. I bought the 10 cent plastic rings. We took our friends and one another to nice after-the-wedding luncheon and went home. Did we have eggs that night?

     Today, I might have answered “no” to our shared question. The government has no power to give or take anything about our love away, and marriage for members of the LGBTQ+ community has, in my estimation, become all too necessary, bringing forth just the tensions that this poor character, Darren, has brought up. Howard and I married each other on February 4, 1970, the night we first met; or at least by the end of that week when I moved in with all my books. We just didn’t call it that in those days. In 2013 the government gave us a document agreeing with our earlier decision.

     I also came out at 17. And if a taxi driver ever asked me, as one did Darren, where he might pick up some hot ladies, I’d simply reply, “I’ll have to ask my husband” (or before we married, “my gay companion”). If an old lady, god bless her, had told me in my younger days that I might make some lady happy, I believe I might have answered, “My mother used to think that same thing.”

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).