Michael Mayer | Single All the Way / 2021

family intervention

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chad Hodge (screenplay), Michael Mayer (director) Single All the Way / 2021

 

One of the now many annual gay Christmas stories, the Canadian film Single All the Way is a totally pleasurable entry to the annual trip back to family with your gay best friend.

    In this case, the inveterate single boy single boy Peter (Michael Urie), working unhappily as a social media strategist who casts, in this case, Christmas ads for a razor company, has just acquired a new boyfriend whom, along with his roommate Nick (Philemon Chambers) he invites to the after-shoot party. His incredibly handsome new boyfriend Tim, a cardiologist (Steve Lund) arrives to the party late, but clear wows everyone. But, of course, as a doctor, he’s called back almost immediately to the hospital for a new procedure, but not before promising to accompany Peter back home to his New Hampshire family, who each year spend the holiday commiserating the fact that their beloved family member has still not found the man of his dreams.

    This year might have been different, except for the fact that his roommate, who works under his one-man company name of TaskRabbit, is asked by a wealthy LA woman to put up her annual Christmas lights on the roof. It seems that her previous workman has fallen to his death from just such a rooftop.

     Nick is far too competent to fall from the roof, but observes, when her husband drives up to be met by her loving kisses, that he is also his roommate Peter’s new boyfriend Tim, the cardiologist.

     So Peter now has no one to take home to prove he’s not a failure when it comes to picking out possible mates for a long term relationship. Moreover, what Peter would really love to do in life is not to shuttle together pretty boys for a quick shoot, but to love and nurture plants in a garden store. His high-paying, empty Hollywood-like job is destroying his life. But this year he determines that things will be different, and encourages his long-term roommate, who everyone in his family have already met, to travel with him back to New Hampshire pretending to be his new permanent boyfriend.

     Lisa, Peter’s mother (Jennifer Robertson), considers the new relationship that her son proposes for about 3 minutes before she announces that she has arranged for a blind date for him with her new gym instructor, a skier named James (Luke Macfarlane). Already hurt by the men he has fallen for, including a man named Zack, and Tim, Peter attempts to get out of the commitment she has made for him, unsuccessfully. In fact, when he meets James in the small town of what Nick hints has about 36 people (clearly an exaggeration, given the festive small-town center), he his stunned by the skier’s beauty and gentle, kind demeanor. James represents just the man he might fall for—and does—except this time inexplicably he cannot stop talking about his long-term (eight years) roommate Nick.

      Nick moreover, is a big hit with the daughters of one of Peter’s sisters, and even a larger presence for Peter’s other sister’s son, who adores the book the TaskRabbit wrote about his dog Emmett. Peter’s father, moreover, is delighted by the return of TaskRabbit, since he knows that Nick will be able to easily fix the leak they have in their basement plumbing.

      In fact, except for Lisa and her highly self-involved sister, Sandy (played to the campy hilt by the always entertaining gay icon Jennifer Coolidge), Peter’s entire family cannot comprehend why their favorite son hasn’t yet realized that he is already in the perfect relationship, that needs simply to be recognized as love between himself and Nick; and they determine, this Christmas vacation of 10 long days, to not only help him to realize that the solution to his bachelorhood is the boy that sleeps in the very next room, as well as helping him to perceive that he should return home where he will be far happier than in his agenting job in Los Angeles.

     This is a busy Christmas comedy, and a great many things happen. Peter takes a second date, this time a ski run with James, while Aunt Sandy can’t quite bring together the Christmas pageant she has planned with family members and other town locals playing out the story of the ordinary Mary and her stay at the notable Bethlehem inn.

     The clever, busy-minded nieces suggest she ask for the help of the ever-ready gay men, Peter and Nick, who like stereotypical gay men everywhere know just how to solve Sandy’s directorial difficulties, Peter steering his nieces and nephews into delightful compliance while Nick whips up a magical set.

     With the help of James, Peter picks out a new, real, Christmas tree to replace his mother’s artificial white one, while the TaskRabbit Nick drapes their home in Christmas lights.

     At the last moment, the razor company demands Peter come up with a new campaign of ordinary people, he realizing, for the first time, that his belovèd roommate might in fact be the perfect model, and James as well. The company loves it, but Peter begins to perceive that there is a big difference between his two models. When he asks Nick to breath out, displaying his winter breath, something almost magical happens even in the cellphone shoot; but when James does the same thing, it’s just hot air misting up in the cold sun.

     The nieces have taken over Peter’s bed, forcing him to share Nick’s, and the Christmas pageant on which they worked together is a big hit, Sandy, in her delirious imaginings, wondering if it might even go on tour. Lisa, herself, is finally convinced that there is something magical between her son and Nick—if only they could come to perceive it.

     Nick packs his bags and seems determined to return, via Boston’s Logan Airport to to Los Angeles, but before he leaves he stops by a store for sale in the small town’s main street, buys it, and begins to fix it up as the perfect plant shop for Peter, who has finally admitted that he truly does wish to return home for ever, to devote his life to his true advocation.

     Nick himself, secretively, has been encouraged by his ardent fan, Peter’s nephew, to write a sequel to the story of Emmett the dog.

     And when Peter comes looking for him, the two finally realize that they are both desperately in love with one another, dependent on the friendship they have for so very long kept closeted as a roommate situation.

     Happiness and joy is brought home to the small town where Peter grew up as the boys finally announce that neither of them will long remain single, and James, recognizing the truth, politely and gallantly bows out.

     Even though we finally have a black man playing Nick, this, alas, is still a white boy’s fantasy, in a town which we might guess Nick will always be the only representative of racial difference, and Peter and him, particularly when James moves on as a model / body trainer to Los Angeles, will be the only town queers. Well, the family loves them, and his sister and her husband own the only town bar, so perhaps…. But I should imagine both boys might find their lives as a TaskRabbit and plant expert just a little boring. But, of course, there is the hysterical Aunt Sandy to attend to, and the imaginative cubs of Peter’s sisters. Maybe life will still be far more interesting than the rubber-faced parties of LA.

 

Los Angeles, December 25, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).