Matthew López | Red, White & Royal Blue / 2023

without any apologies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matthew López and Ted Malawer (screenplay, based on the novel by Casey McQuiston), Matthew López (director) Red, White & Royal Blue / 2023

 

Women and young girls have long had a glorious, never-ending series of  rom-com movies that have fantasized the marriage of women living in the common or everyday world to become the beloved companions of handsome, wealthy or at least the poverty stricken titled, sometimes royal, metaphorically and occasionally real princes in movies from Stanley Donen’s Royal Wedding (1951) and Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember (1957), to later such works as Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman (1990), and numerous Hallmark movies about such brides. In Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle (1993), the straight males describe such films as “chick flicks.”

     Straight men perhaps shall never have such movies; only raunchy bromances will do for them.

    Gay men have long had their hundreds of tales of woe and coming out movies. But now they also have what I shall describe as a new genre, “prick licks,” movies in which ordinary American males can fall in love with a gay prince of England and live happily ever after without any of the camp and circumstance it might once have involved. In the new film by Matthew López, Red, White & Royal Blue, the two lovers, despite a bad start—which is generally required for the chick films as well—just get hard-ons and go at it, ignoring all those ridiculous issues of political implications in the USA red states or, in the case of the Brits, the traditional royal ways of doing things. In this film we’ve entered a gay fantasy every bit as strong as a movie heroine's determination to marry a pretty man of leisure who can still financially support her.

     These boys, the US president’s son, Alex Clarmont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez), delicious eye-candy to both men and women, and the British Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), with absolutely no chance of becoming the King—a cute twink right out of the British Private School system, which allows him later to brag when the two finally get down to serious business, that he has learned everything there is to know about buggering—are nothing more or less than an endearing couple who both the audience and the movie’s director want to hurry into bed as soon as possible.

      This is still a gay film, and this Prince Henry is an obvious reference to Prince Harry, if he had been gay and remained under the thumb of Buckingham Palace; there’s even a passing reference to Prince Charles, a look-alike of whom stands in the waiting line to be greeted by Princess Beatrice (Ellie Bamber) and Prince Henry on the occasion of pompous sissy-like Prince Philip’s (Thomas Flynn) marriage. But don’t worry, the satire doesn’t go any deeper than that, and the central characters are so wonderfully stupid that their major dislike of one another is based on the stereotypes of all Brits being snobs and Yanks being unread and uncouth beings without a shred of a classical education. And, of course, in this whirl of fantasy, they are both right.

      We’re supposed to believe that their intense dislike of one another, which goes back to their previous meeting at an international conference, is really just a cover up of their still-closeted attraction. Why the British and Americans are sending their sons instead of experienced politicians to these august gatherings is never explained.

      And it doesn’t need to be. We have entered into the cinema world that so many female fantasists and male escapists have helped to make financial fortunes for their filmmakers.

      Although there have been a large number of reviewers whose minds have so deteriorated that they were utterly delighted (all irony aside) by this film, and a fewer number of nasty, catty take-downs of the movie, I took special joy in Coleman Spilde’s review in The Daily Beast:

 

“I’m ecstatic to report that the day has finally come: Red, White & Royal Blue is a movie content with being absolutely nothing. With this film—which premiers on Prime Video Aug. 11 and was adapted from Casey McQuiston’s bestselling 2019 novel—queer cinema may finally be level with its heteronormative counterparts. At last, we gay people are allowed to be boring, have absolutely no chemistry with our romantic co-leads, and exist as walking archetypes. Red, White & Royal Blue throws the desire to be special or come first out the window. Now, gays can just be cockamamie and utterly vacuous. Equality is here!”

 

      Beyond his sarcasm, as he admits, there is something quite serious about his comments. This film, for the first time, finds little reason to question its absurd pretentions, its assumptions about its own right to exist, or even its lack of a coherent “LGBTQ” message, while at the same time totally committing itself to the gay cause.

      The hostility between the two young men ends in an utterly ludicrous battle in front of Prince Philip’s lavish, multi-layered, wedding cake making us immediately aware of the Mack Sennett possibilities, about which this always ready-to-be-likeable comedy doesn’t disappoint. It takes only a couple of misintended pushes and shoves, like those all hyper-testosteroned boys of their age, to bring the mightily expensive cake down upon them, scandalizing British decorum and resulting in an uproar in British-US relationships.

     The logic of the US president, Alex’s mamma, Ellen Claremont (Uma Thurman) defies even the narrational consistency of a 1930s pre-Code bawdy tale: send the boy back to England to make nice with Prince Henry, thus solving any sense of their rivalry. And, of course, the boys finally and quite literarily get together when a fire-cracker scares the British secret service who push them into a small closet where the boys are forced into a kind of mouth-to-mouth recitation of their gripes with one another as well as their mutual affection. That doesn’t mean that either of them has grown any more intelligent about one another’s cultures; but it at least it permits them a nice press conference which cements a relationship that quickly transforms into what we were all praying it might.

      Meanwhile, back on the ranch—sorry the White House—Alex is convinced that he has some very intelligent views regarding his mother’s reelection campaign in their home state of Texas. But, gee willikers, no one is willing to listen to him or read his reports. Indeed, we soon learn that just as Henry is committed to the traditions of his family, so is Alex taken by politics, intending—without apparently knowing anything about politics and having read little of American history—to become a politician who might make a serious difference for ordinary people. warning: This is most profound moment of the movie.

      Before you know it, Henry has flown over for Alex’s special New Year’s party, where the self-infatuated US President’s son has gathered a bevy of girls around him who keep begging him to dance while all the time—just as in the scenes from West Side Story and, interestingly enough, the first full-fledged type "B" coming out film, the British gay work (also an early rom-com) Get Real—the noisy crowd is cinematically screened out, in this case as the other dancers simply temporarily bend out of the scene, so that across the crowded room the two boys eyes link up with one another, ignoring the “Lil Jon” musical chaos which muffles out their contact.

     Angry for having traveled across the ocean basically to be ignored, Henry leaves the party, wandering into the fantasy land of the White House’s back yard—surely a no-man’s land in reality—with Alex hot on his trail.

     By this time Henry truly perceives that with regard to sex Alex is a true dunderhead, and when the two finally meet up, he makes his attentions clear by suddenly turning toward and kissing the President’s stupid son, who is more than a little intrigued by the incident, but is also utterly confused, since, as he goes about the rest of the movie declaring, he is really a “ba-sexual” (that's his Texan accent)—this despite the fact that we never see him with another woman, that he is subtly being black-mailed without even knowing it by a journalist who has once spent a few naked hours with him in a hot tub and wants more of the same, and that, as his confidant Nora ( Rachel Hilson), points out, the two boys have been so obviously infatuated with each other the whole evening that they might as well have sold tickets to their affair on line.

      What follows, pure fantasy of course, are dozens of flights by the two back and forth from the US to England that must have cost the Royal family and US taxpayers a fortune, the boy’s love finally coming to a head, so to speak, at a US affair for the British Prime Minister (Sharon D. Clarke, in another wonderful moment of wishful thinking), an event at which, as Los Angeles Times critic Matt Brennan writes today, Alex clasps the Prince of Wales’ bottom: “Alex’s lighthearted handful of royal tush couldn’t have come soon enough—if not for the film, then for pop culture at large. If I’d had to see another gay romantic comedy built around two straight men, I was sure I was going to scream.”    

      You see what I mean? There’s something different about this dumb genre breaker! It does everything the straight films do with quite equal impunity. In the scene after, Henry makes his way, without any secret service interruption, to the second floor of the presidential mansion where, as Alex has promised, he does something nasty with him. The two are discovered the next morning by the White House Chief of Staff, Zahra Bankston (Sarah Shahi), who is so nonplussed when she finds the Prince Henry of England hidden in the clothes closet that she simply cannot catch her breath for a several moments before she demands Henry get his royal ass on the very next plane back to Britain, all without being noticed by anyone else. Did I tell you this film is a fantasy?

       The two meet again in Paris, and at several moments throughout the film they rush into sexual interchanges that promise a true presentation of gay sex on screen without ever fulfilling our expectations. Their sexual grindings are as a pure and innocent, ultimately, as those of the female rom-coms. The sex is after all, truly just imaginary “prick-licks,” no real sex required in such a fantasy world, although we do get a very nice few of Alex's lovely butt.

       Alex goes to Texas to win his mother that state, at one point taking the Prince along with him, who gets drunk, sings karaoke, and enjoys the barbequed pork ribs about which Alex previously has declared he would lick the sauce off his face. Alex’s liberal-minded parents, despite the fact that everything has to remain under cover, accept their son’s coming out and don’t seem to give a second thought about inviting the British Prince to their hidden-away vacation spot. But finally, the now totally smitten “buh-sexual” is so head over heels in gay love that he’s talking about a metaphorical rope pulling him closer and closer to an eternal life with Henry, a possibility which despite the Prince’s constant emphatic explanations has never entered his little brain long enough to have figured out such a relationship is highly unlikely given Henry’s continued commitment to British tradition.

      But even the Prince’s silence ultimately does not stop him—remember this is a fantasy—from breaking into his Buckingham Palace bedroom to demand that the Prince come to terms with their love. Just as the British Press broke into all of the e-mails and private communications of the royal family during Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s unhappy life together, so have they now broken into the series of e-mails between the two lovers. Alex gives a lovely standard gay lecture about the difference between the loss of privacy and his unembarrassed sense of entitlement for his being buh-sexual.

      In the last moments of the film, we even meet the true menace of British society, the King (in the form of Stephen Fry), who demands that Henry agree to accept their explanation that  everything that has been broadcast was an act of enemy warfare, nothing but lies created to destroy what’s left of the Empire. 

      With Alex at his side, Henry refuses the King’s demands, finally released from his total allegiance to the British tradition by the fact that masses of young Britishers all over the country have been gathering to celebrate the news of Henry’s gay relationship with the American pretender. Too bad it didn’t work for Harry.

      Masses have gathered at the gates of the palace grounds, and Henry and Alex go to meet them on the balcony as many a newly married royal couple and numerous grieved royals have greeted the commoners throughout the history of the British reign. And Henry has finally retrieved the first and last names of his inherited moniker, Prince Henry Mountchristen-Windsor-Fox. It is a Henry Fox that he now waves to his fellow countrymen, having become his own man and found another to stand beside him for the rest of his life.

     By film’s end, despite any rational attention one might wish pay to this film, one has to recognize that it’s a joyous celebration of gay sexuality as empty as the usual gay movies are filled with attendant ideas and manifest concerns.

      Brennan summarizes it nicely: “A Trojan horse—well, a Magnum one, if its thirstiest line is to be believed—at the doorstep of the White House, Buckingham Palace and studio C-suites, López’s film smuggles queer ideas and images into spaces traditionally populated by straight people and shaped by straight tastes. Which is, to be clear, no more the ‘right’ way of updating the genre for the 21st century than any other.

     It’s just nice, for a change, to come in through the front door.”

 

Los Angeles, August 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).