Don Scardino | Advice from a Caterpillar / 1999

straight through the heart

by Douglas Messerli

 

Douglas Carter Beane (screenplay, based on his stage play), Don Scardino (director) Advice from a Caterpillar / 1999

 

As a self-defined bisexual rom-com, Don Scardino’s Advice from a Caterpillar, with a screenplay by playwright Douglas Carter Beane, was clearly determined from the very beginning to pull in every cliché from the genre it could manage, mentioning numerous popular culture references along with easily assimilable literary reference such as Alice in Wonderland, Thomas Hardy, etc. And just to make sure you knew it was truly and intentionally cute, the director demanded the costume designer come up with the very unfashionable and awkward attire possibly imaginable, particularly for leads Spaz (Andy Dick) and Missy (Cynthia Nixon). To demonstrate that this film was also just a little hip, Missy is cast as a video artist and Spaz as a gay performance artist now become a caterer just to survive—but don’t worry, he features all of the good old treats your mother used to cook up like fried bologna sandwiches, tuna casserole, and Campbell Mushroom soup with green beans topped by Durkee onion rings (or something close to it), now all making a comeback evidently at sheik gallery openings and even at an opening at BAM (the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for those not in the know).

      To make things even easier, each character is assigned a significant sexuality. Missy is a straight female who wants no strings attached, which means of course, at heart she’s a sentimentalist who can’t wait to find Mr. Right.

       Spaz, her gay best friend and confidant—don’t all gay men have a female bestie which used to be called, now obviously inappropriate to even mention (a “faghag!”; there! I’ve gone and said it)—who’s always witty and totally cynical, although we really know he wants a permanent boyfriend just like everyone else in this film except he’s simply not as cute as he used to be and god knows where he’ll find someone who wants more than a couple of rolls in bed with him.

       Suit, apply named, is the straight guy, a good-looking banker of course, who in this case isn’t “evil,” as Missy points out, even though he’s cheating on his wife; but she’s a suit as well, a real mean bitch, so it’s okay. Missy enjoys fucking him because it’s easy and fun.

       And then, just to spice things up and confuse everybody since nobody really knows what a bisexual is, there’s a self-admitted bisexual would-be actor named Brat (Timothy Olyphant)—what a lovely nickname—who somehow Spaz got into his bed, but is so cute we just know that by the end of the film he and Missy will discover they’re perfect for one another, although understandably she’s still a little afraid that someday he just might run off with a man; after all, isn’t what bisexuals do, spend their lives coasting from one sex to another?

      Of course, when you’ve got such a total core sample of the sexual possibilities—this film was long before transgenderism became popular—you’ve got to find a way to get all these folks together in one house to show off their differences and their abilities to all get along together. Conveniently, Suit has an up-state New York lodge on a lake and since his wife and daughter have just flown off to Paris….well.

      But even before that, the writer and director have to find a way to get the straight girl and the good-looking bisexual boy together so they can fall in love. I can almost hear them saying, “I’ve got an idea, let’s put them in a back room with big old parachute-like piece of fabric so that they flap it up and down and run fast under it to get to the other side!” One critic, named Heather from Mutant Reviewers claimed that she used to do that in elementary P.E. classes. It was so much fun!

      Of course, it just happens that both Missy and Brat are also diehard fans of 1970s TV sit-com trivia, you know, like One Day at a Time (1975-1984) with Ann Romano (Bonnie Franklin) and her daughters played by Valerie Bertinelli and Mackenzie Phillips, and the kooky janitor Dwayne (Pat Harrington Jr.). Boy do they have fun listing the actors and credits of those old TV shows! Sad to say, I do remember that series, and regularly watched it.

      Just as important, the author and director needed to find a way that Spaz would give his permission for Brat and Missy to get together, and yet not be too terribly hurt by their having fallen in love. But just to show he really did care some, they let him jump into a lake without knowing how to swim, which allows Brat to show off his life-saving talents, and gives the opportunity for Suit to put his mouth, for the necessary life resuscitation, over and over on a gay boy’s lips. Ha-ha, they sure tricked him!

      As in most rom-coms, the loving couple, however, just can’t come to terms with what they really know they want. The answer is to have them play it out in a diner in full voice, you know like in Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally (1989) when she demonstrates in a deli how women pretend to have an orgasm, but in this case arguing about love and admitting their dilemmas, with Spaz accompanying them, so that it involves all the upstate bumpkins who turn out be just as fascinated by their sexual differences as we are, the black waitress high-fiving her fellow gay Spaz and the busboy taking more than a casual interest in the fact that he’s actually got an openly gay man sitting in front of him.

     All the others, young and old, sit with baited breaths to find out what is going to happen to this straight video artist and her hunky bisexual beau. Will he promise to go straight till death do them part? Can he convince her to give up her career, at least superficially since she claims that having fallen in love with him she can no longer do her nasty satiric videos about family life? And lord knows what they’ll do for money, although she lives in a lower Manhattan loft so large that we just know in a couple of years it will be able to sell for several million! As he makes clear, their role as rom-com heroes, after all, is simply to hug one another close for the rest of their lives. The people in the diner sure got their meal’s worth as Missy and Brat speed off on his motorbike, and Spaz comes out followed by the busboy, Spaz now probably intending to spend a little more time in the Adirondacks or wherever Suit’s lake cottage sits before he drives Missy’s maroon-colored rental car back to New York City. As Heather summarizes: “This is a cute little romantic comedy.” Better cross it off your serious LGBTQ+ list.

 

Los Angeles, September 25, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).