Nicholas Stoller | Bros / 2022

he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother

by Douglas Messerli

 

Billy Eichner and Nicholas Stoller (screenplay), Nicholas Stoller (director) Bros / 2022

 

It seems almost impossible in 2022 that, as this film hypes itself, it represents the first major US studio film production (Universal Pictures) devoted to gay romance with mostly an openly “out” LGBTQ cast. Forget the fact that it was produced by Judd Apatow, who has spent a great part of his career producing movies about immature heterosexual teens bashing gay and lesbian human beings. We’ll chalk it up to a grand statement of mea culpa.

      But really, after the hundreds of films I’ve slogged through over the years can this truly be the first actually fully LGBTQ “out” studio picture?

     Certainly it behaves as it that were true, feeling it must shoulder the entire history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, querying, and whoever else you want to throw under the rainbow individuals in the US. And that’s a lot a weight to carry around for almost two hours. It’s truly amazing how light and liberating it nonetheless feels.

      Part of that historization process is dealt with through the character of Bobby Lieber (Billy Eichner), a compulsive talker who can’t for one moment stop talking about what he has been told all his life to keep quiet about, his and every other queer since time began problems with being told to tone down their effusive personalities and stop talking about gay love. Through the podcast/radio show “The Eleventh Brick at Stonewall” (the first 10 bricks thrown at the police probably having been by lesbian and transsexual individuals before a white cis gay boy, which he represents, daring to pick up the 11th and lob it at a cop trying to close the down bar) and his later role as chairman of the board of the new National LGBTQ+ History Museum in New York City, where each of the five first rainbow alphabets get some say about how and why they are represented in the new institution, Eichner and Stoller instill their audience with a vast barrage of  information a bit like an informational strobe light that movie audiences must experience  the way  the second graders do who later attend the museum, with names and events mingled into a kind of jumble that may rattle around the brain for decades before clicking back into memory. From Marsha P. Johnson and Harvey Milk to Abraham Lincoln, the film weaves a braid of LGBTQ history that unwinds in the mind perhaps only after leaving the theater.

      Moreover, the compulsive Lieber, who (with apologies for even bringing up the name in this context) somewhat in the manner of Woody Allen subjects all of his statements to self-conscious secondary and tertiary analysis, forces us to hear many sides of his own arguments simultaneously through a kind of amazing kaleidoscopic vision of the same history, again in such a subliminal manner that we hardly notice that we might be receiving an education.

      But of course, it is the larger arc of this story that saves the film from appearing to be as instructive as it ultimately is: the unexpected romantic tale that sweeps up Bobby into an Oz-like tornado of love the moment he meets the “cute but boring” Aaron Shepard (Luke Macfarlane) at a nightclub for a new gay dating app devoted to those who like to get together to discuss old movie  stars. Typical of Eichner’s humor, the two bash gay men as being basically dumb as they gradually discover an intellectual fascination with one another despite the fact that they seem to come from different universes and that Aaron keeps disappearing every time Bobby thinks he’s got their conversation flowing, a bit like way one is ghosted in group chat app.

     While Bobby is a born and bred New Yorker, with parents, he later tells Aaron’s far more traditional parents, who took him early on to see a musical revue at age 13 with seven singing penises (the cast members were naked), Aaron was raised in a small town in upstate New York. Aaron loves country-western singer Garth Brooks, while of course Bobby adores Barbra Streisand—with reservations. Aaron has never even heard of Debra Messing (of the TV series Will and Grace fame), the latter of whom makes a couple of appearances if the film as a non-LGBTQ actor to kvetch against all the gay boy fans who treat her in real life as if she were the fountain of knowledge she played in the series. While Bobby works seemingly confidently in the public limelight, Aaron works with the elderly and dying to help them make out their wills.

      But the biggest difference of all is that Aaron is “simply gorgeous” while Bobby leaves a great deal physically to be desired. Even Aaron’s stares throughout the film at other physically fit athletes makes it clear that, superficially at least, Bobby is not his “type.”

      Yet the two do hook up for the next quite enjoyable day and end of up in bed that night. Neither of them are seeking out relationships—both claim to not even believe in dating. And when Bobby gives his new friend a tour of the new museum before it opens, the effect of the gay history it relates has the effect of making Aaron feel utterly insignificant, as if he has not even lived, forcing him to go missing once again, indicating the ghost he feels himself to be.

      When they finally do meet up for a picnic lunch in Central Park, Aaron will not even join Bobby on the blanket he has laid out to claim as their natural territory, and his eyes remain trained on the nearby muscle-bound football scrimmagers nearby. What hope does love have given their massive differences?

      But somehow in a little show of violence instead of affection, they wrestle with and bounce off one another enough to perceive again that they are both alive and amazingly are attracted to one another, even if Bobby’s chest caves in at the middle to remind Aaron a bit of a little bird bath. In this scene the writers and director are able to subliminally inform curious straight folks of the fact that gay men are not automatically “tops” or “bottoms,” as this time around Aaron asks to be fucked. But the scene, even more wonderfully, opens up Aaron’s character to reveal underneath his hunky silence is a secret chocolatier whose big secret at age 15 was not that he liked boys but that he drew endless sketches of how his imaginary beautiful chocolates might look, even that lovely act being something that as a gay boy he felt he needed to hide.

      When Bobby, soon after, invites Aaron along to the Provincetown where he has been asked to travel in order to woo a wealthy gay man into providing some of the much needed funding so that the LGBTQ museum might open on time, we get further insights into both characters. As Bobby keeps trying to make his pitch for the needed museum funds, Aaron suggests that he listen instead to what the possible donor, Lawrence Grape (a very funny Bowen Yang) wants for any investment he might make. Grape, he discovers, would like the museum to provide a cart ride through a gay haunted house of LGBTQ trauma. When Aaron suggests that such a thing be possible, Grape is willing to provide all of the 5 million dollars the museum needs to open.

       So Aaron, Bobby realizes (as well as the audience) is a hidden genius, the perfect fundraiser that curators and directors seldom are. And as they enjoy the P-Town beach, Bobby in turn reveals the source of all his frenetic bluff, the so-very-many times from high school to college to his early career as a journalist he’s been told all throughout his life to tone it down, be quieter—in short, stop being the overly expressive, somewhat flamboyant, and noisy gay boy which he was. 

      These early scenes are some of the most effective and touching scenes in a movie that has so many endless LGBTQ issues to satirize that in between them we feel we too are being swept up into a whirlwind. The dating app GRINDR is nicely satirized by Bobby and a date meeting up and mutually masturbating the way boys used to do it high school. Hallmark cards and movies are sent up with a series of special Christmas productions, in particular “It’s a Holly, Poly, Christmas.” And group sex beautifully caricatured as a meet up between Bobby, Aaron, Aaron’s old high school crush Josh (Ryan Faucett) an ice hockey hero who has just come out, along with an elfin hanger-on who not able to fully get into the action demands that someone give him a massage. And the inability of the LGBTQ representatives (on Bobby’s board represented by actors Miss Lawrence, TS Madison, Jim Rash, Dot-Marie Jones, and Eve Lindley) to agree on anything makes it clear the rainbow coalition is not always on the same page.

      As Aaron and Bobby’s romance commences, moreover, the movie self-evidently steals from dozens of such heterosexual films including Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember (1957), Nora Ephron’s and Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally (1989), Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle (1993), the 2015-2020 TV series Schitt’s Creek, and the Hallmark specials he mocks, as well as adding a special bonus of re-telling of Shaw Levy’s Night at the Museum, including cameo appearances of that film’s Ben Stiller, along with actors Kenan Thompson, Amy Schumer, and Seth Meyers to perform as holograms of other famous LGBTQ figures such as James Baldwin, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Harvey Milk.

   Alas, as always in the Rom-Com genre, the couple breaks up—ostensibly over Bobby’s truly overwrought gay spiels to Aaron’s Christmas visiting parents and Aaron’s continued attraction to ice-hockey hero Josh, but in reality because both, as products of a world where gay men are forced to put up barriers that might protect them after lives of being hurt and disappointed, they haven’t yet learned to fully accept their own romantic emotions. Of course, they have to prove themselves, Aaron quitting his job and mixing up some Harvey Milk chocolate bars and a box of candies decorated with the “Act Up” symbol of the AIDS days filled with, presumably, deathly treats, the proceeds going to the museum. For his part, Bobby composes a song in the manner of Garth Brooks, expressing his love of Aaron, which he performs when Aaron suddenly appears at the museum’s gala opening.

      As in all such films, everybody seems genuinely joyful, they and the movie celebrating what they have come through and, more importantly, the many thousands who were not fortunate enough to make it.

      Even if some day we were to discover another studio film with most LGBTQ cast members that celebrated the rainbow experience, this one would still remain as utterly important and enjoyable as it is, just because it believed it was its responsibility to accomplish so very much. A job fairly well done.

 

Los Angeles, October 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).