Andrew Hull | That Thing We Do / 2003

learning how to love a seemingly unlovable family

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Hull (screenwriter and director) That Thing We Do / 2003 [16 minutes]

 

Canadian director Andrew Hull’s unusual coming out tale is as good as they come, but even I have to admit, at moments, in its quick shift of time frames is also a bit confusing. Kevin (Drew Roby) returns home to the woods and cottage in Alberta, Canada a couple of times in this film, the first after he leaves his boyfriend who has no interest in joining him.

     He appears to arrive by canoe.

  There we encounter his boisterous family of several sisters and their husbands, interested in wrestlingmania, played out in a charades event, and in other events that obviously have utterly no meaning to the handsome gay boy in their midst, who one sister knows is gay, but whom the others seem absolutely clueless about. Moreover, the father is apparently a true homophobe, insisting that the wrestling players are all a bunch of faggots who prance around half-naked in tights.

     On this first visit, moreover, Cody shows up, who the women all agree, is a hot young man, whom the heavier set sister introduces again to everyone, the young man just checking out who might wish to go skiing the next day. But we quickly discover that, in fact, Kevin not only knows Cody, but was an old sexual flame, which soon after begins to heat up with a kissing session; but in the midst of their intense kisses, Kevin backs off—obviously because of his relationship with Antoine (Salvatore Antonio)—Cody unable to understand the sudden lack of passion and angry at the confusing rejection of his past love.

    On his second visit, however, things have quite radically changed. If Antonine seemed simply disinterested in the visit the first time, he now, having established a quite successful landscaping business with his boyfriend, refuses to join him because Kevin has not yet come out to his father, something he insists upon before he will return back to the Canadian countryside with him. Things have also changed back home, where he now has a young cousin, Adam (Liam Robinson), who will hardly leave him alone for even a moment. Arriving in his landscaping SUV truck, everyone in this backcountry world is impressed, the young boy in particular.

    But it soon becomes apparent that the precocious boy is desperate for an older brother, even explaining the fun time he sometimes has with his young friend back at home. Yet, without suggesting that he is a gay boy-in-the-making, it is so clear that he not only desires but needs Kevin’s company that it is almost painful to watch him attempting to convey his love and admiration. At one point he comes and lays his head against Kevin’s back, a flower dropped on Kevin’s torso, unnecessary interruptions when Kevin is simply trying to recommunicate with his closest sister Susan (Leanna Barnes), and many other intrusions that it is resulted in tears for me, the realization that this young boy is trying finally to have a semi-adult conversation with his beautiful older cousin who is having his own problems simply facing up to his family. Kevin too might have found solace in an older male just to talk to while he was growing up, instead of a local boy lover.

     Finally, Adam begs him to please join him in “doing that thing we do,” which Kevin, at first, cannot quite comprehend; is he asking him to swim with him again, take him on his canoe? Finally, suddenly Adam makes their shared secret apparent. In the deep woods, Kevin has shown him major dance moves, not the kind of intimate dancing, his mother insists upon, but all sorts of other dancing that clearly Kevin participates in with his lover and others in the clubs.

      We watch them trying out new moves, even brake dancing to the boy’s absolute delight, and realize that this is what adult mentoring, the kind of brotherly love available to some younger boys, is all about.

     Later, Kevin finally insists that his father, a bit confused by his insistence, join him in the truck for a drive. We know what’s finally going to be said, and the movie doesn’t go them. But his young cousin has made him realize that he must try to explain to his father his own needs and existence just as Adam has made so clear to him.

      This is a perfectly refreshing, clear-headed film that works, however, by coming at the characters and its audiences from the sides, forcing issues they might never have imagined from other sources than they might have expected.

      Let me just admit that I loved this gentle film; but then there were so many excellent gay films in the first decades of the 21st century which I wish many of today’s films might have learned from. And Canadian filmmaking has been such a rich treasure hidden evidently from it’s nearest neighbor, the US. It’s frustrating still today just how many of the great Canadian director’s John Greyson’s films are unavailable to US audiences with extraordinarily high rental fees. The director of this excellent film, Andrew Hull, unfortunately, died of a head injury after a fall from his bicycle in 2010 at age 47.

 

Los Angeles, August 14, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).