Brian Sloan | I Think I Do / 1997

lover and beloved

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brian Sloan (screenwriter and director) I Think I Do / 1997

 

It’s strange that the mid-to-late 1990s, a time when finally an expression of open sexuality was permissible and a fairly liberal and a Democrat was President of the United States, that there were also so very many “wedding” movies, the most notable examples of which are Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), My Friend’s Best Wedding (1997), and The Wedding Singer (1997), the first two of these also involving minor LGBTQ characters. And in the midst of these films—during a period of flamboyantly gay films such as The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Total Eclipse (1995), Les Feluettes (Lilies) (1996), Body without Soul (1996), Steam: The Turkish Bath (1997), Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (1998), Velvet Goldmine (1998), and All About My Mother (1999) (it may be useful to note that only one of these was directed by an US citizen, and that was about the British music scene)—Lane Janger would produce Brian Sloan’s I Think I Do (1997), a gay version of the “marriage” movie with tropes amazingly similar to both Four Weddings and My Friend’s Best Wedding.

       It might be useful to think of Sloan’s film as being a gay version of Mike Newell’s British romantic comedy. Instead of weddings, Sloan’s work has a group of close George Washington University college friends attending various holiday celebrations—Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day—before letting his characters loose at a wild wedding scene where, like Newell’s characters, they question the direction their lives have taken them, merrily jumping into other beds in order to determine whether or not those to whom they said “I Do” are the ones with whom they wish to spend the rest of their lives.       

    These are, at first, college kids, so there are a great many lame jokes, sentimentally silly phrases (“I’m your bestest friend”), drunkenness, and drugs. The major point of these early scenes is primarily to establish that the film’s central character Bob (the wonderful Alexis Arquette) is gradually coming out of the closet (to himself and to his friends) about his love for his straight roommate Brendan (Christian Maelan), who, as the underground fires bank into heat, begins to create serious problems between the two, particularly since Brendan’s current girlfriend Sarah (Marianne Hagan) seems slightly homophobic. These were the days, after all, when straight kids first started trawling though gay bars as if on a scavenger hunt for new thrills, and Sarah is bored not only by all the cute disinterested boys but is evidently horrified by the advances of the lesbians (I don’t know what kind of gay bars they’re going to, but by this time I believe the two LGBTQ groups had basically gone different directions in larger cities when it came bar life), but the others, Carol (Laureen Vélez), Matt (Jaime Harrold)—already a couple—Eric (Guillermo Díaz, who would also play the charming, clueless hero of producer Janger’s own film, Just One Time) and Beth (Maddie Corman) all seem to enjoy it, leaving time for Sarah and Brendan to check out one another.

      With each passing seasonal party, the two “bestest” pals grow further and further apart because of the growing sexual tension between them, and by Valentine’s day when Brendan practically ignores the existence of Bob, it breaks out in a wrestling bout—which the two have often used to get their hands on one another without admitting why the needed to—when it turns into violence which ends their relationship. Bob leaves after being slugged by Brendan, returning to find the room tag announcing, “Brendan’s Room.”

      Fast toggle ahead, years later, when they’ve grown up to be in their later 20s, thank heaven! And if you got through the first rough patches, the rest I can assure is fairly easy going. I wanted very much, after the first to scenes, to hate this movie, but found that if I just relaxed and enjoyed it simply as the farce it is, that it was just as much fun, if less well-made, costumed, and decorated, as Four Weddings. In fact, its ragged edges made it far more interesting for me.

      On the occasion of Matt and Carol’s wedding, the group basically joins up again which this time for “the big chill,” enacted fortunately not through conversation but through a series of comic highjinks that most imitations of the 1930 and 40s screwball comedies might envy.

      In the interim Bob has found himself a towering beautiful dumb hunk of a companion, Sterling Scott or Scott Sterling (he often doesn’t remember which is his real name and which is his stage personae) for whom Bob writes TV Soap Opera scripts very much like the roles actor Tuc Watkins performs outside of this movie. Beth is still “sort of” with the even more whacked out Eric, and Sarah is still on the make. To the surprise of nearly everyone, at the last minute Bob shows up, he and Eric evidently not having been able to find a room.

       Conveniently Bob and Sterling’s room has two double beds, and—although Bob assures himself and his lover that he no longer is even attracted Brendan—he invites him and Eric to share their room, the boys sleeping two by two.

       What Bob doesn’t know is that since their college days, Brendan has finally come out as gay man and has realized that he has all this time been deeply in love with Bob. What Brendan doesn’t know is that Sterling has just asked Bob to marry him—symbolically, I presume, since same-sex marriage was not yet permitted in the US. And what Sterling doesn’t know is that Bob once was deeply in love with Brendan; but then Sterling doesn’t seem know much about anything except how to sign his signature for all the women who are secretly in love with him, and his few male admirers such as Carol’s fiancée Matt.

       In fact, for a while Matt and Sterling get on so well, spending the night of the first wedding party alone together on the steps of the Lincoln Monument, and sharing time immediately after the wedding while Sterling sews up Matt’s ripped wedding suit pants that you might almost think these two will become a couple, particularly when Carol seems to get second thoughts about the spending her life with her now husband—she can’t bear it when he calls by her married name.

     Eric meanwhile spends the night with Carol’s sister, who like him, loves drugs and all things that make utterly no logical sense. Beth rolls around Carol’s bed with the wedding photographer.

And Sarah once again stalks Brendan without any luck.

     When Sterling gets drunk and tells everyone about his and Bob’s “wedding” plans, just after Brendan has confessed his pent up love for Bob in the bathroom, Bob gets angry, and Sterling, in response, locks Bob out of his room, meaning that Sloan has plotted it perfectly so that Bob and Brendan must now crash Matt and Carol’s suite as well, the two finally expressing their love the way that both of them always wanted to but couldn’t previously manage.

       But when morning comes around again, and Bob wakes up with a glorious hickey on his neck, everyone seems to have third thoughts, Matt and Carol returning to each other’s arms, Eric and Beth dismissing each’s other’s silly encounters, and Bob attempting to patch it up with Sterling. Were they just temporarily mistaken and now are “sorry about last night,” or were they truly exploring something that they were missing in their lives? It appears only the man who was most confused in college, now knows what he truly wants. Brendan desperately desires Bob.

      Carol’s cigarette smoking, lush of an aunt (wonderfully played by the endlessly uncredited but enormously talented singer Marni Nixon) quotes from Carson McCullers to explain the problem with love: the world is essentially divided into two types of people, the lover and the beloved. The problem is knowing who is who. If Bob was formerly the lover and Brendan the beloved, things have certainly changed, and it is difficult to coming to terms with that major shift in roles

      As Beth attempts to counsel the always desperate Sarah, it is perhaps only when you give up the search that you find the person you have been looking for.

     Fortunately, just as the romantic figures in both the popular marriage movies I mention early in this essay, Bob does come to recognize finally that he is the beloved, no longer the searching lover, and that Brendan offers him more in every way than the conventional-thinking Sterling, who just like his soap-opera plots has had his own affair which he has simply forgotten to mention to his mate.

     In the end, of course, all is well. Brendon gets Bob; Sterling seems to hook up with an old friend, perhaps the one with whom he had an affair; Beth and Eric return to their impossible relationship, as do Carol and Matt to their surely difficult marriage, based on a relationship none of the others imagined would ever last, despite their having lived together several years before the marriage ceremony which resulted in such havoc.

      And we leave this pyscho-babble fairytale packed with music from the Partridge family feeling just fine. It’s good, once in a while, to have things turn out swell for the gay guys. Maybe we should see this as the first of the new wave of “coming out” films—given Brendan’s long period of closeted gestation—that began in the following year with Get Real and Edge of Seventeen.* And all those new “coming out” films represent just such a positive view for the future—even if we know there are some very deep pot-holes and ruts in the road ahead and that marriage utterly redefined the LGBTQ universe.

 

*As I noted elsewhere, it begin long before those movies with works the late 1970s such as Mark Olmsted’s 1980 (finally re-released in 2022.)

 

Los Angeles, February 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).