“Bros,” co-written by and starring Billy Eichner, has been touted as the primary mainstream Hollywood studio-backed rom-com to characteristic homosexual males because the leads. Directed by Nicholas Stoller and produced by Judd Apatow, the movie consciously evokes tropes from the hey-day of studio-backed romantic comedies, together with nods to multiple Meg Ryan traditional and a compelling lead efficiency from Eichner. Nonetheless, its perpetual commentary on the mainstreaming of queerness stays at odds with its very need to inform its story inside the Hollywood system.
Eichner performs Bobby Leiber, a born and bred New Yorker who hosts a queer historical past podcast known as eleventh Brick (as a result of as a cis white homosexual man that’s in all probability the brick he’d have thrown at Stonewall) and is the director of the primary nationwide LGBTQ historical past museum, getting ready to lastly opening its doorways. At 40, Bobby has spent most of his life alone and has satisfied himself he’s higher off this manner. “We’re sexy and we’re egocentric and we’re silly. I don’t belief these individuals,” he tells a bunch of pals when explaining why he prefers hookups to something long run.
This being a self-aware rom-com, Bobby’s life and plans change when he meets Aaron (Luke Macfarlane) at a membership. Earlier than we all know it the 2 have determined to be emotionally unavailable collectively. What follows is a by-the-books romantic comedy stuffed with dates and intercourse and fights and assembly the household, all with a queer twist. The soundtrack stuffed with jazzy Nat King Cole songs helps evoke a Nora Ephron-style New York Autumn.
Operating B-side to Bobby and Aaron’s love story are the preparations to open the museum. Right here we see Bobby’s (and presumably Eichner’s) ardour for queer historical past and neighborhood. The museum board is product of quite a lot of queer individuals, together with a butch lesbian, a belligerent bisexual, a Black trans lady, and a nonbinary particular person. Sadly, every character comes throughout as a cliché, which is probably going by design as the entire movie makes use of queer identification as a springboard for jokes. Lots of the jokes do land, as a result of if something queer individuals know the way to snort at ourselves. Nonetheless, what Eichner and co-writer Stoller appear to have forgotten is {that a} rom-com like “When Harry Met Sally” is so iconic not simply due to Harry and Sally’s authenticity, however that every one of its characters really feel like actual individuals.
Whereas a lot of the characters are underdeveloped, Eichner’s razor-sharp wit and caustic humor shines by within the dialogue and situational comedy as he skewers many points of homosexual relationship tradition, from Grindr hookups to obsessive health club utilization to group intercourse. The script shouldn’t be peppered with queer historical past and numerous name-drops of queer icons like Cher, Barbra Streisand, and Mariah Carey.
Eichner additionally takes jabs on the fashionable commodification of queer tradition inside the leisure trade, from the “Queer Eye for the Straight Man” reboot to the common love of “Schitt’s Creek” to Hallmark’s inclusion of queer rom-coms (going as far as creating pretend titles like “Christmas with Both” and “A Holly Poly Christmas”) as soon as they realized a revenue might be made. Though Eichner rejects this very sanitization of queerness, the self-aware rom-com beats in “Bros” discover it treading the identical waters.
Late within the movie, Bobby tells the museum board, “We battle like loopy, and we all the time have, however you’re my individuals.” That is the guiding gentle of “Bros”: to indicate the gays as messy, to indicate the queer neighborhood as greater than a monolith, to have them be as loud and proud and take up as a lot house being their genuine selves as doable.
And it truly is nice to see a mainstream Hollywood movie of this magnitude with this sort of illustration from all through the LGBTQ neighborhood. Nonetheless, it defeats its personal message of bringing queer historical past and queer life out of the margins when it facilities the love story between two cis, conventionally engaging white homosexual males. Eichner is the primary to level out his privilege; early on his character wins an award at an LGBTQ gala for Finest Cis White Homosexual Man of the Yr. However being self-aware isn’t as impactful as de-centering the cis white homosexual man because the lead, particularly when each different queer character within the movie nonetheless stays on the margins of the story.
“Bros” is clearly a labor of affection for Eichner, and as a belligerent bisexual (petulant pansexual?) myself, I laughed an ideal deal on the comedy. As a commitment-phobe who discovered romance late in life, I used to be moved by the core relationship. And as a rustic woman, I felt just like the working Garth Brooks joke was tailor-made particularly for me. However there’s additionally one thing at odds with Eichner’s mission to carry queerness, homosexual intercourse, and homosexual relationship in all its texture to mainstream Hollywood studio-backed cinema, whereas in the identical breath sanitizing queerness to be palatable to straight tradition.
For a film so centered on the significance of mainstreaming queer historical past, it appears to care little or no for the queer movies that got here earlier than it. Bobby and Aaron talk about how typically straight male actors win reward for taking part in homosexual cowboys, however past digs at each “Brokeback Mountain” and “The Energy of the Canine” (directed by and starring straight individuals), the one different queer movie talked about is Luca Guadagnino’s “Name Me By Your Title” in a throwaway joke about the way it’s the one queer film to which all straight individuals examine different queer movies. By solely highlighting these few motion pictures—ignoring queer cinematic pioneers within the course of—“Bros” is as culpable of holding queer historical past (on this case cinematic historical past) within the shadows as has occurred to the opposite sides that Bobby’s LBGTQ museum is supposedly shining a lightweight on. The purpose of the museum is to indicate historical past by a queer prism, but the movie itself doesn’t appear to view cinema in the identical method. Worse but, “Bros” thinks of itself as an important pioneer solely as a result of it is doing so on a mainstream degree.
This evaluation was filed from the premiere on the Toronto Worldwide Movie Pageant on September 10. “Bros” opens on September thirtieth.