When Billy Eichner’s poorly marketed yet richly textured gay romcom Bros was released earlier this year, the critique from many queer viewers was that it wasn’t queer enough. The film, a big and glossy yet not unspecific studio movie produced by Judd Apatow, was a major step forward for the centering of LGBTQ+ stories but ended up as both box office disaster and intra-community whipping bro, unfairly expected to tick every box in every way.
The existence of Bros, like Love, Simon and Happiest Season before it, was important because of its bold mainstream positioning, an insistence that same-sex stories can and should be as expensively mounted and crowd-pleasing as straight ones. It’s not a dilution but a shift in perspective, not a reason for praise in itself but something to be viewed through a different, wider lens. This month, Spoiler Alert, another broadly accessible story about two men falling in love in New York City hits and in February, a gay couple lead M Night Shyamalan’s apocalyptic thriller Knock at the Cabin, both reassuring signs that the industry remains at least half-heartedly interested in allowing queer characters space in the multiplex.
Like Bros, Spoiler Alert is based on the love life of a nervy, romantically inexperienced New York writer but it’s less boy-meets-boy and more boy-meets-then-loses-boy. It’s a terminal illness romance, a formula popularised by 1970’s Love Story and later used in films like Dying Young and The Fault in Our Stars, but mostly associated with TV movies, soapily acted and thinly written. We’re a cut above that here, at least visually, it’s a sleek studio movie from Michael Showalter, aiming to repeat the success of his 2017 hit The Big Sick, also based on the true story of a couple encountering strife. It’s a far less affecting confection though, despite a graver subject matter, the slick aesthetic masking what’s essentially as forgettably bland and shapeless as the many, many cancer weepies that have come before it.
Based on Michael Ausiello’s book of the same name, he’s played here by The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons, a TV journalist focused more on writing about other lives than living his own. One night, when forced out to a gay bar by a colleague, he meets Kit (Fleabag’s Ben Aldridge), a handsome and confident designer and the two start dating. The film then leaps to a decade later and the pair are having issues, living apart and seeing a therapist. But then Kit finds out he has a form of cancer and the two are forced to reckon with the prospect of losing each other.
After another year of back-patting, don’t-blink-and-you’ll-probably-still-miss-it blockbuster faux-representation, from Glass Onion to Jurassic World: Dominion to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, there is something gratifying in seeing two out gay actors playing inarguably gay characters doing visibly gay things in a big movie without any pearl-clutching coyness. But praising Spoiler Alert for what it’s trying to do rather than what it’s actually doing would be disingenuous, the film likely to lose gay audiences faster than straight ones.
For a film based on the realities of an actual couple, there’s an overwhelming lack of lived-in specificity to the characters, their relationship and their sexuality, as if it’s all been concocted by someone whose knowledge of gayness comes from watching Queer Eye. The script, from TV writer David Marshall Grant and, bizarrely, outspoken podcaster Dan Savage, is hampered by a first draft insistence on telling rather than showing, a lazy, insight-free voiceover and an ineffective gimmick that sees Ausiello imagine scenes from his childhood as if they were in a network sitcom. What these cutaways unintentionally do is showcase that the dialogue in the supposed “real” scenes isn’t that much better (“Hi honey, I’m cancer! I mean, I’m home” is one of many clangers). When the film briefly edges out of rote formula with a predicament that could lead somewhere knottier (Kit’s casual disrespect for Michael’s job, fogginess over monogamy, insecurity over the disparity in physical attractiveness), the script quickly sands down any edge and picks shallowness over depth. In trying to reach a wider audience, it feels watered down to the point of nothingness.
Losing someone you love at an age when you don’t expect it is undeniably heartbreaking but it’s only in one brief moment of fantasy, when Michael imagines a future of growing old with Kit that will never happen, that we get that painful pang we expect and need from a string-pulling film such as this. The only real emotion the film can muster comes courtesy of an other league Sally Field, playing Kit’s mother, who immediately adds another dimension that’s sorely missing elsewhere. In just a handful of scenes, she walks away with the film. It’s an easy job, though, given how lacklustre the leads are, especially an uncomfortably miscast Parsons, unable to move past his obvious sitcom instincts, giving us more in moments where we need less and never conjuring even the vaguest of chemistry with Aldridge, a real killer for a film as mushy as this. In trying to lamely remind us, with a blunt hammer, of Ausiello’s job and passion, there’s also a disastrous meta moment in the finale that speaks to an overall tonal wobbliness, the film never managing to balance pathos with humour or surreality with truth.
Commercially speaking, it’s heartening to see queer narratives such as this elbowed on to centre stage and Spoiler Alert’s ambitious release feels like another big step in the right direction. But it’s just a maddening shame that this particular journey is content to coast in the very middle of the road. Spoiler alert: we deserve better.
Spoiler Alert is now out in US cinemas and will be released in the UK in 2023
