‘Bros’ Reminds Us Being Gay Is Still a Good Time
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Bros starring Billy Eichner and Luke Macfarlane was met with much fanfare a couple years ago when it was announced as the first gay romantic comedy that actually starred an all gay cast.
A lot of things have changed in the world since then, notably Florida’s and subsequently the rest of the country’s “Don’t say gay” legislation, monkeypox, and an activist supreme court, but thankfully now that the movie is here, the pure joy it elicits is a reminder that this too shall pass.
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As Vanity Fair says, “What worries I might have had about the film Bros, the first studio-released romantic comedy about gay men that stars out gay actors, are pretty quickly allayed in director Nicholas Stoller’s charming film. Co-written by and starring comedian Billy Eichner, Bros is certainly aware that it’s taking some big steps into the mainstream and is cognizant of the attendant responsibility of that. But the film doesn’t let itself be hampered by its accomplishment. Instead, Bros leans into the giddy little revolution of its own existence, inviting the audience into a good, gay time that hasn’t exactly happened, in this way, before.”
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Of course, to make those leaps into the multiplex ecosystem, some compromises had to be made. Stoller is straight, unlike Andrew Ahn, who directed this summer’s Hulu-released gay comedy Fire Island. Judd Apatow, a prolific purveyor of straight-boy comedy for over two decades now, is a producer whose influence on the film is felt throughout. But Bros never feels like a gay movie whose mandate is to be palatable to straight people. The film is directly in dialogue with its own community, or at least some subset of that amorphous and ever-expanding group.
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Which isn’t to say that the film will satisfy everyone. There’s much to be picked apart here, analyzed for faults in reason and argument, lamented for a lack of this and that. To the film’s credit, though, Bros seems to welcome that discourse; there’s a self-effacing quality to Eichner’s writing that acknowledges its limits and encourages more dialogue, more and varied narratives in the future.
It’s mostly a good time, though, cheeky and clever. A bevy of welcome cameos from gay pop-culture icons adds winsome pepper, while Eichner and Macfarlane’s sideways chemistry offers plenty to swoon over as they stroll and chat in a graciously filmed Manhattan and, for a brief but no doubt expensive jaunt, Provincetown. Eichner has gleefully accepted the largesse of a major studio and made something that is particularly his. What he doesn’t do, thankfully, is close things off at the end. There is little sense of definitiveness here; Bros may be some kind of trailblazer depending on which metric you’re using, but it’s not smug about that status. Its happy blare is only getting the party started—or, maybe more accurately, keeping it going.
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For a movie so frank (but not gratuitously so) about man-man, man-man-man and man-man-man-man sex, it’s peculiar that Stoller’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall had more penises in it than this film. Presumably, some execs were giving notes about exactly how gay a movie can be and still open on 3,000 screens. Maybe the same execs who inspired mockery at the film’s beginning.
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But the suits needn’t have worried. Bros is so steeped in mainstream pop culture, with its run-to-him epiphanies and utterly implausible public declarations of love, that it was never going to alienate anybody but homophobes. Bobby is right to complain that “love is love” is a bogus PR slogan for gay acceptance; it’s something nobody who’s been in love more than once should say with a straight (sorry) face. But when it comes to rom-coms, a love story is a love story. They’re nearly all the same, nearly all phony, even when their phoniness is saying something true or when they have enough charm that you spend your life trying to believe them.
