Halifax • 2022-10-01 • Dan MacKay
I saw _Bros_ (2022) this afternoon. Wow, beautiful.
You know those movies where at the end, there's someone sitting at a desk and they say, "and I wrote this story and.... [dramatic pause] that little girl was me!" ??? Well, it's not like that. At the beginning, the guy tells us that he's making the movie, and he tells us what's going to be in it, and why.
A company plays a significant role in this film: a former greeting-card company which now makes romantic movies, which will be quite familiar to you. In that opening scene, our protagonist tells a "Heartmark" producer that you can NOT just take a straight romance movie and swap in a guy for the woman - and in a breathless rant, he tells us in salacious detail why. And then, the rest of Bros illustrates that assertion.
The storyline hit a little close to home because the protagonist is a Jewish curator of a gay museum and... I've been an archivist for a few years and found out I was Jewish a year ago. And, last weekend I had a fun conversation with friends over dinner, about one big differences in Q relationships, that both partners have to be about the same level of out-of-the-closet-ness and… well, that's just one of the gems in this showcase of the differences between gay and straight relationships, framed up as a rom com.
The writing, though is the most intriguing: some of the film has sparkling witty dialog as good as La La Land or Big Bang Theory, in other places it’s clunky and clumsy and banal and predictable. Of all the the elements, this vast inconsistency is the one that’s most occupying my mind’s hamster wheel. My companions had some suggestions, but I’ll leave that puzzle to you.
You will want to take your Kleenex with you as this is a pretty good romance, but make no mistake, it is a very, very gay one.
