Bromance
How does it feel to be living through history, folks? You see, Bros is THE FIRST GAY MOVIE!!!!! with an all-queer main cast (sorry, Love, Simon) from a major studio (sorry, Fire Island and the entire New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s). Plus whatever other qualifications are necessary to announce that this tale of cis white gay men falling in love just like straight people do (but not exactly like them, because... butts!) is Very Important and Groundbreaking.
The film centers on Bobby (Billy Eichner, who co-wrote the film with director Nicholas Stoller), a podcaster - well, he records one podcast episode in the beginning and never mentions it again, but I guess it counts! He had a sponsor and everything - and one of the curators of the nation's first LGBTQ History Museum. One night at the club, he meets the preternaturally handsome Aaron (Luke Macfarlane).
Because they are emotionally unavailable, they take some time to warm to one another, and the movie briefly feints toward being a When Harry Met Sally... story of friends ordering sandwiches and eventually realizing they love each other. However, they curb stomp that idea the second it pokes up its head, and Bobby and Aaron pretty much immediately begin dating, but they're just, like, weird about it.
Bros is two movies, really. The first is a garbled, didactic message movie about how important it is to learn about queer history and acknowledge the queer community's differences from the broader world of compulsive heterosexuality, as focus-grouped into the safest possible package, while haphazardly deploying raunch without quite being clear whether it wants these scenes to be shocking because they're raunchy or shocking because they're gay.
Look, I try to avoid the modern cinema discourse pitfall of categorically denouncing a movie because it doesn't agree with every single one of my personal beliefs. But that's not what I'm doing with Bros, because that is literally impossible. It is so inconsistent in its thesis that it's impossible to tell what beliefs it actually holds in the first place.
I do understand that the kind of person that Bobby is - ie. someone who espouses the virtues of queer love meaning freedom and then looking like he's going to vomit when his friends start to explore becoming a throuple - totally exists. However, the film makes it clear early on that Bobby is not a character but an authorial mouthpiece for delivering the message of the movie as well as heaping platters of exposition, assuming incorrectly that the clunky dialogue will be more easily digestible if Eichner delivers it in his signature rat-a-tat patter at top speed.
Bobby has a tremendously flat arc, exacerbated by the fact that he's constantly paying lip service to how transgressive the film is being even as he trods the exact same path that 8,000 Netflix rom-com heroes have followed before him, heading toward blissful monogamous pair-bonding between two attractive Caucasian people. Bros mistakes being Raunchy But In A Gay Way for having something to say. But it's really just dressing up the thing that Apatow rom-coms have been doing for years.
I don't mean to harp on this for so long, but there's something almost grotesque about how transparently Bros celebrates itself for saying absolutely nothing.
The second movie that Bros is is still a mixed bag, but actually one that could potentially be worth watching. Eichner really shines when he gets to play opposite Macfarlane, and the chemistry between them is sparkling when the movie takes a hit of poppers, loosens the fuck up, and just lets them breathe and have fun together.
Not to dismiss the quite good work that Eichner does in these scenes, letting his schtick go in favor of a looser, more awkward performance of a man getting his sea legs for relationships, but Luke Macfarlane could have chemistry with a paper bag. Which is something I'm sure he's actually had to do during his many-year tenure as a lead in Hallmark Christmas movies. He's been bubbling under the surface of gay rom-com cinema, appearing as the secondary love interest in the cute but unspectacular Netflix flick Single All the Way, but here he really gets to let loose and hit the open road.
This is a man whose first (and last) appearance on the big screen was a brief role in 2004's Kinsey, and he takes to the cinema like he was born for it. It doesn't help that he is a luminously pretty man, and seeing him projected 12 feet high as his eyes well with tears is an elemental aesthetic experience. But he also drives the comedy in a way that Eichner just can't, shackled as he is to a whitebread wastrel of a character.
There is a complete lack of shame that he has in committing to what the part requires of him, and he nails every single line he is given, however inconsequential. This erasure of shame was potentially honed by roles like, say, Casey Cummins in Karen Kingsbury's Maggie's Christmas Miracle (and for the record, I'm not saying that Hallmark movies are bad because they cater to female audiences. They are bad because Hallmark gives workhorse filmmakers a week to make a feature film that has so little edge you couldn't even get a paper cut from the script itself). But the movie's comedy is buoyed by him almost in its entirety, with the assist from brief appearances made by SNL's Bowen Yang and another surprise celebrity guest.
Any time the movie tries to have a plot, however, it flounders and leans on tropes (including one of the most egregiously bad I Shall Now Give a Different Speech Than I Originally Planned moments I've ever seen), but when the two leads are together there is something truly remarkable and charming happening. That's kinda all you need to make a solid rom-com, but it's a real shame there's so much happening around them that is so fundamentally frustrating.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
The film centers on Bobby (Billy Eichner, who co-wrote the film with director Nicholas Stoller), a podcaster - well, he records one podcast episode in the beginning and never mentions it again, but I guess it counts! He had a sponsor and everything - and one of the curators of the nation's first LGBTQ History Museum. One night at the club, he meets the preternaturally handsome Aaron (Luke Macfarlane).
Because they are emotionally unavailable, they take some time to warm to one another, and the movie briefly feints toward being a When Harry Met Sally... story of friends ordering sandwiches and eventually realizing they love each other. However, they curb stomp that idea the second it pokes up its head, and Bobby and Aaron pretty much immediately begin dating, but they're just, like, weird about it.
Bros is two movies, really. The first is a garbled, didactic message movie about how important it is to learn about queer history and acknowledge the queer community's differences from the broader world of compulsive heterosexuality, as focus-grouped into the safest possible package, while haphazardly deploying raunch without quite being clear whether it wants these scenes to be shocking because they're raunchy or shocking because they're gay.
Look, I try to avoid the modern cinema discourse pitfall of categorically denouncing a movie because it doesn't agree with every single one of my personal beliefs. But that's not what I'm doing with Bros, because that is literally impossible. It is so inconsistent in its thesis that it's impossible to tell what beliefs it actually holds in the first place.
I do understand that the kind of person that Bobby is - ie. someone who espouses the virtues of queer love meaning freedom and then looking like he's going to vomit when his friends start to explore becoming a throuple - totally exists. However, the film makes it clear early on that Bobby is not a character but an authorial mouthpiece for delivering the message of the movie as well as heaping platters of exposition, assuming incorrectly that the clunky dialogue will be more easily digestible if Eichner delivers it in his signature rat-a-tat patter at top speed.
Bobby has a tremendously flat arc, exacerbated by the fact that he's constantly paying lip service to how transgressive the film is being even as he trods the exact same path that 8,000 Netflix rom-com heroes have followed before him, heading toward blissful monogamous pair-bonding between two attractive Caucasian people. Bros mistakes being Raunchy But In A Gay Way for having something to say. But it's really just dressing up the thing that Apatow rom-coms have been doing for years.
I don't mean to harp on this for so long, but there's something almost grotesque about how transparently Bros celebrates itself for saying absolutely nothing.
The second movie that Bros is is still a mixed bag, but actually one that could potentially be worth watching. Eichner really shines when he gets to play opposite Macfarlane, and the chemistry between them is sparkling when the movie takes a hit of poppers, loosens the fuck up, and just lets them breathe and have fun together.
Not to dismiss the quite good work that Eichner does in these scenes, letting his schtick go in favor of a looser, more awkward performance of a man getting his sea legs for relationships, but Luke Macfarlane could have chemistry with a paper bag. Which is something I'm sure he's actually had to do during his many-year tenure as a lead in Hallmark Christmas movies. He's been bubbling under the surface of gay rom-com cinema, appearing as the secondary love interest in the cute but unspectacular Netflix flick Single All the Way, but here he really gets to let loose and hit the open road.
This is a man whose first (and last) appearance on the big screen was a brief role in 2004's Kinsey, and he takes to the cinema like he was born for it. It doesn't help that he is a luminously pretty man, and seeing him projected 12 feet high as his eyes well with tears is an elemental aesthetic experience. But he also drives the comedy in a way that Eichner just can't, shackled as he is to a whitebread wastrel of a character.
There is a complete lack of shame that he has in committing to what the part requires of him, and he nails every single line he is given, however inconsequential. This erasure of shame was potentially honed by roles like, say, Casey Cummins in Karen Kingsbury's Maggie's Christmas Miracle (and for the record, I'm not saying that Hallmark movies are bad because they cater to female audiences. They are bad because Hallmark gives workhorse filmmakers a week to make a feature film that has so little edge you couldn't even get a paper cut from the script itself). But the movie's comedy is buoyed by him almost in its entirety, with the assist from brief appearances made by SNL's Bowen Yang and another surprise celebrity guest.
Any time the movie tries to have a plot, however, it flounders and leans on tropes (including one of the most egregiously bad I Shall Now Give a Different Speech Than I Originally Planned moments I've ever seen), but when the two leads are together there is something truly remarkable and charming happening. That's kinda all you need to make a solid rom-com, but it's a real shame there's so much happening around them that is so fundamentally frustrating.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Categories: romcoms
