In Billy Eichner’s ‘Bros,’ gay love gets its Hollywood ending – The Spokesman Review
Near the beginning of “Bros,” a gay romantic comedy co-written by, and starring, Billy Eichner, his character, Bobby Leiber, lays out the stakes: “Love is love is love?” he asks in the incredulous bark Eichner perfected in his hit show “Billy on the Street.” “No, it’s not.” Gay friendships are different, he explains. So are gay sex lives and relationships.
And so begins a movie (opening Friday) that endeavors to capture the vagaries and absurdities of contemporary gay life. Implicit in this exercise is that real gay life is raunchier and more sexualized than heterosexual people might be comfortable with: They’re happy to pat themselves on the back as they cheer for gay marriage, but when it comes to the sex part of same sex, “straight people,” as the movie repeatedly calls them, would prefer to look the other way.
“Bros,” directed by Nicholas Stoller, whose other movie comedies include “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “The Neighbors,” won’t let them. Here, there’s no tasteful fade to black as two men kiss or above-the-shoulders shots as they undress. You’re an ally? asks the movie. Then get ready for the entirety of the gay lived experience, even if that includes group sex.
To a certain extent, a big-budget Hollywood comedy revolving around a gay man’s love life is long overdue. Since the 1990s, American cinema has included dozens of flamboyant, desexualized gay best friends; after they’ve delivered sassy one-liners and offered a few choice pieces of wisdom, they tend to disappear. (No inner life for you, Rupert Everett in “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” or Stanley Tucci in “The Devil Wears Prada!”)
Meanwhile, overt gay romances tend to end in disaster: “Brokeback Mountain,” “A Single Man” and “My Own Private Idaho” have Hollywood endings, but they’re not happy ones.
In another respect, Hollywood has already caught up. There were Barry Jenkins’ Oscar-winning “Moonlight” in 2016 and the teen dramedy “Love, Simon” in 2018, and streaming has been light years ahead of the mainstream . Such excellent shows as “Sex Education,” “Heartstopper” and “Euphoria” handle queer romance in its various forms far more deftly than big-budget films ever have.
So while “Bros” is definitely a first, its entire premise already feels a little dated. In an age when people are increasingly comfortable existing somewhere between the binary poles of male and female and gay and straight, a movie that repeatedly makes declarations about what “straight people think” threatens to be retrograde, even as it forges new ground.
Instead, it’s probably best to think of “Bros” in narrower terms: It might not be a movie that encapsulates the queer experience, but it does a very good job of describing what it’s like to be a white, cis-gendered, affluent, 36- to 45-year-old homosexual male in Manhattan’s Chelsea and West Village.
Eichner’s Bobby is a successful podcast star who spends his free time going to the gym, dining with friends and endlessly scrolling Grindr, the gay hookup app. Occasionally, he finds someone with whom he can have sex without attachment.
His career is on the upswing – he’s on the board of an LGBTQ+ history museum in the making – and he’s set, more or less happily, in his ways.
The will-they-or-will-they begins when he meets Aaron (Luke Macfarlane), an impossibly buff, predictably gruff, “straight-acting” estate lawyer at a gay club. (Honestly, the least realistic part of this movie was their ability to have a meet-cute conversation a few feet from a subwoofer.)
Aaron, like Bobby, isn’t big on commitment. On one date he invites Bobby to a foursome, rather than deal with the potential intimacy of one-on-one sex. Soon though, Bobby’s wit and Aaron’s charm wear down each others’ defenses, and they embark on a cinematic love affair.
There’s even a montage in which seasons change as they do traditional cute-couple things, like walk along Central Park holding hands, go to the movies, and try an open relationship but decide it sort of makes them jealous and agree not to do it anymore.
That’s more or less when the problems begin – not just between Aaron and Bobby, but with the film itself. What begins as a laugh-out-loud comedy that promises to present a different, more real kind of gay love ends up as a super-traditional rom-com dressed up with a tiny bit of nontraditional sex. Love is love is love, apparently. It just takes the gay men of “Bros” a little longer to get there.