'Bros': You're homophobic if you don't read this review
An otherwise funny rom-com buckles under the weight of its own expectations
Billy on the Tweets
This story begins, as all great stories do, on Twitter. Many of you are, like, ADULT-adults who rarely if ever dip your toes there, but it’s a fascinating place: the most up-to-date news and gossip source imaginable, but also it’s in Hell and written entirely by knife-tip on (again, Hell’s) bathroom stalls. Twitter is where the pre-release mania surrounding ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ took root; it’s also where, last week, Billy Eichner chalked the relative financial failure of his movie ‘Bros’ up to “straight people, especially in certain parts of the country” and “homophobic weirdos.”
On the surface, he’s probably not all wrong. I may live in the bastion of cultural sophistication you know as “Los Angeles” — and saw this movie in WeHo, a gay Mecca! — but I’m cognizant that what seems normal, maybe even boring here, might not strike that same chord in other parts of the country. I could absolutely see someone being turned off by the simple fact of boys wanting to touch each other’s butts.
But lost in Eichner’s (since-deleted) Twitter rant is a broader understanding of what motivates anyone to see a movie in the first place; the complicated calculus that’s been behind any ticket purchase in the history of ticket-purchasing. This includes:
the sheer cost, especially as people consider “what’s worth it” these days
adverse weather, in this case a hurricane, affecting swaths of the country
how much they like the trailer
**how much they like the people starring in it**
It’s that last one that initially turned me off from some pressing desire to see ‘Bros’. Not any latent homophobia on my part, the peak of which was probably me saying “damn, Prince of Persia just got effed in the a” watching ‘Brokeback Mountain’ for the first time at age 19. No — the thing Eichner probably doesn’t want to acknowledge, and it’s totally understandable… is a lot of people just think he’s fucking annoying!
Boy Meets Boy
In all likelihood you know Eichner from either ‘Difficult' People’ or ‘Billy on the Street’, a show in which he yells at people on the street. He’s always the loud guy, the obnoxious guy, the guy seemingly incapable of shutting the fuck up. Whether he’s playing a “character” or not, this has been Eichner’s dominant public face for the past decade. Not who you might traditionally gravitate toward as one half of a romantic comedy pairing, whatever the sexual orientation!
And within the context of the movie ‘Bros’ — not to be confused with the cultural dust-up of the same name — he doesn’t exactly do much to change this perception? Here he plays “Bobby,” a mega-popular podcaster (and board member of the world’s first, soon-to-open, LGBTQ+ museum) who regularly proclaims his contentedness with single life which, if you’ve seen a rom-com before, you know definitely isn’t true. Enter: Aaron (Luke McFarlane), a sweet, crazy-hot meat-head who Bobby will learn, as Shrek did with onions, contains layers.
It’s a perfectly sound rom-com setup! Two unlikely singles meet, fall in love, break apart, come back together. But script architecture can only carry you so far in a genre almost completely dependent on believability. Do you buy this couple? Are you rooting for them? You can do pretty much whatever the hell you want outside of that, from making them neighborhood-destroying book moguls (Tom Hanks in ‘You’ve Got Mail’) to cartoon-level dementia patients (Drew Barrymore in ‘Fifty First Dates’). If the chemistry between the leads is there, the rest is just gravy.
But even at a noticeably subdued level compared to the likes of ‘Difficult People’ or ‘Billy on the Street’, Bobby is just… a tough pill to swallow, and more importantly to buy Aaron swallowing1. Later in the movie, Aaron -- who doesn't love his job and wishes he were pursuing a childhood dream that's too delightful to spoil here -- tells Bobby how attractive he finds his "confidence." I guess, at face value, I understand the compliment: to Aaron, Bobby's bullishness isn't a mask for bone-deep anxiety, it's something to aspire to; something that got him where he is2. But it just feels, as a character moment, so broad. Already an hour-plus into 'Bros', we know little about Bobby (or Aaron) beyond this Meghan Markle Archetypes™️ level, robbing us of the kind of small moments that help us fall in love with rom-com characters -- or the couples they might become.
A Thankless Task
So we’ve reached the point where we must once more jump outside ‘Bros’: “The Movie” and into ‘Bros’: “The Conversation.” Some complicated, seemingly contradictory truths to acknowledge:
Creative accounting aside (including the near-erasure of ‘Fire Island’, a movie that premiered on Hulu but did premiere five months ago), ‘Bros’ is probably the first ever mainstream gay rom-com — which is huge
The marketing campaign played this fact up to the point it made the movie feel like, as Gawker aptly describes, “homework for straight people.” This was probably not a great angle!
Moviegoing is not an act of advocacy BUT
Box office tallies do matter and do dictate the decision-making of fearful studio executives (if you’re reading this, I’m talking about all the other executives, not you) who might take weak revenue as a sign to green-light fewer of “these types” (read: 🏳️🌈) of movies in the future
Why bring any of this up, all of which is extrinsic to the movie itself? Because you can feel ‘Bros’ grappling with it, trying to reconcile historical significance and narrative necessity at the same time, and it’s frequently too heavy a burden for the movie to carry. Much of this ‘Bros’ never asked for! It’s not Eichner’s fault that, our moviegoing culture still so un-evolved in 2022, “gay rom-com” constitutes a revolutionary concept. At the same time, the movie goes meta so often it might as well be Mark Zuckerberg; you never forget you’re watching the First Mainstream Gay Rom-Com™️, because ‘Bros’ never wants you to forget it.
What sucks is: ‘Bros’ might actually be the funniest studio comedy I’ve seen all year! More jokes land than don’t (I howled at someone calling Caitlyn Jenner a “trans terrorist”), and the specificity of Bobby and Aaron’s world shines through in, among other things, cold Grindr messaging (“need ass pic”) and awkward foursomes with guys named “Steve.” When the movie just lets itself breathe, build actual scenes instead of statements, it truly comes alive. It’s just that so much of 'Bros' feels like... the essay about 'Bros' you'd find in a future (important) Criterion release.
In a perfect world, we’d have three ‘Bros’ a year and they’d be of varying quality and you might like one and not the other two and it wouldn’t matter at all because the future of gay cinema doesn’t hang in the balance. They could just be movies, free to do their own thing just as decades, a whole century’s worth of straight dramas and straight comedies and straight musicals3 have been before. This is the sexually fluid multiplex I see in my dreams! And if it turns out, looking back, that ‘Bros’ was the cinematic equivalent of the first brick at Stonewall? Billy Eichner will never, ever shut up about it on Twitter.
I’ll delete this with enough pushback but it was right there
the heights of podcasting!
lol