Billy Eichner came to fame through his Billy on the Street series for Funny or Die, in which he runs around Manhattan harassing folks for answers to inane questions. The bits of it that I’ve seen haven’t been terribly funny, but he managed to find success out of it, becoming one of Hollywood’s most reliable gay comic relief performers. And maybe some frustration with that needling is part of what led him to co-write with director Nicholas Stoller a leading role for himself. An opportunity perhaps to branch out from his typecasting and reveal that he’s more than just Billy on the Street.
He isn’t though, really. That at least is a major takeaway from Bros, a movie that has been talked up all year (mostly from Eichner himself) for its’ historical significance as the first gay Hollywood rom-com -which it isn’t. But that hasn’t stopped Eichner from emphasizing its’ importance representation-wise at every step -quick to point out that there’s no ‘straightwashing’ going on, that it is openly and explicitly sexual, and that it is simultaneously the gay equivalent of a straight love story and a movie emphatically for gay audiences (although the reason its’ currently failing at the box office if you ask him is that apparently not enough straights are going to support it). Eichner’s entire attitude around the movie (admittedly his baby) is reflected in the movie itself and his own character therein -both just as irritatingly indignant and self-important.
He plays Bobby Lieber, an ostentatious, opinionated New York City podcaster and activist involved with the development of an LGBTQ History Museum, whose love life consists of mostly a series of shallow one-night stands with guys he’s met on Grindr. At a nightclub he’s dismissive and condescending to a jockish ‘bro’ Aaron (Luke Macfarlane), but a chemistry is nonetheless struck and the two begin tentatively seeing each other, all the while dancing around whether or not it’s a serious relationship.
The movie is overly aware of romantic-comedy tropes, lampshading them several times in an attempt to appear as though it’s rising above them whilst transparently doing just the opposite. A Hallmark Channel stand-in is a particular target of satire (and incidentally, Macfarlane has starred in several of these), with a recurring gag being the increasingly ridiculous pandering queer-themed specials they produce in the background over the course of the movie. It is a satiric extension of Bobby’s view on LGBTQ pop culture. He is immensely culturally conscious, though in an exclusively cynical sense for the purposes of tearing down shallow or insufficient LGBTQ representation. Several real movies or pop cultural moments related to this are name-dropped, and while there is some satisfaction seeing this very legitimate criticism come from a mainstream Hollywood movie, it’s to such a blunt, mean-spirited tone that it comes across as callous. The movie has a very dim opinion of average consumers, straight liberals especially who come out of a thinly-veiled The Power of the Dog parody only to immediately rank it next to other generally popular Oscar-bait queer movies. It’s pretty erroneously cynical, and what hurts it more is that Bobby, as a mouthpiece for this commentary, is just in general mean about other peoples’ tastes, mocking Aaron’s love of Garth Brooks music when they first meet and sneeringly criticizing Bohemian Rhapsody to a kid who loves it -I don’t like the movie either, but in that situation he’s just being a dick.
Bros is on some level aware of how awful Bobby is, but seems to excuse much of it as a virtue of his struggle against institutionalized homophobia in his young life. There’s an important scene where he pontificates to Aaron about how his early career was plagued by him being deemed “too gay”, and that it’s what has given him a thicker skin and a greater outspokenness in his personality and opinions. This is then weaponized when Aaron asks Bobby to “cool it down” during some Christmas festivities with his family. The movie wants the audience to see this as Aaron inadvertently encouraging Bobby to self-censor, to “be less gay”, but doesn’t seem to understand that there is a difference between being open and being obnoxious -which Bobby mostly certainly is as he constantly rattles off on gay history and passive-aggressively argues with Aaron’s liberal parents over gay education in a public dinner. He is frequently disrespectful of Aaron, whom he thinks is only attracted to boring himbos and sees as one himself for much of the movie, and rude to just about everyone else. He’s very reminiscent of a Woody Allen protagonist in this, equally as neurotic but less self-conscious, somehow less interesting. And ultimately he’s the one whom Aaron has to adapt around rather than reflect seriously at all on his own attitude.
Aaron by contrast is a more compellingly drawn character and played very well by Macfarlane, who nails his image and self-worth issues while additionally being unexpectedly funny. Generally the films’ humour is mixed, often dependent on who’s delivering -Bowen Yang, Jim Rash, and Harvey Fierstein for their minor appearances are the heaviest hitters. There’s a fair bit of comedy based in LGBTQ stereotypes and the nuances of metropolitan queer culture, and it can be fairly weak, occasionally dull or reductive: the mindless lesbian drones commanded by Dot-Marie Jones’ Cherry, and the frequent complaints from Rash’s Robert about bi erasure that nobody takes seriously -the movie itself ardently contributing to bi erasure. There’s also a scene featuring Debra Messing as herself that is horribly awkward and betrays a very white-centric Gen-X sensibility to LGBTQ culture the movie would otherwise rather hide.
What it might also like to hide are several shooting errors or missed cues or the like because the editing on this movie is distractingly flimsy. There are several scenes where shots are interrupted clumsily, cutting to a different angle, sometimes a medium shot in the middle of an action or line of dialogue that suggests a sparsity of usable takes, even last minute reshoots or ADR. It’s bizarre to see such painfully integrated edits in such a professional production, and especially hurts the pacing of the most narratively important moments -really rather embarrassing for a 22 million-dollar Hollywood investment.
You’ve probably already heard that in its’ almost two weeks release Bros hasn’t earned nearly that much at the box office. Eichner laid some of the blame on homophobia, which in certain cases is fair, but the movie had so many other things working against it such as its’ seasonal timing, the general decline of romantic comedies as a genre, and its’ grandstanding towards its’ own importance as a landmark gay rom-com (it’s not even the best gay rom-com of the year -check out Fire Island) over anything to do with its’ plot or humour. And the movie itself doesn’t exceed those expectations much at all. A flat movie and a rather overbearing one in several respects. Ironically, for as viciously as it would mock them, there’s not a lot separating Bros from a Hallmark rom-com if it were to just remove the sex scenes and explicit dialogue. In a way this makes it a perfect metaphor for the state of representative media within the Hollywood system. Bros can critique that system all it likes, but at the end of the day, the movie still toes its’ conventions more often than not. And that’s the disappointing cherry on top of the hardly bearable pie.
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