a different kind of bond
by
Douglas Messerli
Craig
Johnson (writer and director) Alex
Strangelove / 2018
Having
truly enjoyed Craig Johnson’s second feature film, The Skeleton Twins, of 2014, I determined yesterday to watch his
most recent work, Alex Strangelove that
was released by Netflix this year.
His earlier film had been a clever family
drama, starring Bill Hader and Kristen Wigg, which featured a rather unhappy
housewife and her gay brother who both attempted to nurse one another, often
rather clumsily, back to health, after attempting suicide; the ending of this
black comedy being rather uncertain.
Accordingly,
I wasn’t quite prepared for the rom-com sitcom-like Alex Strangelove, although the title might have easily tipped me
off, since the character’s real name is Alex Truelove. In a sense, it’s just a
sex and drug-infused movie that, like another recent film, Love Simon, tells the tale of a handsome and quite popular young
high school student who is in the process of “coming out.”
Like that film, the central character
doesn’t yet quite perceive that he’s gay. But things are so far different from
the days I attended high school, that the entire decision of whether to be
heterosexual, gay, pansexual, whatever, sees simply to be a matter of choice,
like picking items from a Chinese menu. As the comic straight-guy in this film,
Dell (Daniel Zolghadri), argues you just need to choose. Their school even
seems to have an active LGBTQ community, the drama kids, who hold their own
parties to which heterosexuals are also invited.
But Alex Truelove (Daniel Doheny), now the popular class president and a dogged cultural
conservative—he’s carefully laid out all his plans for his life, determining
upon studying marine animal biology at Columbia University, getting married,
and having children—and he’s already found the girl of his dreams, his
long-time friend, Claire (Madeline Weinstein).
Although Alex is clever, witty, and even
enterprising—he and Claire perform together in a popular on-line school web
series, featuring the sexual habits of and other eccentricities the school’s
students—there’s still something slightly nerdy about him (at least in his own
mind), and like most of these teenage comedy-dramas, he hangs out with a group
of rather dorky friends who spend far too many of their hours describing their
heterosexual conquests. Something doesn’t seem right. Why is this bright kid
not moving on? And, most importantly—at least in terms of teenage hormones—why
us he still a self-admitted virgin, particularly given the fact that Claire
herself insists she has been desperately trying to “de-virginfy” him. He keeps
putting off the event.
Finally, embarrassed in front of his
bragging bodies, he determines to do something about it, setting up a hotel
room so that he and she might finally have sex.
The plot needs time to hatch it’s secret,
of course, so the sexual encounter is put off for a few weeks, while the
meandering story takes him to one of the “drama kid” parties (consisting of
numerous ridiculous stereotypes, including one male who obviously believes he
is the permanent host of Cabaret and
a hallucinogenic turtle which Dell immediately picks up and licks sending him
into comic hallucinations that might have served nicely for a backstory to Todd
Phillips’ The Hangover. Oddly there
seems to be a lot a role playing and very little sex. Maybe that is what
Johnson meant by “Strangelove.”
Obviously, anyone with a sense of film
history knows that gay director Johnson means that other “strange love,” even if there seems nothing at all
strange in being gay in this progressive high school community.
By
accident, Alex stumbles into the more normative “pot” room, where a handsome
young man, Elliott (Antonio Marziale) and what we used to call a “fag-hag” (a
heavyset young girl who is best friend to a gay boy) are about to light up. Clearly
not inexperienced with pot and quite obviously intrigued by this open gay guy,
Alex joins them ending up head to head in bed with Elliott; and a day or so
later, meeting up with him for a concert and slow walk, so to speak, around the
park.
Claire clearly begins to suspect
something’s up, but Alex (I must admit, a bit like me at his age) is slow to
wake up to the reality of his feelings. He still takes his girlfriend to the
hotel, but in the midst of clumsy sex tells her there’s someone else.
It
takes a final deep dive into a suburban pool to make him come to his senses,
finally admitting to himself that he is gay. (As I’ve written in My Year 2005, it took me a bad showing
in an ROTC test and a few circles around my bedroom to come to that same realization).
What’s a guy to do? After admitting to Claire
that his “Truelove” has reverted to a “Strangelove—a moniker, as a gay man, I rather
resent—they still agree to go with one another to the prom party. Claire,
perhaps the wisest figure in this film of dumb-headed adolescents (she has also
the wisest of mothers) arranges for Elliott—how she knows the address of a boy
who has graduated from another school the year before is never quite explained—to
also attend.
Suddenly
faced with the boy he now knows he loves in a room with his high school chums,
Alex gets cold feet once again, rushing off to the bathroom and almost losing
his chance for maturation and true love. Returning just in time, he kisses
Elliott, expressing his sexuality for the first time in the very judgmental
public of young evaluations of life.
I presume we are meant to be touched and
overjoyed in that fact. But for me, there is something sad in the final image. Let
us hope that Elliott does not have to wait for the sexual consummation as long
as Claire and we have. But worse, can the otherwise excellent director,
Johnson, release himself from this kind of teeny-bop writing to again create a
sophisticated adult comedy-drama such as his earlier works? Or have we lost him
to Netflix gay “feel-good” fantasies?
This is not seriously a gay film, but a
rather silly tribute to an LBGTX nostalgia, where all is ultimately just fine as
long as everybody just finds their own groove. I doubt that’s the way, even
today, that most kids see those difficult years.
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