Bros (2022)

Score: 4.5 / 5

It's giving GAY! Four years after the much-hyped Love, Simon in 2018 broke the mold on major studios catering to mass audiences with healthy gay protagonists and themes, we finally get a cute and sweet adult rom-com with a theatrical release. Let's just do a quick breakdown of the burning questions. Yes, it's hilarious. Yes, it's progressive. Yes, it's sweet and hot and takes queer stories into the spotlight (and the future) in ways few films do, even these days. Yes, even straight people should see it, although I expect some may have trouble keeping up without help explaining certain cultural touchpoints in the rapid-fire dialogue. Yes, it fits firmly in the mold of classic rom-coms and features compelling lead performances. And yes, one might argue that its placement in mainstream media undermines its own commentary (read: critiques) on the mainstreaming of queerness culturally. 

You can tell Bros is a labor of love for its creators, including director/writer Nicholas Stoller and co-writer Billy Eichner, who also stars. Eichner plays Bobby Leiber, the gay New Yorker for the 21st century: he hosts a woke queer podcast and daylights as director of the first national queer history museum that is just about to open. He's forty and single, and he's spent his adulthood navigating disappointing hookups while he convinces himself that being single is the best thing for himself. He is keenly aware of his cishet white privileges, to say nothing of his education, occupation, or conventional attractiveness, and can't really help himself from bringing queer culture or his own identity into conversations with others; basically, he's the trailblazing millennial who fought for his identity and now has trouble relating in any other way. 

This reaches its peak, narratively and comedically, in scenes where he meets with his board of directors for the museum. Bros is packed with cameos and bit parts for big stars, and scenes like these serve as excellent highlights for the thinly written supporting cast. It's a bit annoying that his board is a bunch of stereotypes (butch lesbian, indignant bisexual, a Black transwoman, and a nonbinary person), but he smartly plays off that queer people generally know how to laugh at themselves, so it's never really offensive humor. But the film is primarily Eichner's, and so the plot primarily works through his burgeoning romantic life, sparked when he meets Aaron (Luke Macfarlane of Single All the Way) at a gay club. They like each other, but they're both a bit disillusioned by romance. Naturally, in the vibe of such Nora Ephron-esque setup, they're about to find themselves in the familiar trenches of romantic comedy. They date, they fight, they meet family, they have sex, they do all the typical things but in a distinctly queer way. They bicker knowingly about Grindr, gym rats, orgies, even that odd but cute gay throuple who keeps popping up, and almost every scene includes some reference to a queer icon (even Garth Brooks earns a running joke). 

And that's where I feel a bit conflicted in my feelings about this film. Its meta humor works best when it is as metafictional as possible. While that might be indicative of our culture right now, it makes for tiring film viewing. I don't want to keep up with dialogue in a film the same way I scroll through Facebook for news and new slang. It's annoying to be constantly reminded of other queer media and to be fed Eichner's (or, arguably, Bobby's) opinions about everything from Cher to Schitt's Creek. Yes, it's frustrating to Eichner and to us that Hallmark only started making gay Christmas films when they realized they could profit from it, but that's also kind of what Eichner is doing with Bros. 

That said, as someone who relates both to Bobby and to his style of detached cultural critique, I found his reference points almost as tiring as the fact that he can't stop referring to other media. He touches on most of the major titles millennials would recognize (Brokeback Mountain, Call Me By Your Name, etc.) and all but lambasts them -- which is fine with me, to an extent -- but he completely ignores significant and much more progressive titles such as The Broken Hearts Club or Moonlight. In ignoring these, Bros manages to ignore critical queer pioneers in film history (and therefore cultural history) even as it attempts to convince us and itself of its efforts to reveal queer history. If it were acting as the pioneer it pretends to be, it would honor its own genre and predecessors. That's the danger of being too self-aware.