Spoiler Alert: Tragic Gay Love Story is Death-They-Do-Part Déjà Vu
By Jim Slotek
Rating: C
As happens in Hollywood, similarly themed films tend to get released practically on top of each other in any given film year. So, it is that Spoiler Alert, a good-hearted, tragic gay romance, is being released a month after the gay rom-com Bros.
Of the two mainstream movies with comic overtones, only the latter was actually funny. This is genuinely surprising, since the writers of Spoiler Alert include Dan Savage, the aptly-named sex advice columnist I’ve enjoyed for decades, who adapted the autobiographical book Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies, by Michael Ausiello.
Ausiello works the same entertainment/celebrity beat on which I’ve spent most of my career, and he is a witty writer.
Parents Bill Irwin and Sally Field ponder life with doomed couple Ben Aldridge and Jim Parsons
Unfortunately, what ended up on the screen is a movie that rides on tropes, with some sore-thumb attempts at surrealism. The title literally references what happens as the movie opens. We see Michael (Jim Parsons), sharing a hospital bed with his dying loved one Kit (Ben Aldridge).
And with that – and Parson’s narration - back in time we go to where this doomed couple met.
The theme of couples destined to have disease do them part goes all the way back to films like 1939’s Dark Victory and 1970’s Love Story.
Now would be a good time to mention that Spoiler Alert director Michael Showalter’s biggest credit is The Big Sick with Kumail Nanjiani. I’m sensing the beginnings of an oeuvre..
As far as gays’ introduction to Hollywood goes, for a long time, a tragic end seemed to be a moralistically tidy way to introduce them – whether they be the heroine’s best friend or, post-‘80s, couples on a collision course with AIDS.
For that reason, Spoiler Alert often feels like an old movie. And by old, let’s say ‘90s. In terms of its Odd Couple coupling, it has a similar vibe to Bros. Kit is a buff photographer who spends much of his time at the gym (and not just to work on his abs). Michael, as we said, is an entertainment reporter. This is not particularly physical work, but he is an avid runner. Still, one is slight and the other a hunk.
Their differences don’t end there. Michael spends the longest time avoiding having Kit sleep over because his apartment is a shrine to the Smurfs. He collects them the way your grandmother may have collected Hummel figurines.
But their differences apparently mesh. Spoiler Alert follows Michael and Kit through 14 years of their unlikely domesticity, followed by what we already know will happen.
Hearing Parsons narrate so much of this is particularly distracting if you ever watch the Big Bang Theory spin-off Young Sheldon, where he does the same. He’s rich enough from residuals to never need work again. But creatively, it must be frustrating for Parsons – an openly gay actor who played an androgynously straight character for 12 seasons – to grow dramatically.
Playing gay, he’s had a role in a remake of The Boys in the Band, and played a predatory character not-so-loosely based on Rock Hudson’s real-life agent in the mini-series Hollywood.
Michael in Spoiler Alert is an agreeable if insecure sort. He was a fat kid, and still lives in his head in some sort of ‘80s/’90s sitcom, where all the horrible, dysfunctional things that go on with his family and his hellish school life come with an incongruous laugh-track. This gimmick is so jarringly removed from the events in Michael’s and Kit’s life, it all but brings the movie to a halt every time.
We don’t get to know that family. But Kit’s parents – to whom he has yet to come out – are an adorable white-bread couple (gamely played by Sally Field and Bill Irwin) whose job it is to demonstrate their unconditional love when the story calls for it.
Ultimately, Spoiler Alert is earnest, emotional, good-hearted and edgeless.
Spoiler Alert. Directed by Michael Showalter. Starring Jim Parsons, Ben Aldridge and Sally Field. Opens in theatres, Friday, December 9.