Single All The Way
The RomCom to Make You Feel... 🎵 Merry and Gaaay 🎵
I’ll be completely honest:
As part of the Alphabet Mafia I was intrigued to see what this movie was going to be about. But the real reason I watched this was for Jennifer Coolidge and I felt so caught out when her character in the movie said “The gays love me” and she looked off screen in wonder.
GIRL SAME. I DON’T KNOW WHY I LOVE YOU BUT I DO.
Single All The Way (2021) obviously does a play on the hit Christmas song by a…similar tune and it’s every holiday, Hallmark, romcom movie you see populating streaming services right around now but ✨homosexual✨ and feels good.
We meet Peter, a plant-dad who hates his LA job as what I can only assume is as a Creative Producer to some effect. His roommate as well as his best friend is Nick and we are immediately introduced to the fact that they are PERFECT FOR EACH OTHER. This is no joke, we meet Peter’s soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend (who’s a hunk but a piece of garbage cheater who’s *gasp* married to a woman) and Nick is nothing but sweet and kind and caring for Peter.
The main conflict Peter faces is coming home for the holidays, which isn’t the usual fear of acceptance and homophobic/conservative attitude, but the overwhelming fact that he is, yet again, single for the holiday.
In order to avoid the questions of his love life and the concern his family feels over his singleness, Peter comes up with a flimsy plan to bring Nick along to his hometown to pretend to be his boyfriend.
This backfires because his family knows them too well and assumes Nick is just there for the season (though most everybody in the family comes to believe that they should shut up and just be with each other). Peter’s mom tries to set him up on a blind date and his threadbare plan is out the window once more as the story organically transitions into one of first-dates and realizing that the love you’ve been looking for was right next to you the whole time.
I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. It was fun, it was Christmas-themed, and it had a happy ending.
But I recently enjoyed this YouTube video essay on why “Good LGBT Representation is Boring” and Verity Ritchie explains how a lot of mainstream LGBT media is sanitized to placate a heterosexual audience and is fearful of repercussions stemming from portraying the community in a less than flattering life.
This creates 2-dimensional characters whose only personality trait is them being gay, which is poor representation when you try to make every gay a ‘good boy.’ Let the gay characters be complex and have ups and downs; that makes for a compelling story for anyone, gay or not.
This movie fell very much into the danger of being a happy gay movie, but without any real consequence or struggle unique to the LGBT community.
But honestly? I don’t really care. This movie made me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside and it made me enjoy it while it was on the screen.
Can representation and the complexity of characters be better? Of course it can! It can always be better, we should always strive to create more authentic and compelling stories the more that we create!
There’s also the fact that I didn’t come to this movie wanting to go on a deep, intellectual rabbit hole. I just wanted to have fun.
So despite my moanings and groanings about better (AKA more complex and fleshed out LGBT characters) representation, sometimes it’s nice to just enjoy the movie. Set aside your expectations and worries, try not to think about the tropes or the stereotypes. Because at the end of the day, this movie made me laugh. And I don’t watch enough LGBT movies where there is a happy ending, so why not indulge?
Tis the season :)