Bros

Billy Eichner and Nicholas Stoller’s Bros is billed as "the first mainstream gay romantic comedy." This claim is not to be confused with that of Happiest Season (the first mainstream gay holiday romcom), Love, Simon (the first mainstream gay teen romcom), I Love You Phillip Morris (the first mainstream true-crime gay romcom), The Birdcage (the first mainstream gay romcom about gay people who sill aren’t fully out of the closet), But I'm a Cheerleader, Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss, and Jeffrey (the first mainstream Indie-break-out gay romcoms), or the myriad gay romcoms that have been a staple of LGBT film festivals for the past thirty-five years. This one folks, is the important one. Why? Well, silly, because it stars Billy Eichner, the Daytime Emmy Award-winning host of Billy on the Street, that wildly popular (and very mainstream) web series in which the abrasively quick-witted comedian quizzes random pedestrians on the streets of New York City about pop culture. Now he's written and starring in his first mainstream feature film, unless you count his voice work as Timon the meerkat in the very mainstream hit "live-action remake" of The Lion King.

Much of the humor in Bros takes aim at how gay pop culture and style have become ubiquitously mainstream over the past thirty years. Thus it’s odd for the movie to present itself as a historical mainstream event. This claim isn’t a case of a studio’s marketing department missing the subtle nuance of the speciality picture they’ve been charged with selling. Eichner’s narcissistic protagonist seems obsessed with his work being recognized as some kind of landmark, and since the movie’s main character is a surrogate for its star/writer, the whole proceeding comes off as desperate for the same kind of recognition.

Bros stars Eichner as Bobby Lieber, a podcaster and radio host who prides himself on being a relationship-rejecting, single, successful gay guy. He's recently become a curator for the new National LGBTQ+ History Museum in Manhattan, which fits his self-image as a sardonic and insightful spokesperson for the LGBT community. He stumbles into a relationship with a hunky, "broey" guy named Aaron Shepard (a winsome Luke Macfarlane). Like Bobby, Aaron is commitment-avoidant, yet these two mismatched types can't help but be drawn to each other. Will their attraction and budding love overcome the rock-solid identities they've built for themselves? Of course they will—it’s a romcom.

But Bros is not a romcom in the classical sense of the genre. It's a modern romcom produced by the comedy juggernaut that is Judd Apatow who, along with his fellow comic talents Ben Stiller, Todd Phillips, Adam McKay, the Farrelly Brothers, and the host of improvers and stand-ups who populate their movies, has transformed cinematic comedy from carefully crafted narratives that feature many laughs into as many laughs that can possibly be mined from a strong premise and strung along a skeletal narrative framework. Under the Apatow aesthetic, romcoms of the current millennia emphasize the COM to the detriment of the ROM. Since modern comedies now seem required to cram as many laughs as possible into their often over two-hour running times, maintaining narrative credibility or earning the sentimentality most of these films ultimately trade in has become unimportant. Don't get me wrong—these humor mavens have made some very funny and notable movies, but they also killed the craft of designing comedy for a visual medium in favor of delivering humor verbally.

Comedy filmmaking used to be akin to capturing lightning in a bottle. Now it's more like mining data for later processing. Directors set their actors up in bland frames (sometimes not bothering to compose shots at all) and have them deliver as many variations on loosely scripted jokes, exposition, and thematic bullet points that they and their actors can think of while the digital cameras continuously capture this raw material. The idea, I guess, is that the process of filmmaking takes so long between the writing of a script, the shooting of a production, the editing of a picture, and the release of a final product, that the jokes may feel stale by the time they reach the audience. So collecting as many options as possible while on set and then choosing and manipulating that footage later on in the editing room shortens the gap between the conception and the reception of each joke. There's no doubt this practice often increases the number of laughs per minute in a movie. Unfortunately, it also decreases a viewer's emotional connection to characters, who come to seem more like joke-delivery devices or exaggerated stereotypes than nuanced relatable individuals.

Most romantic comedies feature protagonists who are emotionally stunted in a key way that leads them into the broad, usually deceitful situation that constitutes the movie's premise. From the fast-talking guys and gals of the Screwball era to Woody Allen's neurotic New Yorkers to Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyer's middle-aged professionals trying to balance their careers with their personal lives, the leads in romantic comedies are specific types. But during the various golden eras of the romcom, filmmakers and actors examined human foibles by putting these flawed protagonists through a series of situations that challenged them to rise above their natures. For the last twenty years, the protagonists of comedies have seemed more like fixed types—something easily definable for which a writers-room full of gag-men can come up with joke after joke. This need to fit in as many laughs as possible (with the only non-verbal humor usually being of a scatological or regurgitative nature) leaves so little room for nuanced progression of personality that the climaxes and conclusions of these movies come out of leftfield. It’s as if the simple fact that someone is the protagonist of a romcom is justification enough for their transformation into “a better person” at the end of the movie, no matter how abrupt or facile that transformation may seem.

I wish I could say Bros is an exception to these tedious trends, but instead, it is a prime example. Rather than evolving their filmmaking styles over the last fifteen years, comedy directors of the Apatow School seem to have intentionally doubled down on not caring at all about the various crafts of their chosen medium. No doubt, part of this slap-dash quality is a result of budgets getting smaller and the amount of shooting time allotted for an original comedy shrinking substantially. But production challenges used to cause filmmakers to devise ingenious ways of surmounting such limitations. Contemporary directors just shrug and claim that style isn't the point of this type of movie. But style is one thing; competent filmmaking is another. And we have to assume that Nicholas Stoller can do better than his work in Bros. His track record includes directing one of the better Apatow-produced comedies, Jason Segel’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), and co-writing, with Segel, the successful Muppets reboot, The Muppets in 2011.

But in Bros, Stoller covers each simplistic scene of characters conversing (and this is a movie entirely made up of scenes where characters talk to and at each other) from an absurd amount of angles that he and editor Daniel Gabbe then slam together. The unmotivated frequency of the cutting makes each scene physically uncomfortable to watch. The audio is equally unpleasant, with a loud, cluttered sound mix desperately attempting to cover up painfully obvious mismatches in production dialogue and after-the-fact ADR that's been forced into questionable synchronization with the actor's mouths. This disjointed and hastily manufactured quality is the inevitable result of collecting material with cameras to later fashion into scenes rather than designing and staging a scene for a camera; trusting your actors and the script you've written to carry the day.

Bros’s aggressively off-putting directorial style aligns with Eichner's aggressively off-putting characterization of Bobby. He's a guy who needs to constantly inform everyone about himself, his values, his long-cultivated opinions, and his outlook on life. He both consciously and unconsciously pushes everyone away from him and then all but demands them to shower praise on him for being so self-aware. These propensities and neurosis could be the making of an excellent character for a romcom protagonist. Indeed, the basic premise of this movie is sound. Bobby, an emotionally armored early-middle-aged gay man falls for a guy, Aaron, who is romantically defended in more traditional ways but runs counter to the physical standards and personality traits that Bobby considers “his type.” So Bobby must overcome the self-loathing, self-pitying, cynical but intellectually astute ideological construct he's built for himself in order to become vulnerable enough to experience genuine love for, and from, another person. But Eichner is clearly more in love with the self-loathing, self-pitying, cynical but intellectually astute ideological construct he's built for himself than with the romcom notion that love can heal even the deepest wounds.

Eichner/Bobby seems to have more contempt than affection for himself, for the genre he's chosen to write his first movie in, and for the community he claims not only to love but also to speak for. The presumptuousness of Eichner and this movie (and the way this movie is marketed as some kind of culmination of the past fifty years of gay history and culture) is both astounding and offensive. The picture does succeed in its baseline goal of delivering some genuine laughs (Eichner is quite funny in bite-sized portions), but it fails at telling an emotionally satisfying story. In the end, an internet celebrity who became famous doing short-form, aggressively high-energy, man-on-the-street style comedy is probably not going to be the best leading man for a genre that requires subtlety and careful balance of tone. Robin Williams understood the need to adapt his stage persona to suit the medium of cinema from the get-go, why can’t most contemporary comedians recognize this? Can you imagine what The World According to Garp would have been like starring Mork from Ork? These days you don’t have to imagine it, it's mostly what you get. But even more than the stand-ups and improvisers who now dominate movie comedies, a guy who is loved by "the mainstream" for being a relentlessly bitchy internet game show host might not be the best choice to lead "the first mainstream gay romantic comedy."

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