I Think I Do (1998)
Director: Brian Sloan

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JUMP DOWN:        Ambivalence        Gay Movies Aren’t        Those Darn Critics       
The Advantages of Low-Budget        Slapstick        Writing Sexy        Expert Fools

A crisis has been chomping at the edges of mainstream romantic comedies. Two recent studio releases, My Best Friend’s Wedding (TriStar, 1997) and The Object of My Affection (20th Century-Fox, 1998), have tried to jolt some life into the formulae by casting the female star in the role of the conniving rival. Julia Roberts’s crazed, selfish drive to get Dermot Mulroney had the edge of the bitchy runners-up played by Ina Claire in Ninotchka, Constance Bennett in Two-Faced Woman, and Susan Hayward in I Married a Witch. It’s a shrewd stratagem because such roles revitalize the genre with the energy that romantic disappointment can give a temperamental woman, at the same time that they reproduce the current skeptical tone of women’s discussions of romance (which is part and parcel of the crisis). The stratagem is shrewd but problematic. In My Best Friend’s Wedding Roberts has to compete with a goony but dazzling gal pal; in The Object of My Affection Jennifer Aniston is even worse off since her beloved prefers men; in both movies the star loses out. The Object of My Affection dissolves in the pathos of "issue" moviemaking, while My Best Friend’s Wedding comes closer to pulling the trick off. It just needed Roberts’s character to emerge from the debacle without being romantically defeated. A gay male best friend, even one as gorgeous as Rupert Everett, was not acceptable consolation for the glamorous, rattling-her-hinges-loose comedienne that Julia Roberts has become. She’s no fag hag.

TV now provides most of the conventional fare that movies used to (not necessarily the same genres, e.g., the western, but the same bulk of product), and so movies have felt increased pressure to modify conventions with a saleable, easily summarized quirk. I think this is why the makers of My Best Friend’s Wedding worked so hard, even frantically, in a way that finally locked the star out of the happy ending. (They might have finessed their game if the tone had been more complex, less insistent that we were going to have a totally popcorn time.) Bad news for straight people can be great news for gays because homosexuality itself is quirk enough to allow moviemakers to shoot romantic comedies straight, so to speak. Gay comedies will not soon achieve the popularity of something like My Best Friend’s Wedding. The potential audience of open-minded people isn’t that big, especially for a genre that relies on a reassuring plot curve (we do end up at the best friend’s wedding to his lovely bride, after all). And Brian Sloan’s I Think I Do, by a long stretch the best of all American gay comedies, and put out by the tiny, adventurous Strand Releasing, wasn’t popular even with the art house audience. But it’s so well done that it’s failure seems like a mistake that ought to be corrected on video.

The title I Think I Do refers first of all to the reluctance of a heterosexual bride whose wedding to her college sweetheart reunites in D.C. a circle of dormmates from George Washington University. Carol (Lauren Vélez), the bride, is thus typical of the female audience that would make the off-center My Best Friend’s Wedding a hit. She’s not enjoying her own wedding because she’s not into the girlie thing (wearing a white gown or putting pink ribbons on the church pews to designate the bride’s side), the consumer thing, the religious thing, or the mother-daughter thing. It’s clear her wedding is more for her upper-middle-class mother (who is herself acrimoniously divorced from Carol’s father), and about all Carol can do is roll her eyes as mama drags her to the seamstress or to church for the rehearsal.

Carol’s ambivalence, which has to do with the rituals of formalizing her relationship not with the relationship itself, is mirrored in the situation of Bob (Alexis Arquette), now a writer for a TV soap opera, who comes to the wedding with his boyfriend Sterling Scott (Tuc Watkins), the humpy male star of the show. (His TV character is straight, of course.) Sterling is about a decade older than Bob and Bob’s college friends, and is ready to settle down. So, at the start of the wedding weekend he proposes to Bob, who, however, is unsure about this big guy who wants a theme reception, reads Danielle Steele novels (Bob was an English major), and is vain almost as a profession. In other words, you can tell Sterling would be into all the things that make Carol roll her eyes.

Bob’s ambivalence has a background in college when he had a crush on his roommate Brendan (Christian Maelen). The opening of the movie quickly sketches in about a year’s worth of dorm-life holiday celebrations to show us that Brendan reciprocated Bob’s crush enough to wrestle with him in his underwear before bed but always stopping short of full-on sex, while the other kids looked on in varying degrees of sympathy and dismay. The point is that Bob seemed to have found a soulmate in college, but sexual preference got in the way. Now when he’s around the gang he’s still sparky but wary, embarrassed about having pressed the issue at a Valentine’s party while Brendan was flirting with a girl. When Bob grabbed Brendan’s butt Brendan punched him in the mouth. In this way Sloan, both writer and director, puts the expected self-pitying gay misery up front, and then busts through it at Carol’s wedding where you find that Brendan was as interested as Bob sensed. Sloan takes the miraculously artificial possibilities of romantic comedy and discards the usual restrictions on gay stories--that the lead male, no matter how smart, articulate, funny, or dreamy, will not get what he wants.

Leaving aside AIDS movies (Longtime Companion, It’s My Party, Finding North), almost all English-language movies of the decade with central gay characters--My Own Private Idaho, The Sum of Us, Johns, In & Out, Love and Death on Long Island, Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss, The Opposite of Sex, All the Rage, Get Real, Gods and Monsters, Head On--are mostly downers with respect to the hero’s romantic life, even those that end, after much thrashing (sometimes comic, sometimes literal), with the main male character in a couple, such as Jeffrey, The Object of My Affection, David Searching, Like It Is, or Edge of Seventeen (in which the teen hero is thrown a hottie like a sardine at the end for being a nice boy; I just want to say for the historic record that this is not how it works).

Among them, My Own Private Idaho has the most visual style (though its blend of John Rechy and Shakespeare is a hopeless mess, and the two nonprofessional actors’ monologues have more impact than the star performances); Like It Is is the most enjoyable within its limited terms as melodrama; Head On dramatizes its themes (the Greek immigrants’ status in Australia and the connection for gay men between father-son relationships and top-bottom configurations) most intelligently; and Edge of Seventeen probably replicates the experience of white American middle-class gay boys most realistically. But none of these movies transmutes the experiences it depicts by the rigors of comedy or tragedy, and only Head On offers the scrupulous how-things-are transcription of naturalism. What we get instead is either low-level realism at its most "sensitive" (i.e., self-pitying) in combination with labored sit-com situations, or else the depressiveness of tragedy without vision or catharsis.

Although in many of these movies you sense, increasingly over time, a mandate to show the difficulties gay men face without being needlessly grim, only I Think I Do shows the full imaginative power of comic art. It may be light as fluff, but it has a thoroughgoing crystalline structure, like a snowflake. It’s the sole American movie that fully integrates distinctively gay conflicts into the mechanisms of the comic genre. (By way of contrast, In & Out does not do this because once Kevin Kline’s character comes out he’s no longer a romantic figure. The movie, in its ass-backwards way, becomes Joan Cusack’s love story.) As the obstacle in the romantic comedy plot Brendan’s confusion about his sexual preference is easily as serviceable as the usual misunderstandings, and considerably less trivial since it’s a universal passage for gay men. It’s comparable to the situation of a young hero who has lied or pretended to be something he’s not to impress the girl, but preferable in that it can be resolved in romantic passion without stating the implicit lesson ("Just be yourself"). When Bob finds out he was right about Brendan in the first place, all the self-pitying self-doubt of the opening disappears in a slapstick attempt at a screen kiss.

A new current also worked against I Think I Do with critics, which is their desire not to approve of gay movies just because they’re gay. There’s nothing wrong with this in principle; special pleading never made good art. But because of the lack of critical consensus nowadays in general, critics seem more afraid than ever of getting into a movie’s groove, especially if it hasn’t been pre-sold to them. I Think I Do was way too low-budget to have a publicity campaign and so critics, with the exception of Anita Gates in The New York Times, were shockingly ungenerous. (See, for instance, the 24 August 1998 Time article "Objects of Our Affection" which treats the tired, teary Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss as the trend-leader. I might prefer to sleep with the star Sean Hayes as he appears in Billy, but I’d rather watch him as the manically queeny marionette on the NBC series "Will & Grace.") Knowing at what level of the movie industry such a small production exists, it’s galling to read a San Francisco reviewer’s accusation that I Think I Do belongs to "that genre of low-budget films that play the gay film-festival circuit each year and sometimes return to local theaters--not because they’re worthy but because they’re gay and have a built-in market." 1   Built-in market! Not even in San Francisco. This movie struggled at the very margins, where critics are most likely to expose their failure to provide the good will that a splashy media campaign usually generates around a new movie.

In a sense, if critics are bending over backwards not to like movies just because they’re gay-themed, and thus overlook the particular qualities of the movies, gay movies are no worse off than straight movies. But if critics can’t pick up on the qualities of a movie like I Think I Do, they need to have their metal detectors recharged. What are critics for if not to unearth treasure from the beach sands of pop culture? There hasn’t been a happy-ending romantic comedy, with no black comic undertones and unforced yet by no means blind liberality towards its characters, with so much sparkle and so many truly funny moments, for ages. Sloan has cited George Cukor as his inspiration, and I would guess he’s thinking of a partner-switching farce like The Philadelphia Story. On about one hundredth of the budget I Think I Do betters Sloan’s (gay) master in all but his finest comic outings--the conmen and strolling players sections of Sylvia Scarlett, Holiday, the dumb blonde scenes of Born Yesterday, Pat and Mike, It Should Happen to You. And even measuring Cukor’s work by his best output, Sloan is certainly pitching in the same league.

The inexpensive quality of I Think I Do may also put people off. Even critics will dismiss a no-budget movie out of hand in a way they’d never treat any corporate-backed star product that has bought major media coverage. A clinker starring Brad Pitt becomes a "major disappointment." You immediately register that I Think I Do is a shoestring production made by people without tons of experience, but it works in the movie’s favor as it did for Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It. Seeing a romantic comedy that has classic shape but isn’t trussed by impersonal Hollywood professionalism is a relief, because anymore the investment represented by that professionalism keeps the moviemakers from risking any of the qualities--originality, unfussiness, speed--that are often what make comedy actually work for an audience.

In addition, these indie actors hit their marks while still seeming less different from us than stars. Alexis Arquette doesn’t have a groomed quality, as even the scruffy Adam Sandler does. He’s a natural at sarcasm--cutting lines, rolling his eyes (sometimes with his whole body)--and he’s more effective because his personality doesn’t feel overpracticed. Maddie Corman as Beth the party girl who can’t get a steady man has the best delivery of the script’s clever dialogue. She’s pert without machine-applied sit-com polish. And Christian Maelen, with his brimming dark eyes, perfectly serves the double purpose of being a yearning lover and a credible object of undying lust.

Maelen also pulls off the pivotal scene during Carol’s wedding ceremony when he changes the tone of the movie by reading, in place of the standard excerpt from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that he was asked to read, a passage from Carol’s favorite novel, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (a move directed at Bob). It changes the tone because it finds a non-corny way of validating the possibilities of love and romance that the movie feels the rituals no longer adequately embody, for its intended audience anyway. It’s a speech full of hope, for Carol, that despite the wedding she will find an expression of her love in marriage, and for Brendan, that he can repair the mistake of having rejected Bob when he didn’t really want to.

At the same time that Brendan’s surprise switch of readings gives the movie soul, the wedding extends the movie’s range with physical comedy. Before this the movie has been brittle: especially since in the interest of realism it hasn’t irritatingly emphasized what great friends the young people were in college, as if we’d gladly trade our own experiences for theirs, but has shown them mainly in terms of the friction that results at that age when you are learning that proximity and intimacy are not the same thing among friends. It has been satiric: largely of Sterling, who represents the kind of show biz slickness the movie rejects. But it hasn’t so far gone in for slapstick, and once it does, announced in an adroit shot of Carol standing at the head of the nave perfectly still except for her bouquet which is vibrating in her jittery hands, it enters an interlude of raucous but festive turmoil that transforms it, making it far more openly funny.

The slapstick indicates that Sloan has greater control than you might have thought. The wedding is a double transformation, and Sloan has the skill to make his characters more ridiculous even as he pulls them together under the spell of that passage from Kate Chopin. He reclaims the narrative forms from the big moviemakers and shows us that they can operate on a direct link to the spirit of comedy, without "production values," tie-in CD snippets on the soundtrack, or the biggest star that publicity can generate. He casts new and underused actors and plays Partridge Family songs for clever counterpoint to his scenes. It may be synthetic but it’s freshly synthesized, and Sloan already has supple ingenuity, evident as he intercuts among the various singles and doubles in bed the night after the wedding. He makes two fluid passes through all the characters’ bedrooms and still gets the full erotic impact of the gesture with which Brendan finally completes the pass at Bob he backed away from in the opening scene. While David Cassidy sings "Somebody Wants to Love You," this scarlet ribbon of a sequence quietly ties itself in a bow around the movie.

This moviemaking vivacity lifts I Think I Do closer than any other American gay romance to Stephen Frears’s 1985 classic My Beautiful Laundrette. Sloan’s script is more along the lines of George Cukor material; it doesn’t have the deep observational tang, the inter-generational and -cultural texture that Hanif Kureishi’s screenplay had. Sloan has published short fiction in addition to making movies and his prose shows an easy cleverness that can make it a bit thin as writing. He’s a better movie director than he is a writer, even when the material is comparable (Bob and Brendan’s relationship in college, for instance, with desire expressing itself in roughhousing, is worked up from his 1994 short story "New York in June" 2  ), because he knows how to use the actors and the camera and editing and music to fill in a story’s stylized outlines.

The choicest moments of Sloan’s writing have the comically pulse-elevating sexiness of I Think I Do at its friskiest (or of the moment in his half-hour short Pool Days, circulated in an omnibus release called Boys Life, when the older man leaves his handprint on the teenaged life guard’s chemically-sensitized tank top and then dives crosswise into the pool). Sloan’s story "Sex with Teenagers," in which a fledgling screenwriter is seduced by the sixteen-year-old son of the (fictional) head of the studio where he has a development deal, especially shares with I Think I Do a gift for riding the dangerous wave of sex without going in for melodrama or masochism. Here’s the screenwriter’s description, for instance, of the moment of truth with the teenager:

He didn’t say a word. He didn’t utter a sound. He didn’t even move his head. All he did was unbutton his jeans with his waxy hands and let them fall to the floor. In a heap. Through a pair of immaculately white Calvin Kleins, I could see the outline of his desires. And then, just as quickly as his 501’s fell, his desires were revealed to me in all their nakedness. I was gloriously shocked. I was beside myself. He was beside myself. 3 

Sloan has talent as a story writer, but even that talent has more glimmer when he’s writing something for himself to direct.

You couldn’t claim that Sloan has Frears’s authority as a movie voluptuary, though Frears’s fleetfootedness and tartness aren’t alien to him. And both My Beautiful Laundrette and I Think I Do are blissfully free of the passive trembliness with which "serious" movies make homosexuality as a topic palatable. When you recall that I Think I Do is a début feature, and that the magic carpet ride over the beds is something that Frears, using split screen, didn’t get to work as well for him in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Sloan’s stock rises. He’s already developing a distinctive soft pop sensibility.

Sloan also has the skill to incorporate Tuc Watkins’s expertly stylized performance with those of young performers whose key is different. Watkins is taller and bigger than the other actors, which works because Sterling is already an adult. A laughable adult, perhaps, but past the prolonged stage of discovery that Bob and his friends all feel they should be through by now. Playing the adult, and a soap star, it makes sense that Watkins would give the most conventionally accomplished performance.

As Sterling, Watkins is aglow with the can’t-help-myself fatuity of a man used to public adulation, and we detect the itty-bitty person underneath who isn’t satisfied by the attention but can’t live without it. He’s even physically fatuous, at his peak miming aw-shucks with a backswing of his arm when a gay waiter tells him he likes his hospital scenes best because he always appears shirtless, or attempting a flourishy exit and getting his own name wrong. We later like him even more when he simultaneously admits to and appreciates his own campy histrionics. Sloan can’t get all the performances right--Marni Nixon just barely acquits herself as an old broad who unintentionally causes a stir among the friends at the reception. But for an actor like Watkins who has the means--the gestures, the mugging, the purposely stilted delivery--Sloan provides the perfectly-timed opportunities. Watkins is as good in his way as Sally Field was in her more electric starring role in Soapdish.

You can like poor, superfluous Sterling so much because being a fool isn’t bad in I Think I Do, which is another way it fits in with the tradition of comedy. In a hero, foolishness, especially in a slapstick mode, enables the hatchling of personality to crack the shell of convention. (Sterling, a stock character, won’t change as Bob and Brendan do, but he contributes to the mood in which fantastic change is possible.) I Think I Do is also old-fashioned, in the best sense, in that we know the movie is a sexual fantasy at bottom. Far from presenting a gay guy whose love is unrequited, Bob’s problem is getting two extremely enticing proposals at once. At the mixed bachelorette party held at a male strip club, Bob says, "All it takes is a dollar and a dream," as he stuffs bills into a dancer’s g-string. In part, that’s exactly the dream he gets. (Brendan’s body is every bit as porn-ready as Sterling’s, just on a smaller scale, and his smoky Tony Curtis voice makes it seem as if he’s touching Bob when he’s just talking to him.) Sloan knows how the forms operate, both at the level of fantasy and realistic detail (for example, the Danielle Steele-Kate Chopin opposition that tells us whom Bob really belongs with). And it’s honest at both levels, showing us that part of what Bob likes about Sterling is that he can condescend to him.

Finally, the fantasy element is part of the movie’s Easter Bunny generosity: even the roommate who’s a Republican, and mistakenly thinks Brendan is longing for her (thus setting her up for a humiliation which being a Republican surely doesn’t in itself merit), finds a Dole-Kemp supporter who returns her interest. Sloan’s No Big Deal attitude mixes without comment not only gay and straight and anglo and hispanic, but even Democrat and Republican, a nod toward ideological diversity, the red-headed stepchild of multiculturalism.

Bob and Brendan’s story is the center of the plot, but all the characters are tied together by the hesitation expressed in the title. It’s a basic emotional state for adolescents as they begin to define what their lives as adults will be like. They think they’re doing the right thing in their love lives and their careers but they don’t have enough experience of themselves or the world to know for sure. Sloan understands as well as any ’30s moviemaker how the "gravity of lust," to quote "Sex with Teenagers" again, 4   makes people lightheaded without slowing them in their trajectories. The best thing I can say about him is that he knows how to use physical wobbliness to express emotional wobbliness. In slapstick moviemaking this can be called genius.

1. San Francisco reviewer: Guthmann. (return to text)
2. roughhousing: Sloan, New York 224. (return to text)
3. He didn’t say: Sloan, Sex 361. (return to text)
4. gravity of lust: Sloan, Sex 358. (return to text)