The excitement for Netflix’s first gay holiday-themed romantic comedy has focused largely on its radical joy.
But other things jumped out at me on my second viewing. The story is blissfully hermetic, its characters sipping peppermint lattes in a winter wonderland devoid of anti-gay bigotry. Yet there are occasional reminders of the social challenges — navigating the unease of the closet, wrestling with the isolation of small locales — that have long hovered over queer people. These different layers, together, make “Single All the Way” an emotionally rich film.
The plot goes like this. Peter, an overworked social media professional in Los Angeles, is determined to elude his family’s judgment about his singlehood. How does he intend to do that? By getting his best friend to pretend to be his boyfriend. Nick (Philemon Chambers), a children’s author, begrudgingly agrees to the scheme, and the two fly to snowy Bridgewater, New Hampshire, to spend the holidays with Peter’s family.
By the time the camera even rolls, Peter is already out to his parents and siblings, who just want him to fall in love with the man of his dreams. (A well-meaning heterosexual ally, Carole is reading a book about “LGBTTs,” as she mistakenly and hilariously puts it, so that she can support her son.) Absent is a plotline that plumbs the anxieties of the closet.
The complexity of closeted lives
Yet as heartwarming as “Single All the Way” is, the movie is salted with meaningful reminders of the disquieting world that Peter and Nick have left behind.
Take a breakup that arrives early in the film. Nick, who subsidizes his burgeoning writing career with work as a handyman for TaskRabbit, is installing Christmas lights at a client’s house when he discovers that said client, a woman, is married — to Peter’s boyfriend, Tim.
“You’re a liar and a cheater!” Peter explodes after learning about Tim’s trickery. “You’ve been lying to me for almost four months and to your wife for however many years and to yourself for — no, you know what? I’m not gonna judge whatever journey you’re on. It’s just not what I’m looking for, and I hope that you never do it to anybody else ever again.”
A similarly affecting scene comes a little later in the movie. Peter and James are on their first date when the former asks the latter, “Why are you living in this town?” It might seem like a throwaway question, something that anyone would ask to make casual conversation. But I suspect that the question has a distinct resonance for queer viewers.
Even James admits to this reality when he says to Peter that the gay dating app radius in Bridgewater is “kind of a joke.”
The power of dueling meanings
Maybe no other part of “Single All the Way” better illustrates the film’s ability to work in multiple registers than a darkly comic scene where Aunt Sandy (played brilliantly by Jennifer Coolidge) agrees to let Peter and Nick help her with the Christmas pageant she’s directing.
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