Run 'Red, White & Royal Blue' Its Oscars!
Tonight, I'll be eating crow for dinner.
“Alright, well thank you for your time,” I tell writer/director Matthew Lopez as we wrap up our interview. “Now I have a question for you,” he asks. “Why didn’t you want to see the movie?” He was referencing an Instagram story of mine from a week ago when someone DM’d asking if I’d be covering Red, White & Royal Blue, the Amazon Studios film adaptation of author Casey McQuiston’s New York Times bestselling romance novel. “No, sorry,” I flippantly responded, subsequently posting the interaction to my story. A week later, like Wendy Williams before me, I ate crow.
Brokeback Mountain. Call Me By Your Name. Moonlight. And now, Red, White & Royal Blue? Not no!
I suppose I was worried we were going to have another “exclusively gay moment” on our hands with this one. For context: In 2017, Bill Condon, the director of the frightful live action Beauty & The Beast remake, teased an “exclusively gay moment” in an interview with Attitude ahead of the film. That moment ended up being a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of a queer-coded but not out character, Le Fou, line dancing with his boss and ostensible crush, the deeply heterosexual Gaston. So why the comparison? I started seeing headlines like: “Exclusive: Red, White & Royal Blue accurately depicts ‘how men have sex with each other’”; “Red, White & Royal Blue director explains important gay sex scene”; and the most recent entry: “Why Those Red, White & Royal Blue Sex Scenes Matter.”
Was it important? Does it matter? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What I will dive into is the accurate depiction part of the conversation, because they did, in fact, nail it — and not in a Lily emerging from Brady’s room the morning after they allegedly had sex on And Just Like That… type of fornication. We got a preamble; a who’s gonna do what conversation. It might seem arbitrary, but these are actual discussions that play out, albeit often relegated to “u top or bottom?” messages on Grindr.
Alex: Who’s gonna do what? Because I’m… I’ve never…
Henry: I went to an English boarding school, dear. Trust me, you’re in good hands.
The music kicks in as Alex realizes his lover was a former passed-around party bottom who can teach him a thing or two about how to fuck. With the Eiffel Tower in the backdrop of their hotel, suit jackets come off, ties unknot; lots of chuckling, hands beginning to graze as they explore each other’s bodies before the panting begins. They fall back on the bed and before you know it, Henry’s hand is slipping down Alex’s back, helping guide his hips. With Alex’s key dangling back and forth like a pendulum (he wears his old house key around his neck as a reminder of where he came from before his mother became the President), Henry exhales slowly and gives an ever-so-slight nod to Alex, which I read as him indicating that Houston, we have penetration. ("I do question whether or not if it had been a man and a woman, if we'd still have gotten an R rating,” Lopez told People earlier this month.)
Okay, but enough about the sex (for now). I have yet to even describe this film! Taylor Zakhar Perez (of Minx and The Kissing Booth fame) plays Alex Claremont–Diaz, a First Son of the United States who falls for Henry Fox, the (fictional) Prince of Wales, played by Nicholas Galitzine. They start off as thorns in each other’s sides, then find friendship and finally, romance. Will they? Won’t they? They will! But it’s not an easy journey toward accepting one another — or in Henry’s case, accepting himself. It’s sometimes hard for a jaded-skewing brain like mine to accept something so sweet without wanting to implant complications or “yeah, but…”, but this movie found a way to surpass (or at least quell) those impulses.
In one particularly poignant moment, after Alex tells Henry that he’s never felt this way about anyone and describes it “like there’s a rope attached to my chest and it keeps pulling me toward you,” he gears up to say the L word (“love,” not “lesbian”).
Overwhelmed, Henry jumps in the water and floats à la Tanya in the Season 2 finale of The White Lotus (albeit, in this instance, he’s not dead). I bring this up less to highlight the plot and more to highlight the way this film delivers a visual language. “I remember when we found that composition on that day and I was like, ‘Oh this is my Luca Guadagnino moment,’” Lopez recounts. Is it heavy-handed at times? Absolutely, but knowingly so. I found that, in a way, that allowed me to coast easily into the acceptance phase.
What makes this movie worthy of six dedicated IG grid posts (so far)? Well, to start, this movie absolutely surpassed my paltry — albeit uninformed — expectations that had me believing an oft-repeated gay Twitter sentiment of: “It's so bad. I want to watch it again and again!” Richard Lawson’s Vanity Fair review called it a “high gloss soap, done up in the garish hues and stagey patter of toss-off Hallmark holiday junk,” adding: “I can’t wait to watch it a hundred more times.” That's the general consensus I’ve seen, which feels akin to the response to AJLT in ostensibly equating it to a car crash; you can’t look away! One tweet I saw read: “So is Red, White & Royal Blue good or is it ‘gay people deserve bad movies too’ good?”, which is honestly a valid question in the wake of films like Bros which brought about such a metric. Critics have been mixed. “I heard from a friend that the movie seemed to ‘exist to be made fun of on The Other Two,’” Jackson Henry noted in his review for Vulture.
That was my perception of the film at first glance. Now, going back to Lopez’s question: Why didn’t I want to see the movie? “I gotta ding the marketing here,” I tell him. Here’s the main poster:
This poster made me think we’d be adding another entry in the canon of Heartstopper, Young Royals and other recent media that center around the sweet, saccharine, sappy nature of young love through the prism of queerness. I thought there would be a hand-holding montage or a teary-eyed coming out. This movie, instead, gave us jokes about the Prince’s “royal hardness” after the two slip away for a make-out sesh at a political event, a smash cut from a blow job shot to the Washington monument and a scene where Uma Thurman (!) playing the President (!!) with a Texas drawl (!!!) tells her son, who has just come out to her as bisexual, that they can talk about getting him on Truvada and getting him the HPV vaccine “if [he’s] bottoming.”
What was it like educating Uma Thurman about bottoming? “Listen, Uma Thurman is an actor who’s been working since the 1980s. She does not need any educating on bottoming,” Lopez replies. “Uma Thurman could probably teach me a thing or two about bottoming!” There were, however, conversations about her character, Ellen, knowing these things. “Obviously, you’re going to win ‘mother of the year’ awards for knowing this stuff and being able to say it to your son,” Lopez told Thurman, knowing this line would get laughs but also allow some audiences to feel seen and included.
And yes, Lopez has seen the memes comparing it to Jennifer Garner in Love, Simon and Olivia Colman in Heartstopper, ”but for me, I want to hear the President of the United States say these things and talk about them knowledgeably. I want to know that Mom, as President, is more prepared for this conversation than Alex is.”
The reviews I’ve seen tend to grade it on a curve of “it’s not as awful as it could have been.” Take The Mary Sue, for instance: “If you can temper your expectations and agree to check some of your conventional wisdom at the door, there’s a lot to love about something as fluffy and escapist as this — namely, the sheer novelty of seeing a queer couple afforded the same corny, over-indulgent kind of romance movies that studios have been pumping out for straight couples for decades.” But that’s the part I’m hung up on: I didn’t find this cheesy at all. Maybe that’s a “me thing.” I just found it genuinely sweet and poignant, and I even shed a tear when the crowd gathered outside Buckingham Palace to show their support for their gay Prince and his bisexual lover.
For me, this film offered some clever plays on convention, like when Alex and Henry floated above the crowd at the New Year’s party or when they slow danced at London's Victoria and Albert Museum to a perfectly-placed needle drop of Perfume Genius’s cover of “Can’t Help Falling In Love.”
This movie wasn’t groundbreaking and didn’t go out of its way to subvert the formulas of a classic rom-com. Instead, it cleverly leaned into the familiarity of the convention and the tropes that come with it, found remarkably charming (and hot) leads (who can, despite what some are saying online, act), a sturdy ensemble to round out the cast (special snaps to Sarah Shahi as Zahra and Rachel Hilson as Nora — split Best Actress in a Supporting Role Oscar incoming), and said “let’s make a great romantic-comedy,” rather than try for a commentary on the genre or any kind of spin. And it gave us cameos from Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid and PopCrave along the way. Now c’mon now!
About this Taylor Zakhar-Perez. Can someone point a fan at my face? Vulture’s Rachel Handler wrote of his performance that it feels “more ‘Disney Channel Original Gay Porn’ than anything else,” while Richard Lawson stated, “No one is expecting Meisner here.” Maybe my brain is broken — I mean, it surely is — but I found him Jonathan Taylor Thomas-level charming. Obviously, he’d be at home in the 2012 SeanCody video that I’d illegally download, but I did find myself genuinely charmed by his balance of confidence, buffoonishness, trepidaciousness and lovestruck fool-ness. And yes, backside representation is always a win. Especially when it looks like this:
I love the way this film handled the characters’ sexualities. They weren’t grappling with homophobia — internal or external — but rather their own search for identity, with their sexuality woven into that. Alex wanted to stay tethered to his working-class roots despite his status as the First Son and his burgeoning political career. “A relationship like this will define your life,” his mother tells him, referring not to the homosexual nature of his relationship, but having a relationship of any kind on the public stage. Henry, meanwhile, was searching for who he was beyond the monarchy, admitting he wasn’t raised by a loving, supportive family like Alex was. “My life is the crown and yours is politics,” he tells Alex through tears, “and I will not trade one prison for another.”
“Is this camp?” my fiancé asked when Uma Thurman told her son (in her Tennessee Williams-esque Southern drawl) that “we’re gonna need some pizza” after he came out to her — in the Oval Office no less! “No!” I insisted! It’s hard for me to prove why exactly, though. I feel like it’s so easy to ascribe the “camp” label these days to anything that can be recontextualized online for a laugh. And while I understand there’s a way to view this film as camp, I think that’s more of a lens than an inherent quality of the content itself. I’ve heard people comparing Uma Thurman’s accent to Sienna Miller’s in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and I’m sorry, I’m just not hearing it.
Lopez says this in response, sharing that over this past weekend he went to the movies quite a bit in an effort to distract himself: “I was bracing for the truth that queer audiences are very hard to please, plus I am in recovery and such an addict mind that, if I wanted to, I could spend the entire weekend on my phone scolling through every Twitter and Instagram comment.” As part of the British Film Institute’s “Be Gay, Do Crime” series, he, his husband and friends went to a screening of Bound, the Wachowskis’s 1996 neo-noir thriller starring Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly. “I’m sitting in this packed theater in London and I would say the vast majority of the audience were not alive when the movie came out, but they were laughing at so much of the film. There was a point at which — I’m 46 — I’m watching this movie thinking, ‘I don’t remember laughing at this movie when I was watching it the first time.’” At first, he reasoned they were laughing at the movie, but he then reconsidered whether they were actually laughing with the movie. “I think it’s possible that there is some intergenerational disconnect about how we receive things.”
His bottom line: “Look, as long as people like it, I don’t care how they receive it. If they watch it upside down, if that’s what’s good for them, do it. If they think it’s camp, great. It was not intended to be, but if they think it is and like it because of that, wonderful. I’m never going to tell anybody that they’re watching my thing wrong.”
Am I being hyperbolic when I say, “Run this film and everyone in it an Oscar!”? Yes, of course. But I think this film absolutely succeeded in providing non-cringey, non-ironic summer escapism. Maybe I need to get into smutty books. Maybe I need to write a smutty book? Maybe I need a hobby more generally. But I really loved this movie, if for no other reason than it teaching some individuals that gay guys can do missionary.
“I’m glad you got over your resistance to it,” Lopez tells me as we wrap up our call. “I’m over my resistance,” I tell him. I am staunchly pro-Red, White & Royal Blue.
I agree—perfect addition to the romcom genre and the leads were fantastic. Our brains are not broken everyone just lacks understanding of genre!!!!
And thus another one joins the wonderful world of romance novels! Where happy ever afters are a guarantee, the sex is steamy and the love is true. We just need more LGBTQ stories. Many, many more!!