I specifically waited until December to watch this. It’s been on my Watch list forever, and I figured I’d watch it to get in the Christmas spirit.
I’ll preface by saying I LOVE Michael Urie and completely understand that will make me biased with my thoughts about this movie (especially considering my thoughts about the movie I watched immediately after.)
Let’s start with a brief synopsis, shall we? (This means I will be discussing what happens in the movie, so if you haven’t watched, now would be a good time to click away…)
We have Peter, played by Michael Urie, who has lots of trouble with love. Can’t keep a man very long, and though he seems to be doing well as a photographer, his true passion is plants. Plants aren’t really my thing, so I didn’t get it, but whatever. Peter lives with his best friend Nick, played by Philemon Chambers. (Michael and Philemon are so adorably cute, and that’s the reason I watched this movie.) He works for TaskRabbit and is also apparently a really great writer who is afraid to write a sequel to his best-selling children’s book… That felt odd to me, and I’m not sure how to put into words why…
I understand the fears that come with writing, so I can only imagine them being worse once you’ve created something successful… It was more the TaskRabbit thing… How much money did he make from that book because he seems to have an infinite amount of money… and if so, why is he working at all? I suppose at some point he says he likes helping people. I don’t know, it just seemed like an odd combination of occupations/skills, but nothing to ruin the movie.
Peter starts the film with a boyfriend. They’ve been dating for a few months, and since the boyfriend is a doctor, he gets called away to the hospital a lot. Peter decides to invite him home for Christmas, after agreeing, and even though the boyfriend just got there, he is called away to the hospital again.
It just so happens that Nick gets a Taskrabbit job to put up Christmas lights. He’s on the roof and the woman is telling him how she normally uses someone else, but he fell and died while putting up someone else’s lights (it was so odd how caviler she was telling this story… shouldn’t this be a jolly movie?!?) Anywho, her husband drives up, and guess who it is?!? Peter’s boyfriend. Nick tells Peter. Peter breaks up with the boyfriend. Now he is sad, because he is the only single one of his siblings, and he was excited about introducing the boyfriend to the family…
He then comes up with an idea to have Nick come home with him and pretend to be his boyfriend. His family already knows Nick, and they’ve been best friends for nine years. His plan is to tell them they just fell in love, which is kinda what his family had wanted to happen. With very little persuasion (and having to buy his own plane ticket for the next day, I might add… if you’re roping me into a sham relationship, you can at least buy my plane ticket…) Nick accompanies Peter to his family’s house for Christmas.
Kathy Najimy plays Peter’s mom (I’m a HUGE King of the Hill and Sister Act fan, so was happy to see her.) and Barry Bostwick plays Peter’s dad. He looks familiar to me, but I don’t know what I know him from and I’m not going to IMDB him (I know he’s in Rocky Horror Picture, but I haven’t watched that.) Before he even gets to tell his family that he and Nick are now boyfriends, his mom tells him she has a blind date set up for him the next day, and Nick tells him he should go. (We’ll circle back to my thoughts on this later.)
Long story less long, he goes on some dates with this guy James, played by Luke Macfarlane, while leaving Nick with his family (… a choice.), all the while his nieces are scheming to get Uncle Peter together with Nick. They eventually turn the whole family to their side, aside from Peter’s dad, who was with them from the beginning. It’s a cheesy movie, but I expect Christmas movies to be cheesy, and I expect romcoms to be cheesy, so it’s par the course.
Oh, how could I forget, Jennifer Coolidge is in this too, she plays Peter’s Aunt Sally. She is hilarious and ridiculous and is putting on a play. He has a bunch of other family members, two (or maybe three) sisters, their husbands, and their kids. I’m not going through all of those people, sorry to those actors (I did think you were all wonderful. His sister w/ the daughters, I think her name was Lisa, she had such witty lines. I liked her character.)
The nieces finally get Nick to admit to them (and himself) that he has feelings for Peter, and that’s probably why he came on the trip. He goes to the play, and Peter invites James to the play as well. In a ploy to get Nick and Peter together, they help Aunt Sally with said play, so they are off to the side watching it, and have their arms around each other… very couple-like behavior… and James notices this from the audience.
After the play Nick tells Peter how he feels, and Peter feels the same way but is afraid to mess up their friendship. Before they can discuss it further, James interrupts. For some reason, Peter thought it would be a good idea for the three of them to get a drink. Nick says he’ll meet them there (the town only has one bar), but he goes home, packs his stuff, and is on his way out when he gets a Taskrabbit job.
Peter and James are at the bar, which is owned by Peter’s sister, and James makes Peter admit they aren’t compatible. James tells him he saw the way he interacts with Nick and lights up when talking about Nick just like he lights up when talking about plants. So now Peter rushes home, but Nick is gone, so he’s heading to the airport.
I guess this town only has one street (to go with its one bar), so on the drive, he notices their rental car parked. He stops, gets out, and he and Nick reunite and confess their love. Nick is there painting this building and has used his saved up money to pay for like six months of rent for Peter (oh yeah, Peter wants to move back to New Hampshire). They kiss. It’s magical.
We fast forward to Christmas day. Nick wrote a sequel to his book and gives it to Peter’s nephews (who are big fans of the book), and at the end, it says Nick and Peter are moving together to New Hampshire.
Now, my thoughts…
I could have done without the love triangle. I’m not well versed in romcoms, so I assume they tend to be a major component… but I consider Coyote Ugly to be a romcom (and one of my all-time favorite films), and it doesn’t have a love triangle… unless you count the bar, and I don’t. It would have been more interesting to me to see Nick and Peter spending time together throughout the film and learning their love for each other is more than platonic. Again, doesn’t ruin the film for me, but James just felt kinda unless.
Maybe it was because I was rooting for Nick and Peter from the beginning, but I didn’t see Nick and James being compatible… not to mention living on opposite sides of the country. Even from the very beginning, Nick and Peter interact like a couple and they know each other so well. The only thing James has going for him (as far as a relationship with Peter) is he is extremely good-looking… but so is Nick.
What really prompted me to write this is a post I saw about this film. Not so much the post itself, but the comments people left. People were saying Peter was insane to pick Nick over James. Now, I’m well aware that are is subjective… HOWEVER, this film isn’t very subtle, you’re supposed to root for Nick and Peter… So people saying they don’t have chemistry (I thought they did), and they would never pick Nick over James… is interesting, to say the least.
It seems some people are equating two different things. Just because one isn’t personally attracted to Nick (and if you aren’t… interesting), doesn’t mean the movie doesn’t make sense because Peter chose Nick over James. The way the story is told, there isn’t a way that Nick and Peter don’t end up together.
I hate to be that person… but Philemon Chambers (Nick) is black and Luke Macfarlane (James) is white, and I can’t help but wonder if that comes into play at all when SOME people say it doesn’t make sense to them why Peter ended up with Nick instead of Luke…
Surprisingly, unless I missed something, race doesn’t come up at all in this film. Not that it needed to, but Nick is the only black person I remember seeing in this town. It is quickly established that he’s met all these people before, but I’d still be uncomfortable, personally, hanging out with ANYONE’S family on my own while they are out dating.
All in all, it was a very cute movie… and I may sound like a hypocrite with my next post (or if you read this before the other one, you may think, I’m glad he called out his contradictions.)
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