FIRE ISLAND — Fruitcake Enterprises

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

There’s a lot to love about Fire Island, this year’s first major “Pride Month Movie” release, streaming on Hulu since its release yesterday (June 3), and most of it has to do with representation. Written by and starring comedian Joel Kim Booster, and co-starring viral sensation and SNL cast member Bowen Yang, this is a movie clearly aimed to be a “mainstream release,” itself no longer unusual for a story focused on queer people—what sets it apart is its unapologetically plausible and realistic representation. This is definitively not a “family-friendly” movie, and not because it happens to be about a group of gay friends, but because it includes frank depictions of gay sex and casual drug use.

To be clear, though, the overall plot is surprisingly chaste, largely because it’s a modern adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice—very much in the vein of the classic 1994 high school adaptation of Emma that was Clueless. Granted, Fire Island has no chance of becoming the cult classic that Clueless did, but that’s just because of how much the movie industry has changed in the past thirty years.

Anyway, the casual observer might be forgiven for thinking the story is only about Howie (Bowen Yang), and his sweet, budding relationship with Charlie (James Scully), initially at the behest of Howie’s best friend Noah (Booster), who is so intent on getting Howie laid on an annual friends-group trip to Fire Island that he’s committed to not having sex with anyone himself until it happens. But, Charlie’s own group of friends are a much wealthier group, who overall rub Noah the wrong way, particularly a lawyer named Will (Conrad Ricamora), who Noah quickly writes off as a snob, responding in ways that only increase tension between them. Spoiler alert! By the end, this movie becomes just as much about the predictable trajectory of the slowly evolving relationship between Noah and Will.

If you are at all familiar with Pride and Prejudice, identifying which characters parallel those from the novel becomes a fun game. Noah is narrator Elizabeth; Will is Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy; Howie is Elizabeth’s sister Jane; Charlie is Jane’s love interest Charles Bingley. The diverse group of friends along the ride with Noah and Howie are, broadly speaking, the Bennet sisters.

The overall plot points of Fire Island do hew incredibly close to those of the novel, which is why, for instance, most of the time none of the aforementioned sex is ever centered in the plot. Noah and Will spend most of the story annoyed with each other, and Howie and Charlie spend most of it innocently getting to know each other. The unusual frankness comes in as background, sometimes as part of a punch line, such as when Noah crashes a bedroom orgy while looking for Howie, and all the guys stop their fucking just quickly enough to look around politely to see if there’s a Howie in the room. There is another scene in which Noah takes a potential hookup into a back room also filled with sex at a party, and yet another in which the group of friends are taking stock of their relatively pathetic collective stash of recreational drugs.

The great thing about all these details is just this: none of it is ever looked upon with judgment. It’s just, part of these gay guys’ world, secondary background details that they may or may not partake in depending on the circumstances or the mood. There is no self-loathing to be had in this movie, at least not as a result of one’s sexuality (they do discuss body image issues, in some cases in a way that’s a bit of a stretch, considering the conventional fitness of many of these guys who apparently feel out of place on Fire Island). There’s no tragic subplot about addiction, and there’s no hand-wringing or grappling with homophobia, a fact made easy by the convenient setting in one of the nation’s few small-town gay utopias. This story could just have easily been set in Provincetown or Key West.

All that said, if you strip away all these trappings that set Fire Island apart, and look strictly at its simple plot arc, as well as most of it’s dialogue, and it’s reduced to something little more than adequate. I can’t quite call this film “exceptional,” much as I really would love to. If I had my wish, it would be something with the staying power of The Birdcage, just without the conservative judgmentalism used for punchlines. Fire Isand could have been a great movie about gay guys on vacation, or it could have been a great modern adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, but apparently it can’t be a great combination of both.

Don’t get me wrong, though: I still thought it was a fun, worthwhile way to spend a couple of hours at home. I might even have enjoyed seeing this in theaters. That said, the “house mother” who owns the place this group of friends goes to every year is played by Margaret Cho, whose comic talents are criminally underused and whose presence seems only to serve as “gay icon cred.” And although the guys who round out Noah’s and Howie’s group of friends are diverse in both ethnicity and—critically—body type, their existence as a bunch of flamboyant femmes seems a little too amped up at times. This is a movie clearly meant to feel unusually grounded, but then at times the wrong “camp knobs” seem to get cranked up to 11. At least Will is unusually quiet and reserved—elements that are used by Noah to judge him.

It’s wonderful to see a movie like this, not just made by and about gay people, but gay people of color: the director is Andrew Ahn, whose short film First Birthday was made as a means of coming out to his Korean parents. I’ve been a fan of Joel Kim Booster as a comedian for a short while (ditto Bowen Yang, but given his rising fame that’s less surprising), and I do think he has talent. But, this script focuses more on the Pride and Prejudice angle than on the humor that could have been added; it did make me laugh several times, but the script still could have used some punching up. It could be argued, actually, that the whole Pride and Prejudice thing is more of a distraction than it needs to be, and the movie would have been better served just as a wholly original story about gay friends on Fire Island.

This is the movie we got, though, and it still works for what it is, and the significance of what its very existence represents cannot be overstated. The more broadly the queer community sees themselves in film, and the more films are made with that in mind, the better off we’ll all be.

Overall: B