Straight Up
Here’s an affinity test for the new comedy Straight Up: If you see the comic potential in a gay man who’s dating a woman dressing up as Brick from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for a costume party, sit down right now and start streaming this movie. Straight Up has the pop-culture density of a Quentin Tarantino movie — minus the drugs, criminals, violence, and just about everything else — filtered through the sensibility of an intense young gay man with OCD.
The film’s main virtue is its literate, clever, rapid-fire dialogue, which has been compared with TV’s Gilmore Girls, a connection made explicit by the second main character being named Rory. If, like me, you’re unfamiliar with Gilmore Girls, or many of the other cultural touchstones verbally juggled here, fear not: The movie is smart enough to make most of its jokes land whether you share its IMDB search history or not. Its humor doesn’t flag, right up to the finale, a rare thing for a small-scale comedy.
Straight Up is written and directed by James Sweeney, who also plays protagonist Todd, a twenty-something programmer his best friends describe as a “Kinsey 6” — that is, as gay as you can get. But Todd’s a virgin — insecure, asexual, and intimidated (maybe repulsed) by the gay dating scene in Los Angeles. So when he meets fellow Gilmore Girls fan Rory, a struggling actress with her own troubled relationship track record, the two bond and start dating.
The indie film vibe is reminiscent of early Hal Hartley or Whit Stillman films, in which young people talk intensely and with minimal expression, favoring words over overt emotions. Visually, it reflects Todd’s OCD, with rigorous compositional symmetry, a style that’s usually pleasing but occasionally crosses into excessive. (Its many striking interior locations are justified by Todd’s second job as a professional house sitter.) But it’s never arch: A number of scenes are simply entertaining riffs on the movie’s premise, most memorably a dinner with Todd’s parents (Randall Park and Betsy Brandt) and Todd’s sessions with his jaded therapist (Tracie Thoms).
In an earlier day, Straight Up might have been considered politically radioactive for pairing a man who’s clearly gay with a woman who’s hoping he’ll evolve. But Todd’s predicament and motivations are entirely credible: He’s not trying to de-gay himself; he’s just trying to find a soulmate who wants what he wants. Rory’s motives are more amorphous, and some viewers may find her willingness to pair with Todd unjustified. But the balanced, fragile performance by Katie Findlay as Rory assuages most concerns: She’s lonely and understandably suspicious of straight men and finds Todd a comfort.
Sweeney did well to cast himself as his own leading man, as he perfectly embodies Todd’s neuroses and sharply delivers his own dialogue. The themes of Straight Up are not frivolous: Sweeney wants viewers to question the centrality of sexuality in our pairing customs, particularly for people for whom sex is either undesirable or just a low priority in their relationships. And if sex isn’t the be-all and end-all, what does that say about our insistence on categorizing people according to their attractions?
Straight Up doesn’t have all the answers, and you can even ignore the questions if you just want to go with the flow of the comedy. Its themes are certainly central to Sweeney, who has explored the spectrum of sexual attraction in at least two previous shorts. (Watch his 9-minute Normal Doors on Vimeo if you want to see an early iteration of Straight Up.) But the cultural critique is just context for the movie, which serves chiefly as a showcase for Sweeney’s dense, witty writing. Here’s hoping Straight Up propels him into a writing gig where he creates his own Gilmore Girls for the next generation of Todds and Rorys.
Grade: B-plus. Not rated, but PG-13 equivalent, plus adult language. Available via the Sofa Cinema streaming program from Grail Moviehouse.
(Photo courtesy of Strand Releasing)
