Year:  2022

Director:  Michael Showalter

Rated:  M

Release:  February 9, 2023

Distributor: Universal

Running time: 112 minutes

Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth

Cast:
Jim Parsons, Ben Aldridge, Sally Field

Intro:
… flirts with interesting rejections of media-driven norms when it comes to storytelling for the screen, but its real power comes in how well it handles the fundamentals.

The title of the source material notwithstanding (Michael Ausiello’s Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies), this film already feels somewhat subversive purely because of its title and the context behind it. Tragedy underpins a lot of mainstream gay romance (as Billy Eichner pointed out in last year’s Bros, these films are mainly marketed as stories that straight people can get all weepy over more than anything else), so being that upfront about the eventual fate of a main character reads as surprisingly daring.

From that foundation, the story of the blooming relationship between Michael (Jim Parsons) and Kit (Ben Aldridge) goes some way to subvert the way popular media depicts such couplings, and indeed dramatic events writ large.

Emboldened by what is easily Parsons’ most likeable on-screen performance to date, the story is seen through his perspective as someone who watches a lot of daytime television, with regular flashbacks to his childhood depicted like a 1980s sitcom. With that comes a comparable earnestness to the film’s portrayal and understanding of romance, aided in no small part by just how cute the main couple are together.

Building on the allyship director Michael Showalter displayed with his last film The Eyes of Tammy Faye (and casting two openly gay actors as the leads), Spoiler Alert thankfully avoids feeling like a gay narrative told from a straight perspective. Co-writer David Marshall Green broke new ground for gay depictions on American television with his work on thirtysomething back in the 1980s, and with the freedom to depict characters who can touch each other in bed, his and Dan Savage’s rendering of the story avoids a lot of the sourer cliches for the sub-genre.

When Kit comes out of the closet to his parents, there’s a certain instinctive bracing for melodrama which then leads to a pleasant and thankful reprieve from how this scene would play out, and indeed typically plays out, elsewhere. The core relationship between the couple is still messy in places, but never leans against the suspension of disbelief.

Considering how much attention it draws to the differences between dramatization and real life, the film ultimately works because the drama and the audience engagement with it is all about what is happening now. The meet-cute, the decision to move in together, the in-laws (with Sally Field maintaining her rapport with Showalter that made Hello, My Name Is Doris so delightful); it proffers that knowing how this all ends isn’t really the point. It is an ending that all stories and relationships come to eventually, so it focuses on appreciating the moments the characters still have, however fleeting they may be.

Spoiler Alert flirts with interesting rejections of media-driven norms when it comes to storytelling for the screen, but its real power comes in how well it handles the fundamentals. The performances are endearingly awkward, but without overdoing it, the breaks into hyperrealism give the production a distinct flavour, and Showalter hybridizes the bedside in-law drama of The Big Sick with the character-driven yuks of The Lovebirds to tell a love story that does justice to its based-on-actual-events roots. It’s a tear-jerker that garners a reaction through honest means, which is always worth embracing.

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