Queerly Ever After #13: REGARDING BILLY (2005)

Queerly Ever After is a bi-monthly column where I take a look at LGBT+ films that gave their characters a romantic happily-ever-after. There will be spoilers.

What do you get when you mix stilted dialogue, flat performances, and an artery-clogging amount of schmaltz? The movies of Jeff London. Like the previously covered Rob Williams, London will have multiple movies covered in this column. While Williams’ films cannot generally be considered good, compared to London’s oeuvre, they look like cinematic brilliance. The first film from the mind of Jeff London to make its way into this column is 2005’s Regarding Billy, an incredibly wooden (no pun intended, London’s films are pretty chaste) Christmas movie to kick off the holiday season.

In Regarding Billy, a young man named Billy (Ronnie Kerr), must return home following the tragic deaths of his parents to take care of his younger brother Johnny (Jack Sway) who is intellectually disabled. Meanwhile, Billy’s best friend Dean (Jason Van Eman), who has been away in the Air Force returns and moves in with Billy and Johnny, forcing the two men to finally acknowledge the feelings they have had for each other for years.

Becoming a Family

Let’s start with the good. I like the plot, I’m a bit of a sucker for plots that center on a couple who end up having to raise a child. There are a lot of movies that will be covered in this column that center on a gay couple who take in a child and form a family and Regarding Billy is one of those. And that is where the good things I have to say about this movie ends.

Now, for the bad. Judging from the plot line it seems like there’s a lot going on in this movie, and enough material for a feature length film. Yes, in the hands of an adept screenwriter and director, that would be the case, but in the hands of London, the movie is a slow, laborious slog. The same conversations are repeated ad nauseam, for example there is a ten-minute long conversation between Billy and Johnny about how much they miss their parents, followed by the exact same conversation repeated two scenes later. While the film clocks in at only 77 minutes, it feels hours longer. No one ever taught London that sometimes things can be shown and not said, and thus every feeling or idea on a character’s mind has to get voiced when it would have been better being shown.

Kerr and Van Eman are no naturals in their roles, most of their dialogue feels forced and stilted. Whether these two would have been able to deliver good performances in the hands of a better director and with a better script, I cannot tell, they are good at longingly looking at each other and perhaps there is some hope for them yet. Sway, as the intellectually disabled brother, delivers a performance that is so broad it falls head-first into being an offensive caricature. The film never explicitly spells out what kind of disability Johnny has, and I get the sense that neither London nor Sway actually had an answer for that, leading to the cartoonish performance we end up with.

The Night Before Christmas

You know how I mentioned above that the movie, despite having a plot that could easily lend itself to an interesting film, barely manages to sustain its 77-minute running time? London must have had a hard time even hitting that run time, which is the only explanation I can come up with for why he felt the need to include a scene where Billy reads The Night Before Christmas in its entirety to Johnny and Dean not once, but twice. If I want to read The Night Before Christmas I can do that, I don’t need to sit through a movie to hear it read aloud twice.

I know I usually include a bit of a plot synopsis in these entries, but nothing really happens in this movie. It takes place almost entirely in one location and there’s not much of a dramatic arc. Don’t get me wrong, it tries to have a dramatic arc, it just fails.

Regarding Billy: In Conclusion

This could have been an interesting film about what makes a family, moving on from loss, PTSD, being closeted in the military, but instead London turned out a wanna-be Hallmark movie as syrupy sweet as it is chaste. Regarding Billy is the kind of movie you watch if you enjoy laughing at the formulaic holiday films churned out by Lifetime, Hallmark and Netflix year after year but you’d like your Hallmark cheese with a dash of gay.

Regarding Billy came out on DVD November 22, 2005. For all other release dates see here.