Queerly Ever After #62: WHAT HAPPENS NEXT (2011)

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. Also, don’t forget to buy your Queerly Ever After merch right here.

After retiring from the company for which he worked for 30 years, 55-year-old perpetual bachelor Paul Grecco (Jon Lindstrom) doesn’t know what to do with himself. Up until this point, his life has been a meticulously scheduled series of days, everything about his life is in order, down to the clothes he wears. To keep him company, his “woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown” overbearing sister, Elise (Wendie Malick), gets him a puppy, whom he names Mrs. Grecco. Elise also tries to set him up with the recently divorced Irene (Marie Marshal), but that’s another matter.

When he brings Mrs. Grecco to the dog park for the first time, he meets fellow dog-owner, Andy (Chris Murrah), an openly gay man about 20 years his junior. The two start talking and over the course of the next few weeks, develop a friendship. I have to say, the passage of time in this movie feels very strange, at one point Andy and Paul make plans to have dinner in a few days, but then it seems like weeks pass in between the time they made the plan and when they finally have dinner. There are definitely some pacing issues. The color also seems over-corrected, with greens and yellows so garishly bright you might get a headache.

What an Organized Closet

As the friendship blossoms between Paul and Andy, Paul starts to question his sexuality. He finds himself more and more drawn to Andy, although the only experience he’s ever had with another guy before was one time, as a kid, a friend of his tried to kiss him and he punched him, not very romantic. Anyway, the more he thinks about Andy, the more he wants him. So, he buys himself some gay porn to see if it does the trick for him. Did people still buy porn DVDs in 2011? Paul has a laptop he frequently uses, wouldn’t it have made more sense to google it?

You obviously know where this is going. Paul finally comes to the realization that he is gay, but first, he and Andy have to have sex, then break-up because Paul isn’t ready to be open about his sexuality yet, and then Paul has to make a big, public gesture to prove to Andy that he’s ready, and they live happily-ever-after. I’m not saying formulaic is bad, just that we know how it goes.

Was That a Joke

Some of the comedy in this movie falls really flat. I think they were attempting to be a little edgy, but instead a lot of the jokes resort to stereotypes and caricature. In one scene, while Paul and Andy are talking in the park, the aggressively flamboyant Robbie (Michael Blaustein) interrupts their conversation to come complain to Andy about their mutual friend Roz’s (Natalia Cigliuti) hair. This scene, and character for that matter, only exist for Paul to make a comment after Robbie leaves about how his effeminate behavior made him uncomfortable, and how he’s glad Andy isn’t like those other gays. Addressing that sort of homophobia is important, but it is not handled well here. For instance, if they wanted to address Paul’s prejudice against gay men who exhibit more effeminate behavior, then using a character whose sole existence is to be a joke, who Andy doesn’t actually like, is not the way to do it.

The movie also undoes its own attempt at trying to address that sort of prejudice when Andy tells Roz that Paul is the perfect kind of guy, because he’s a “straight gay.” So is the movie trying to tell us not to judge gay men who come off as more stereotypically gay or is it trying to extoll the straight-passing gay? If it’s the former, try harder, if the latter, not a good look.

I also have to address the alcohol consumption in this movie. I enjoy a good glass of wine myself, but the amount of bottles that all these characters seem to go through nightly was unhealthy. Multiple dinner scenes would show the characters going through half cases of wine. I think this might have been done to show time passage, but there are much better ways to do that than alcoholism.

In Conclusion: What Happens Next

What Happens Next is a romantic comedy where the comedy does not always work. Actually, the comedy often doesn’t work, that’s probably the worst part. There’s a sweet story buried in there about a man in his mid-50s finally coming into his own, but it’s mired under attempts at edgy humor that really come off as regressive.

Watch What Happens Next