Caffeinated Clint
In what was supposed to be released in 2009, Wild About Harry arrives to streaming services… but don’t get too excited.
A film about two girls who are mourning over the loss of their mother, but when one of them learns that their father is gay and in a relationship with his friend, Mr. Gibbs, she tries to secretly change her dad’s feelings. Seems like a great little premise, right? For this day and age especially, right? This was supposed to be released in 2009 but the release was pulled from distributors (no outlets wanted to carry a “gay male” film back then from what I hear) so all these years later, now that the digital market is thriving, they decided to bring it back for us all.Supposedly based on director Gwen Wynne’s personal experiences, this film just feels like an incredibly missed opportunity to deliver something memorable. It presents a good story but gets it horribly wrong, it acts very aloof about the situation, trying to make fun of it almost like the whole situation is just one big laugh. Back in the day though, it was seen as a proper issue and a little more seriousness and believability would have been a more appropriate path to follow, like Moonlight or Brokeback Mountain.
Straight from the get go, you get a whiff of an old fish mongers… something isn’t right here. It is supposed to be a comedy drama, but it isn’t even remotely funny, and it really does try to be, with excruciating effort. Then we see Tate Donovan – very much an American actor – in the lead as a British man, using a very weird and terribly inconsistent British accent for some reason – it just seems a little bit odd, right? This isn’t the only questionable accent on show though, as there are some poor New England accents to get your teeth into, mainly from Josh Peck which again, becomes lost at times – kind of like a poor Mark Wahlberg impersonation or something of that ilk. There was something that bugged me about the daughters as well, both of whom had such unnatural behaviour; they had childlike naivety and a child’s quirky dress sense, but these girls are in their mid to late teens, what is going on? If they were much younger, say ages 8-12, you could have accessed the magical nature of the story and used their inquisitiveness about the topic of discussion to make it more appropriate.
So, the acting is poor, the dialogue is even worse (I wasn’t alive in the 70s but surely people didn’t talk this way?), even the film doesn’t take its own story seriously. It attempts to portray a viewpoint that was rife in that era towards gay men, by using choice words such as “queer”, “fag” and, “menses” the latter I haven’t even heard of. The eldest daughter goes about telling people that her “Dad is a homosexual”, just call him gay and stop trying to be so Webster’s about the whole thing.
Talking about sexualization, this film was supposed to be a PG-13, but it feels very sexually orientated and overly sexualized at every opportunity. This is accentuated by some questionable framing (the camera doesn’t need to be that low that often) and some premature sexual relationships that manifest after five minutes of knowing one another. Is that what kids did? I think I missed the memo. It also felt abnormal that all the middle-aged women in the town are pining over these obviously gay men, are they blind? It seems that that every middle-aged woman in a 5-mile radius is single and ready to mingle, where are all the husbands at? This town is too carefree for my liking.
The whole thing just felt very T.V drama like, not much excitement in this suburban household even though the story should be full of it. Very superficial and unrealistic, sticking to stereotypes, and the lack of resolution on any of the subjects being explored was incredibly disappointing. There we too many holes in the story, too many questions still to be asked, was Harry cheating on his late wife the whole time? Why was Harry and Mr. Gibb’s relationship already so well developed? Something doesn’t add up. This could have been a hallmark film with plenty of pretty quotes and slogan worthy pearls of wisdom, and apart from one Josh Peck speech, there were none. Ultimately, a lot of bad choices were made which makes this film unsuccessful and forgettable.
Wild About Harry is available to watch on streaming services from the 17th of December
