Honey, I have cancer!
A review of Michael Showalter’s 'Spoiler Alert'
After reading the review, make sure you vote in our next From the Archives poll. And consider preordering friend of The Yearning Haley Jakobson’s big bisexual debut novel, OLD ENOUGH. Details below!
The Yearning Rating: ✰✰✰
Romance ✰✰✰
Sex ✰✰
Storytelling ✰✰✰
Performance ✰✰✰
Yearning ✰✰✰
Written by Meg Heim
Happy Thursday—I’m starting off The Yearning this week on a light, airy, Christmassy note! Michael Showalter’s Spoiler Alert is being billed as a lot of different things: a love story, a tragicomic…a Christmas movie? But my personal favorite way to categorize it would be ‘holiday-themed weepie’.
Adapted for the screen from entertainment journalist Michael Ausiello’s memoir of a similar name, Spoiler Alert follows Michael’s 14-year love story with his partner Kit Cowan, which tragically ended when Kit lost a hard-fought, 11-month battle with neuroendocrine cancer.
The movie starts by outlining Ausiello’s love of TV and storytelling—which began early, in childhood, snuggling with Mom on the couch enjoying soaps. This passion is carried through into adulthood. At the beginning of the love story, we see Michael (played by the film’s leading man, Jim Parsons) as an endearingly nervous-but-passionate queer man pitching stories on Gilmore Girls and Felicity at a TV Line meeting. When dragged out to Jock Night at the local gay bar by friend Nick (the effervescent and charming Jeffrey Self), Michael meets the outwardly confident, hunky Kit (Ben Aldridge) and the rest is history.
This movie felt a little muddled all the way through. There were many moments that were genuinely funny and beautiful; with a lived-in, sincere quality that comes from the movies subject matter—a very real 14-year love story. Laughter chorused around me as a well-written joke or sincerely funny interaction between the two main characters caught the theater a little bit by surprise. I think that’s because the story choices bookending those beats tended towards formulaic and clunky.
What comes through the most in Spoiler Alert is the care that was taken in portraying a lover after they’ve passed. I loved the conception of Kit on screen; he is the beating heart of this movie. That he is the most fully formed, knowable character in the film supports the perspective the story is being told from: Michael’s, whose love for Kit is undeniable. I haven’t read Ausiello’s memoir, but the love that it was written with is tangible. Portrayed beautifully by Aldridge, Kit was confident, charismatic and goofy in social settings. As the two build their lives together, organic glimpses into his internal world reveal insecurities and roadblocks that help you understand him better. The way that Kit regularly cracked dark jokes about his health (i.e. the inspiration for my titular “Honey, I have cancer!”) was recognizably revelatory; I feel like we all know that friend who lets little slivers of vulnerability through like that. The character is well rounded—as I imagine the man was as well—and written beautifully.
Jim Parsons’ portrayal of Michael took many forms: at times, mincing and a little unsure. The moments that he allowed himself (and the character) to take up space were my favorite. Still, regardless of the project, I think there’s always a part of me that, whenever I saw him on screen, feels at any moment, he could break out into a jig. But opposites attract, and there is something refreshing about a queer love story on screen where both men aren’t absolutely pure, smoldering charisma. As we watch the two get to know each other better, Parsons shines through in moments of fun and playful chemistry between the two of them. It was hard for me to discern if I felt more connected to their relationship in those scenes because Michael was gaining confidence, or if Parsons was. And sometimes the hesitancy and meekness in Michael works! It starkly contrasts with Kit’s outgoing, popular boy energy. Kit pulls Michael out of his shell time and time again in the most organic and saccharine adorable way.
Spoiler Alert continues to ride this middle ground for me as it attempts to touch on a bunch of genuine obstacles that queer people and long term couples face: coming out, fidelity, growing resentment, and what integrating your partner into your immediate family looks like. Sally Field blasts onto the screen as Kit’s frenetic, triathlon-obsessed mother who senses a dynamic beyond friendship between the two men and simply must address it: “Why does he know where the sheets are?! What is GOING ON HERE?!!!!!” This leads to a Band-Aid-ripping coming out scene and moments later, she’s placated and welcoming Michael into the fold. There was so much energy and connection between the actors in this scene—I loved it. The movie needs a little razzle dazzle. But while on the topic of Sally Field—Spoiler Alert might be worth the watch to take in her jogging style alone (simultaneously intense and very, very slow).
There’s a weird scene that just makes a complete mockery of couples therapy? Edited in a very punchy, zippy style, we see quick cuts of Michael and Kit bickering, pointing fingers, and pleading their cases to a skeptical, silent therapist. But then, just as strangely, the therapist provides a very thoughtful and accurate analysis of the issues they’re facing. He suggests a drastic solution—which they agree to try, because they both clearly care deeply for each other! This was another moment where I was like…what is happening here.
I think Spoiler Alert was trying to cram a lot of life into an hour and 52 minutes and some stuff just wasn’t integrated as well as others. The movie is able to include the important context from their lives that we need to understand, but loses details in favor of sweeping emotional beats.
The film is also, in a lot of ways, a love letter to television. Michael’s flashbacks to his childhood are portrayed through snippets of a fake ‘80s sitcom about his life. These sitcom scenes honestly didn’t sit right with me. Childhood Michael, who was fat and unpopular, makes light of being picked on at school to a classic laugh track. (After these, we’d jump right back into chemo and radiation and relationship strain). He interviews busy actors between takes as he gets the text confirming Kit has cancer. He makes references to Knight Rider. I’m genuinely curious if they ever considered structuring this adaptation as a limited series? It is, after all, a love letter to TV…in a movie…
It felt like in order to connect the movie to the memoir, Showalter and screenwriter Dan Savage (of the sex advice column Savage Love) pulled key identifying characteristics and personality quirks of Ausiello and Cowan and squeezed them into the movie just to check a few “matches the book” boxes. As all people who read books that eventually become movies get snobby about this kind of thing, I almost interpreted the inclusion of these very specific moments as armor against those inevitable eyerolls (“That wasn’t in the book”). Was Kit an aspiring photographer? Let’s have him pull out his camera and just awkwardly take pictures of Michael without asking. Is Michael a dweeby lifelong collector of Smurf paraphernalia? An entire one-bedroom in Jersey City with every square inch occupied by the small blue humanoid figurines should do the trick. At the risk of sounding callous—because I know these are real people—I think the way that these parts of Michael and Kit are just plunked into the movie took away from the sincerity of them for me. Instead of feeling like I was seeing deeper into these character’s inner worlds, I felt like I was just playing catch up, scrambling to accept new and weird realities about them. It ended up feeling generic and random.
On the topic of half-baked…a Christmas movie? Christmas in Spoiler Alert felt like an afterthought to me; I think it would’ve been fairly simple to cut it as a central plot point entirely. However, we were still being told it was important. In one scene, Parsons and Aldridge lie together under the tree. An undeniably sweet but corny moment, Michael tells Kit how he’s always imagined that year after year, he’d lie under the tree with his partner and take in the beauty of Christmas. Geuuuuch. (And I love Christmas movies! Trust me—I almost reviewed the new lesbian Hallmark movie instead this week!) I love a Christmas story—but I didn’t buy into the relevance of it here.
Sally Field and the lovable Bill Irwin make a heartstring-tugging team as Kit’s parents. Some of my favorite scenes in the whole movie were the ones where they gathered around the Cowan’s table for dinner, laughing and talking and catching up in a way that reminds you—not to get too sugary sweet— that sharing dinner with people you love is one of the perfect little things about this life. (I recently learned the meaning of the Spanish word sobremesa, which describes the tradition of relaxing at the table after a meal and no one wants to leave yet.) Bringing the pair into a scene woke the movie up—no doubt in part due to Sally’s feverishly loving Mom energy.
As Spoiler Alert trundles to the end, it resorts to more and more “cheap tricks'' guaranteed to make you cry1. But the story is sadly formulaic, and ends up missing the opportunity to share a much richer, more intimate portrait of the love these two men had for each other. As I told my fiancée after we left the theater, I cried when Kit died because I was imagining how devastating it would be to lose them. I think I landed there—reflecting on my own fears of loss—in lieu of finding anywhere else in the film to truly emotionally invest.
Overall, I felt like Spoiler Alert clumsily flitted between funny and not, trying to pepper in the necessary levity for a heartwarming and heartbreaking story like this, but not totally succeeding. Despite being generic, the emotional toll of this movie is brutal— and I’m not sure it strikes the balance necessary to prevent it from becoming gratuitously depressing.
Spoiler Alert is in theaters now. Find showtimes here.
It’s that time again! We want to revel in a classic, relate to the past, relax with a comfort film—we want to write another “From the Archives” review! Let us know which holiday hit you’d be most excited to read about:
The Yearning would like to introduce you to another favorite queer internet writer of ours — Haley Jakobson!
Haley explores queerness, mental health, sex, trauma and bodies in her work. And she WROTE A BIG BISEXUAL NOVEL.
This book is beautiful - it’s a queer coming-of-age story about finding your people, friendship breakups, devastating crushes, and being a survivor in a world that centers justice over healing.
Coming June 2023 - pre-order your copy of Old Enough now!
Next week on The Yearning, Ali will be reviewing the second season of HBO’s The Sex Lives of College Girls (and desperately trying to make the acronym “SLCG” happen).
CC’ed here: the scene where cheery pop music from RuPaul’s Drag Race fades out as the scene transitions into a slow-mo rush down the hall of the ER.