When I sat down to watch this independent, ensemble, British, romance film about six homosexual men living in London, I really had no idea what to expect. This isn’t exactly the kind of film I usually gravitate towards, but I was interested to see how they’d make the various stories work together. I was pleasantly surprised by the performances and the promise the film showed, even if I wasn’t impressed as much with the stories and the structure of the film.
There are really four different stories that are being told in the film. You have a struggling actor and a reality TV producer, a successful artist and a model/actor, a single father and a TV show star and finally, a single woman and a man she believes is gay. As with all ensemble films, some of these characters are interesting and some are not. Some are developed well and some are left alone. But for me, the key to an ensemble film that tells multiple stories is that all of the stories have to tie together somehow. For MR. RIGHT, it failed to adequately give us a common bond amongst the stories that we could focus on. Instead, each of the characters went their own way and the audience was left wanting more resolution or at least a common thread to cling to.
But the most confusing part of the story was Louise. She was the only person in the film that wasn’t gay and she was afforded an awkward “interview” in the very beginning that led us to believe the film was going to follow her and her interactions with the other characters, or at the very least, follow her as she came to terms with her boyfriend’s homosexuality. But after that initial interview and awkward opening scene, she’s passed off as an afterthought. She’s supposedly friends with everyone, but we really only see her with Alex (Luke de Wollfson). I really liked her, but every time she was on screen, I found it distracting.
Louise should have been the best part of the film. Georgia Zaris is a very beautiful and talented actress and her character should have been the common bond amongst the different couples. The scene where everyone comes together at the dinner party was by far and away the best part of the film and I wanted more scenes like that, or even an extended version of that scene would have been nice. Using Louise in that fashion (to bring everyone together) would have done more to intertwine the stories and it would have given the film some purpose. Or, they could have just completely deleted her character. As it was, she and her story felt more like an afterthought and they were a little too inconsistent with her, especially with that odd opening scene.
This is a film in which every major character (except Louise) is gay, but their homosexuality isn’t the focal point, it’s just a fact. It was actually nice to see a quality film about homosexuals that didn’t try to be too preachy or make a specific political statement. You could have replaced three of the male leads with three females and not changed anything about the script. You may think that two men in a relationship would be less complicated, but nope, apparently all relationships are fraught with emotional baggage and complications.
