For many viewers, there’ll be something charmingly synthetic about Amazon’s milquetoast romcom Red, White and Royal Blue, another film aiming to show that gay love stories can be just as basic and sickly sweet as straight ones. Its overwhelming blandness is sort of the point, a sign of true representation, but vaguely admirable intentions only get the film so far – a win that it exists perhaps, but a loss for those hoping for something better than a Hallmark movie.
The painfully slow rise in gay stories that cater to a broader crowd has given us some crowd-pleasing winners, standout films like Love, Simon, Bros and Happiest Season, showing the importance and pleasure of watching same-sex romance on a bigger canvas, bursting out of the arthouse closet. But the much-anticipated adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s fan favourite novel is closer to last year’s beige weepie Spoiler Alert and the recent tide of queer Christmas movies made for TV or streamers, like Single All the Way and The Christmas Setup, as boringly by-the-books as it comes. This isn’t always a problem within the romance genre, but here it’s never done with enough fizz or feeling for us to invest more than a passing double-screened interest, a plane movie that never takes off the ground.
It’s a what-if love story between Prince Henry of England (Nicholas Galitzine) and Alex (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the son of the US president (Uma Thurman, delivering the most deranged southern accent since Sienna Miller tackled Tennessee Williams). They go from hating each other to falling in lust to falling in love while forces prevent them from going public, hitting every beat one would expect yet never with more than a light tap, the romantic highs never high enough and the melodramatic lows never really that low.
What’s most curious about something that is otherwise painfully straightforward is when the Tony-winning playwright Matthew Lopez (whose two-part generational epic The Inheritance showed him more than capable of deftly pulling heartstrings), acting as both writer and director, finds himself wrestling between the film it is and the film it could have been. The book was known for its surprisingly explicit sex scenes and while the film is mostly chaste, there’s one sequence, a Truvada reference (!) and some running bawdy jokes that briefly steer it out of safe PG territory to something more risque (the film is strangely, given the genre, an R). Similarly while the film exists in a universe of overly lit, tiny-budget backlot fakery, effort is put into using real news anchors, including Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid, and real newspapers, such as *coughs* the Guardian. One laughable scene also includes the actual White House with a limp marquee, housing the year’s cheapest-looking New Year’s party, in the back garden. These discordant moments are at least interesting when the rest of the film mostly isn’t.
The romance between the two leads goes from slightly rough to very smooth to back again with a little too much ease, the plot never offering us enough juicy conflict despite the circumstance and the two actors failing to give us enough chemistry. Of the pair, Zakhar Perez at least has some charisma, which might be best used elsewhere in the future, but sparks just don’t fly between him and Galitzine in a way that would excuse the film’s formulaic familiarity.
The pressure shouldn’t be on gay cinema, or that of any other minority group, to be somehow more substantive and socially conscious than that of the straight majority, and queer audiences should be allowed to laugh and cry at the same escapist nonsense as the rest. But Red, White and Royal Blue just isn’t the fun, brain-disengaged romp it could have been, any praise going toward intention rather then execution.
Red, White and Royal Blue is out now on Amazon Prime
