Bill Oliver (2023)

The rules of screen drama-by-numbers stipulate that if a character acquires a house plant at the start of the story, said plant will wither once the emotional going gets tough.  The same rules require that whenever someone disposes of evidence they want to keep secret they’ll stick it in a waste bin where it will be discovered by someone else.  Bill Oliver’s Our Son is so cliché-rich that it gives you the two things for the price of one.  Early on in the film the title character, eight-year-old Owen (Christopher Woodley), proudly brings a plant home from school.  Later, with the marriage of his parents, Nicky (Luke Evans) and Gabriel (Billy Porter), on the rocks and Owen the subject of a custody battle between them, the boy’s shrivelled plant goes in the bin – where it’s found and rescued by Nicky.  The film ends with Owen’s fathers reaching an accommodation.  The plant perks up a bit.

Our Son, written by Bill Oliver and Peter Nickowitz, premiered last year at Tribeca and is screening at this month’s BFI Flare Festival.  It’s set in present-day New York, where Nicky runs a publishing company.  He’s the sole breadwinner, he bought the family the handsome brownstone in which they live, and he’s Owen’s biological father.  Gabriel, the homemaker, sacrificed an acting career to devote himself to bringing Owen up – although, as Nicky tartly points out when custody negotiations get fraught, in order to sacrifice a career you need to have one in the first place.  Oliver loses no time in foregrounding the tensions in the marriage, which emerge not just in Nicky’s and Gabriel’s bedroom conversations but more publicly, when they’re spending time with friends.  Nicky is, in his husband’s view, married primarily to his job:  Gabriel and Owen have to make do with whatever time and attention he has to spare.  It’s not long before Gabriel decides he no longer loves Nicky and wants a divorce.

They’re told a 50-50 custody arrangement is usual in cases like theirs.  Nicky, shocked that Gabriel wants to end the marriage, is ready to accept this arrangement.  Gabriel isn’t.  He’s given up too much to lose so much of Owen; besides, he doesn’t believe Nicky would be able to provide even half-time care for their son – he’d rely instead on their ever-obliging babysitter (Nuala Cleary), whom Owen adores.  Nicky’s argument, of course, is that Gabriel hasn’t an income and won’t make ends meet, even with alimony.  Gabriel says he’ll get a job:  he has his eye on one in a charity outfit run by Matthew (Andrew Rannells), who just happens to be Nicky’s ex.  Whereas a 50-50 split is the bone of contention between the principals, it suits the scriptwriters just fine.  In the course of the film, each of Gabriel and Nicky has scenes with their lawyer, their family and in bed with another man, adding up to more or less equal screen time for the two leads.

Some of these scenes are stupidly conceived, particularly Nicky’s visit, with Owen, to see his folks – his parents (Kate Burton and Michael Countryman), his sister (Emily Donahoe), her kids.  Does Nicky seriously expect to get through this weekend without someone asking where Gabriel is and Owen supplying the bombshell news?   Needless to say, this happens at the family dinner table to enable (a) each actor on screen to react in turn and (b), as immediate aftermath, a kitchen-sink heart to heart between two characters, one washing up while the other dries.  Bill Oliver, whose first cinema feature this is, has a checklist approach to ‘issues’.  Nicky’s mother is devoutly religious and his sister already divorced:  these things are mentioned but weightless.  The same goes for what sounds as if it should be a psychologically important revelation.  Nicky and Gabriel intended to have two children, each of them the biological parent of one child, but the surrogate mother pregnant with Gabriel’s baby miscarried.  The film conveys no sense of how this trauma informs Gabriel’s attitude to his marriage and to Owen.

Even with a continuing theme like Nicky’s work commitments, there’s little evidence of actual conflict between these and his caring for Owen single-handed, once Nicky has kicked Gabriel out of the brownstone – though at one point Owen gets angry and upset because there’s no milk in the fridge.  Is milk the best Oliver and Peter Nickowitz can come up with?  Couldn’t they have chosen a favourite food of Owen’s that Nicky himself was less likely to need to use?   It may be a mark of social progress that the breakdown of a gay marriage can be the subject of a mainstream film drama.  Well over forty years after Robert Benton’s Kramer vs Kramer (1979), Our Son is not a creative advance, though:  it’s just an enervated version of K v K.  I wasn’t a fan of Benton’s movie but at least Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep made the Kramers’ courtroom battle for their son theatrically exciting.  In Our Son, the judge (Ramsey Faragallah), once he’s listened to opening arguments, tells Nicky and Gabriel they’re ‘both grown men’ and adjourns the hearing, giving the parties a further month to try and work something out.  Nicky suddenly decides he isn’t a proper father to Owen and throws in the towel; Gabriel is so moved that he agrees to 50-50 after all; as the hearing reconvenes, the two men embrace and the court’s work is done.

At least too, in Kramer vs Kramer, the domestic scenes between Hoffman’s Ted Kramer and his son, Billy (Justin Henry), are often entertaining, and Justin Henry is engaging.  Everyone in Our Son keeps going on about how adorable Owen is but he’s a moody moaner from the word go.  To be fair, he has been taught by a master in endlessly weepy Gabriel.  I’d not seen Billy Porter before; he’s competent in the role but wholly unsurprising.  It’s true he’s at a disadvantage in that he has more lines than Luke Evans, which means more bad lines.  (Porter does get off more lightly, though, in the talking-to-family strand of the narrative:  Gabriel has a conversation about the break-up just with his mother (Phylicia Rashad).)   Relying on Nicky’s face as much as on words to express his feelings, Luke Evans is the best reason for staying with the film.  After deciding to give up the custody battle, Nicky meets a much younger man (Isaac Cole Powell) in a club and takes him home; they spend the night together but it’ll clearly be just the one night.  There’s something persistently conflicted about Nicky, including his conscientious but failed attempts to be a family man.  This comes through quite affectingly in the film’s closing scene, where Nicky meets Gabriel to hand Owen over for his next chunk of time with his other father.  Gabriel now has a new partner (Bryan Terrell Clark) and they invite Nicky to join them for food.  He politely says no and walks home alone.

Nicky’s trust in his attorney, Pam (Robin Weigert, very likeable), takes root in their first meeting as Pam recalls how her own, still happy, same-sex marriage came about.  Nicky and Gabriel’s circle of friends are all gay or lesbian.  The first scene in which we meet them as a group features one of the few remarkable things in the film – this viewer found it remarkable, anyway.  The gathering includes, as well as Matthew and his new partner (Alfredo Narciso), another male couple (Francis Jue and David Pittu) and a female couple, who announce they’re having a baby.  Adele (Cassandra Freeman) will give birth but it’s her wife Claire (Liza J Bennett) who lets the gathering know that ‘it’s a girl but we’re keeping it gender-neutral’.  I honestly didn’t realise that some people now consider ‘assigning’ sex at birth unhelpful in principle – that is, not just in cases where the person concerned eventually decides their ‘authentic’ gender identity is different from their assigned sex.  But that’s what Claire’s words imply and no one else in the group takes issue with them.  In a couple of subsequent scenes, though, the idea is treated more humorously – Claire suggesting a series of gender-neutral forenames, Adele amused by this but asking why they can’t take a gamble and opt for Sheila.  When Adele finally gives birth, Claire concedes, with a smile on her face, that Sheila it is.  I guess a disagreement of this kind could be between a husband and wife in a straight marriage; even so, I couldn’t help wondering if it might be a basis for an LGBTQIA+ comedy more distinctive than the weedy drama Bill Oliver has cobbled together.

Our Son will have been the last film I see in BFI’s NFT1 before it closes temporarily for refurbishment; it’s also the first film during which I’ve ever had the courage to speak my mind about an audience member’s mobile phone.  I sat, as usual, in an aisle seat in Row M.  There was a group of twenty-somethings – four or five girls – in the seats to my immediate left.  At one point, the girl next to me and the girl next to her both had their phones on but my immediate neighbour turned hers off and didn’t turn it back on.  The other girl was different; when her screen lit up for about the fourth time, I leaned over and said quietly, ‘Excuse me, but why do you think the instruction to turn phones off doesn’t apply to you?’   I think I was as surprised as she was but it worked.  She muttered something and put her phone away for the duration.  But although I’m glad I spoke up I must admit I had a sneaking sympathy for this girl’s need for supplementary entertainment.  The big screen in NFT1 was showing a truly feeble film.

20 March 2024