Spoiler Alert tries too hard to distance itself from the tragedy at its center
In Spoiler Alert, the hero dies—but the Jim Parsons-Sally Field film undercuts the emotional impact of its inevitable conclusion every chance it gets
Film Reviews Spoiler
To say grief comes in many forms is such an overwrought understatement that to trot it out at the start of a review feels like a cop-out. And yet Spoiler Alert, based on Michael Ausiello’s memoir by the same name (with the added clarification: The Hero Dies), made me think about the ways in which we cope with grief. Not just the grief over losing a loved one—which this film is very squarely about—but about the grief of losing parts of yourself whenever you’re in a long-term relationship. Or the grief of having said goodbye to how others once saw you as.
Grief, this tender-hearted tearjerker of a film seems to suggest, is an integral part of queer life. There’s no way of escaping its trappings even when you’ve successfully (or so you thought) built a life for yourself with a partner who loves you. The “yourself” in that sentence is Michael (Jim Parsons), a TV blogger/writer who seems to hit the jackpot when he meets Christopher “Kit” Cowan (Ben Aldridge, in what should be a star-making leading role). The two, in true Hollywood meet-cute style worthy of the film’s romcom-skewing first half, fall for one another despite obvious red flags. And then, more than a decade later, when a cancer diagnosis threatens to disrupt what was already quite a precarious relationship between Michael and his boyfriend Kit, it proves that sometimes all you need is love.
If such a premise sounds all too cloying, you should know that in that sense, Spoiler Alert is, in many ways, familiar and novel in equal measure. After all, since the 1980s, queer and straight filmmakers alike have been telling stories about romances interrupted and lives shortchanged due to illness. Yet, in telling a cancer story (rather than an HIV/AIDS one), the film sets itself apart from that cinematic lineage all the while joining a similarly robust one. And director Michael Showalter makes no attempt to disguise such a lineage. During a scene where Michael is tasked with “de-gaying” Kit’s apartment, we see a DVD of Beaches—the film where a pair of friends learn they’re one another’s wind beneath their wings—falling over a shelf before he scoops it up. Later, Michael himself channels Shirley MacLaine’s Oscar-winning turn in the tearjerker cancer drama Terms Of Endearment as he demands his husband (shush, it sounded more dramatic that way!) be! given! a! bed!
It’s in that familiarity that this adaptation thrives, achieving that “normalcy” American audiences so often clamor for when talking about contemporary LGBTQ cinema. Here is, after all, a “normal” couple tackling an unspeakable tragedy in slow motion in ways many others have before. And within that template, David Marshall Grant and Dan Savage’s script sneaks in often quite nuanced takes on gay male intimacy and the scars the closet has taken on these two otherwise well-adjusted gay professionals. Even the quiet moments Kit shares with his parents (played by the luminous Sally Field and the always-game Bill Irwin) are lovely and grounded, allowing us to witness the way in which Michael and Kit’s long-term partnership had turned them into a family.
Tonally, then, the only glaring misstep is the choice to depict Michael’s childhood as a 1980s family sitcom. This makes for a jarring juxtaposition with the grounded rhythms of the rest of the film. The scenes, which are designed to showcase Michael’s obsession with television’s tropes as coping mechanisms for how he understands his life, continually jolt the film out of any pathos it’s building toward. They feel gimmicky, almost, and come to detract from the emotional heft of the movie.
Ditto the moments when Spoiler Alert opts to (whether intentionally or not) reference another pop culture artifact Ausiello (writer and character alike) so adores: not just those soaps he used to watch as a kid but its primetime Shonda Rhimes-produced heir, Grey’s Anatomy. The film has so many montage/needle drop moments—including a head-scratching Robyn one!—designed to make you be in your feels that you wish Showalter would take a different approach toward balancing the moments of loss and anger and sadness and grief that are so threaded throughout this loving story.
Similarly, there is a choice late in the film that leans into that same meta-fictional/“my life is a movie set” conceit that feels so ill-conceived you wonder why the impetus toward short-circuiting the sentimentality of a deathbed scene feels so necessary for Grant, Savage, and Showalter. (Related: the less we talk about the casting of a certain notable celebrity in a crucial bit-part cameo with one devastating-yet-ill-delivered line, the better.)
But perhaps all these missteps are what help make Spoiler Alert feel so ruggedly endearing. When the film lets its guard down—namely, whenever Aldridge gets to deploy his charm as Kit or manages to let Field echo a weathered kind of Steel Magnolias screen presence—the film sings. Yet its attempts to distance itself from the very genre of a film it so clearly is (there wasn’t a dry eye in the house by the time I left my screening) end up shortchanging its impact. The film may not carry Ausiello’s entire title. But the desire to skip to the end, or, really, to pre-empt how you’ll feel knowing how it will end, is all over the way the film organizes itself—for better and for worse.
41 Comments
This book had me ugly crying, and I almost never cry. The only other time in recent memory when I cried was watching It’s a Sin.
michael showalter is becoming the most consistently inconsistent filmmakers out there. the baxter is an incredible first feature, the big sick was great, lovebirds stunk, eyes of tammy faye stunk, the shrink next door stunk, but then his work on the dropout was terrific. happy to see he’s still working so much but i have no idea what to expect from his projects. guess i’ll still check it out.also funny to see this coming out (from a dan savage script no less) so soon after ‘bros’ would have you believe it’s the only gay romcom to ever exist…meanwhile it’s the merely the 3rd most interesting one this year.
I thought Lovebirds was “fine” but in the context of being a comedy that debuted on Netflix.
yeah, they had me at Dan Savage script – frothy!
I’m so confused by this comment.The Baxter – 32% on rotten tomatoes = “incredible”Big Sick – 98% = a lower rating of “great” by you.Everything else pretty *consistently* about 60%It may be less about Showalter.. and more about your personal preferences. Nothing wrong with your judgment or experience of the films. Just wanted to point out… it seems to be more of a ‘your enjoyment’ thing than any sense of the work itself.
Also… if I’m less generous, I might suspect that you’re confusing screenwriting for filmmaking. And you’re basing your consistency rating on the the jokes/stories you like… which is only a part of what filmmaking is.
i’m confused as to what you’re confused by, and even more by your assessment of my thoughts. of course i’m talking about my own opinions and personal preferences. i’m saying i have no idea what to expect from a showalter project, because i’ve had such inconsistent responses to them.why would i be talking about a consensus from an aggregate review website? is that how you form your opinions?i even said i’d still check this out haha. but fr you should watch the baxter it’s one of my favorite movies of all time, hopefully you’ll allow yourself to watch something with rotten tomatoes score of 32%.
Man, I appreciate you making this comment to explain the concept of personal opinion, because after I read Barnes’s comment I was all set to do it myself.
That’s just, like, your opinion on personal opinions, man.
it’s a wild ride. don’t understand how you go from ‘your opinions confuse me because they differ from the critical consensus’ to ‘this has less to do with the filmmaker and more with how much you enjoy their work’ (which like…yeah?) to ‘you probably don’t even know what filmmaking is’.
When you write “Another person is inconsistent”…. that’s not a statement about you. Like… based on grammar.
I understand subjectivity a lot better than you write.
Yeah, it’s confusing when someone states an opinion without checking the aggregators.
also like, ‘consistently about 60% on rotten tomatoes’ doesn’t really disprove my point that those things stunk. 60% is bad on RT!
I upvoted your comment to aggregate it, and here the meta spiral begins.
If I say “Another person is inconsistent”… that’s not a formulation that implies it’s my opinion. “I find him hit or miss” does. “I’m never sure what to expect” does.But making a declarative statement about someone else… doesn’t really hint that you’re talking about yourself.I read dozens of comments that are clearly statements of preference. This one was not written that way.
Without a narrative it’s all experimental. And hey, Wavelength or Mothlight or Meshes of the Afternoon yourself silly, bud. I’m not stopping you.
Look at you, having to source your opinions out to the hive mind. Please for the love of god watch films and think about them for yourself, don’t just look at rt scores.
I mostly identify him with Wet Hot American Summer, but I just realized he didn’t direct it, but write it.
he seems to just say yes to everything. which, hey whatever! can’t fault that. he’s been in showbiz long enough.
*Showalterbiz
You didn’t like The Shrink Next Door? It was fantastic!
i wish it hit for me, i wanted to like it, but i found the whole thing pretty half baked. was one of those covid-era series, like pam & tommy, where i wish they’d either made it a more focused feature length film or a longer series. possible i’ll revisit it in a few years and love it, but i didn’t care for it.
I’m amused at the directional identifying of Sally Field and Jim Parsons in the header. They’re not exactly unknowns and easily confused with each other.
(L-R:) Sally Field and Jim Cusack in Spoiler Alert
The Big Spoiler Theory
Fatal illness? For a gay story? Groundbreaking.
Ah, but it’s a different kind of fatal illness!
Wait, Dan Savage co-wrote this?
Wonder if it involves the main character Dumping a MotherFucker Already because he doesn’t do oral before meeting the main love interest.
Yeah, you can tell because Parsons sets a pitbull on fire for no good reason. Seemed pretty ignorant to me!
HE IMMOLATED MR WORLDWIDE?
Remember when Michael Showalter specialized in parodies of junk like this?
if i had to guess wain was doing the subversive stuff and showalter added the heart on this one. his solo work is actually quite sappy and saccharine, even when it’s parodic.
“(Related: the less we talk about the casting of a certain notable celebrity in a crucial bit-part cameo with one devastating-yet-ill-delivered line, the better.)“Dr. Schwarzenegger steps into the oncology waiting room: “IT IS A TUMAAHH”
I was hoping that when it was discovered to be lung cancer, the lead would say, “But how?!?! How did I get lung cancer?” and Jim Carrey would pop his head in and say “SMOKING!!!!”
Sadly, time’s winged chariot has robbed us of the possibility of Wilford Brimley announcing the character also has “DIABEETUS!”
excuse me, i believe you mean, “THE diabeetus!”
Kanye? Dr. Anthony Fauci?
I am hoping for Oprah, and his hospital bed has a car under it.
Knowing The AV Club it’s either gonna be Mel Gibson or Dave Chappelle. They say celebrity and not actor so fuck it Rolf Harris is gonna be the dude.
Parsons was brilliant on Big Bang, would like to see this though not really my cup of tea normally.
Can’t believe that the certain notable celebrity was the one, the only Ashley Marie Arnold. (I’ll be honest with you, I checked the cast list on IMDB and I don’t know who’s irked them.)