Brotherly Love: will a gay man choose chastity or the hot gardener or
The Golden Girls?

REVIEW by Drew Rowsome

The Golden Girls can be read as a primer on continuing to exist as a sexual being as one ages. It is also side-splittingly funny as the girls quip, kibitz and insult each other with quicksilver comic timing. It is no wonder that it is a biblical text for gay men.

Brotherly Love uses The Golden Girls as a motif, referencing it frequently. It just can't decide whether the iconic television series is to be mocked or venerated. The first episodes of The Golden Girls aired 40 years ago and Brotherly Love posits that the fierce foursome are the current camp equivalent of what Judy, Barbra, Cher, Joan and Bette once were, though there are many of us who would argue that some icons never fade, they just have to be rediscovered.

Brotherly Love is a rom-com wherein Brother Vito Fortunato - played by Anthony J Caruso who also wrote, directed, executive produced and edited - has a crisis of faith and takes a sabbatical at an AIDS drop-in centre in Austin, Texas. The centre's gardener, Gabe Rimes played by Derek Babb, just happens to be a hunky, lonely and horny blond, freshly out of the closet and a marriage that was supposed to turn him straight. Which will win out: the vow of chastity or the man Vito loves?

We first meet the brother when he is vomiting in the street after a night at a gay club. The hurling just happens to occur in front of a XXX video store and the brother is abandoned by his uber-gay bff who just wants to pop in and get some cocksucking action. Fortunato invokes his vow of chastity (and presumably puke breath) as well as a fear of catching crabs. The bff, Chance McKee, fires off his first unfortunate but thematically resonant line,

It's been a long time since you got laid. Crabs are so 1992.

Vito is cruised by a hunky married man, William John Daley who is suburban rough trade right down to the SUV, scruff, prominent bulge and abs, and has Sirkian moments peering through a fence trying to resist. It is a promising if uneven beginning, but then McKee returns and the banter continues. Before Brotherly Love, I had no idea that snappy gay patter required such skill and timing. Now I appreciate the flair that Sean Hayes brings to Will & Grace. Without the right inflection and the speed, gay patter just falls brutally flat.

As if that weren't excruciating enough, Caruso makes the curious choice of underlining every one-liner with a reaction shot. Caruso has gorgeous soulful eyes that brim with emotion and are strikingly communicative. They are great for almost any acting chore except a double take. Later in the film he is compared to Bea Arthur, she is his Golden Girls spirit animal. It is a worthy aspiration, Arthur was a master of the arched eyebrow, eye roll and spit take, but in this case it has yet to be achieved. But even Arthur would have trouble giving a lift to a limp line like,

You tried it out and it didn't work. Kind of like Cher's infomercial career.

Brother Fortunato is an out, proud gay man and he spends lots of time at bars and cruising, even jerking off with a "porn star" at the gym. His calling is referred to vaguely as wanting to be more, to give back, to become whole. I may not be the right person to understand, all religions including Catholicism have always seemed bizarre to me, but Fortunato's dedication to the church seems very flimsy. And does the Catholic church actually recruit out gay men? All of the priests and brothers we meet are flamers. And very wooden actors.

Almost an hour into Brotherly Love, there is a minor miracle. The drop-in centre not only comes with a temptress gardener, it also contains three queens (alas, also wooden) and an older sage. David Blackwell as Joseph is a breath of fresh air. The character is a cliché but it is a good one. His camp references ring true. He puts zing into his patter. He invokes Harvey Milk and the glory of Mandy Pantinkin's butt in Yentl. He is believable as a human being. The subtext of Brotherly Love becomes clear. With age comes not only wisdom but also thespian skills.

Caruso seems to be longing for the days when gay mattered, when it was as institutional and ingrained as the Catholic church still pretends to be. The references fit well in the mouth of Blackwell, they breathe, but sound rote and off-key when declaimed by McKee and Caruso. Kudos for aiming for All About Eve, and there is little shame in not achieving lift off because our culture, gay culture included, has become so debased that a Kardashian reference is more apt to be understood than a reference to Neely O'Hara. Brotherly Love longs to recreate those glorious gay romantic witty films of the Hollywood golden era. And it mourns deeply, and causes deep mourning, that those arts are mostly forgotten.

That theme is driven home when we discover that Gabe lives cute in a trailer in the backyard of two elderly gay men who have been together for decades. Not only are they an example of what Vito and Gabe are clearly fated to be, they are also an example of how to sell an anecdote and how to be charming and funny instead of vaguely annoying. Steve Uzzell and Ed Pope never achieve the transcendence of Vicious Old Queens, but they make a valiant effort. They make us wish that they and Blackwell would find a fourth to create a gay Golden Girls so that we could watch them instead of the floundering romantic leads.

There are Italian jokes, a crude farting armadillo-killing Texan, a lesbian spiritual adviser who speaks more innuendo than scripture, and Brother Fortunato fits an entire wardrobe of tank tops with apropos comic sayings into one little travel drag bag. Laurie Coker makes an impression as a foul-mouthed force-of-nature lesbian (also conspicuously older) by injecting a lot of broad and crude slapstick into what is a broad and crude metaphor of a character. The final scene is a doozy and very clever, and by then I found myself oddly invested in the love story and quite touched. But that may have been sheer relief that none of the triumvirate of elder statesmen had been dispatched in order to provide pathos or a life lesson.

The most entertaining camp moment occurs towards the end. Caruso has doffed his shirt fairly consistently throughout Brotherly Love, treating us to lengthy perusals of his handsomely hirsute chest. Gabb obligingly strips down at one point as well to reveal a healthy hearty treasure trail and some finely framed areola. They are very sexy men. Then, the night before Fortunato's sabbatical is to end, they get caught in the rain and return to Gabe's trailer. After some hemming and hawing about the sins of the flesh, love, vows of chastity, blah, blah, blah, there is the sex scene we have all been waiting for.

The sex scene is derivative of internet porn with little foreplay before Gabe begins driving it home. They do remember to use a condom, Fortunato's religious training has not been for naught, safe sex and instantaneous anal receptivity. But, lo and behold, Caurso's chest is shaven to stubble and Gabe is as tragically smooth as a Bel Ami baby's bottom. Semi-explicit thrusting over, the pair sprawl sated on the bed knowing, as gay men who have just had sex always do, that their destiny is to be together forever, damn the church and the fact that they disagree on the merits of Yentl. God must approve of Fortunato's choice as there is a miracle: their chest hair grows back just like loaves and fishes or Lazarus from the dead!

IMDb doesn't list a credit for continuity for Brotherly Love. Presumably the poor soul shaved their head and joined a monastery or convent after being given the impossible task of matching the sex scene, presumably shot as a pick-up later in hopes of adding titillation to sell the film to a gay audience, to the footage already in the can. And that probably explains the problems with Brotherly Love. There is a very cute entertaining film in there, it just needed more time, ruthlessness, rewrites, more money, and editing out of redundant reaction shots, to make it what it could have been.

So if, like poor Gabe, you don't want to spend another night alone watching The Golden Girls, Brotherly Love is a slightly gayer option. And the lord will forgive you if you watch with one thumb hovering over the fast forward button to reach the grey-haired good parts (and the sex scene with subsequent miracle), or if you invite over an gay man of a certain age to talk back to the screen with some snappy gay patter of his own invention.