Uncoupled - a movie review

Neil Patrick Harris in Uncoupled

A playwright friend of mine once staged a reading of a play of hers in progress. She's a very close friend and normally I'd go out of my way to say nice things when asked for an opinion. But she said this was a work in progress and wanted honest criticism, no matter how harsh. I hesitated, even then, worrying about crossing the line into unkindness, but I gave her what she asked for. I told her the play was about people I couldn't get myself to care for. It was about rich people and their problems. What I want to see on the stage is something with universal appeal. Rich people's problems that are also poor people's problems, by all means. But rich people's problems that are only rich people's problems, no way.

I revisited that response last night while watching the 2022 Netflix production, Uncoupled. It's a product of Darren Star, who gave us Sex and the City. At the risk of again going over the line from constructive criticism into unkindness, I have to tell you, until I learn more about him, I'm inclined to think of him as a writer with only one story in him. Uncoupled is Sex and the City. It's just that he replaced all the women with gay men before taking it for a spin. The story line is unoriginal, predictable, and tortured. Uncoupled stars a gay hero of mine, Neil Patrick Harris, and I give him credit for stretching his acting skills here to include some raunchy near-naked romping around with one-night stands and setting the story in the world of Grindr and Tinder, complete with dick-pics. What I admire about Harris the man is the beautiful image he portrays as a gay married man with kids. And the fact that since making a splash as Doogie Howser his career has risen steadily, even to include hosting The Academy Awards. The fact that he chose to play a character so out of sync with that image does him credit.

Besides his convincing acting, there are some laugh-out-loud lines. But that about exhausts what I have to say about the film that is positive. Who, I'd like to know, gives a hot damn about a bunch of shallow rich New Yorkers having a bad day now and again? Harris plays Michael, a man whose husband, Colin, played by Tuc Watkins (Hank, from the recent remake of Boys in the Band), walks out on him after seventeen years of living together, and never quite figures out - right up to the end - that the fact he's a lousy self-involved listener might have something to do with the walk-out. Colin, too, remains largely inarticulate, says only that he "needs some time" and the two never seem to figure out how to put their problems into words. The Harris character makes his living talking other rich folk into buying what he has to sell. When he's not stroking egos to sell prestige addresses, he's socializing with friends who exploit each other's insecurities.  It's a movie about a pile of spoiled brats, the kind of people who live high off the hog and then, when it's over, sink into self-pity.

I get that it can't be easy to satirize superficial people without leaving an audience with a bad taste in their mouths.  Satirizing rich people ought to be like shooting fish in a barrel. But after a time, even Claire in action, the character probably written to be the most obvious object of satire, the character who illustrates how easily people allow themselves to be abused by the wealthy, burns out and simply becomes tiresome.  And again, as with Patrick Neil Harris, the character is well played - by Marcia Gay Harden.

Only occasionally does the film move beyond aggressive sex-centered acts by people making themselves look good while putting others down. Mostly it dashes from one gay stereotype to another, the nobody-loves-an-old-gay pity party, the importance of appearances over reality, the need to measure friendship on the strength of how useful people are when you want something from them.

That said, if you can summon the kind of motivation that drew folks into the cinemas of yesteryear to watch glamourous people parade themselves fashionably across the stage, to escape for a couple hours the reality of their own ordinary dull lives, you can probably get yourself in the right headspace to enjoy what this film has to offer - some genuinely guffaw-generating moments. It's not that bad. It's just that, with a conspicuous absence of heroic characters or interesting villains, it doesn't have that much to offer.

A for acting, B- for character development, C for plot line.

photo credit: Barbara Nitke/Netflix