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Two men – one boyish-looking, one in his thirties – are in bed together dozing. They are joined by a third, also older, who puts an arm around both. It is with this attention-grabbing tableau that ‘The Houseboy’ begins. A number of questions about the terms of this apparently blissful ménage quickly arise. It emerges that Ricky (Nick May), the youngest third of the triad, has been rejected by his God-fearing mother and taken in by Simon (Brian Patacca) and DJ (Tom Merlino), whose Franciscan propensity for adopting waifs and strays means their apartment is full of fish, gerbils, and rescued cats. The motives of Ricky’s benefactors however - and their true feelings for each other and for him - remain a puzzle. The situation only grows more complex when, minutes before his boyfriends jet off to visit family for Christmas, Ricky overhears them bickering about ‘breaking it to him gently’ and ‘new toys.’ Left to housesit, Ricky has plenty of time to brood over what the future holds.
The ambiguities introduced in ‘The Houseboy’s’ first scene are never fully resolved. Simon and DJ figure only indirectly in the remainder of the film, which ends before their return. Writer/director Spencer Schilly proves to be admirably averse to up-front answers and straightforward exposition, opting instead for implication and the gradual accretion of hints and details. Thus, just like Ricky - newly out and new in town, still trying to find his place and work out what constitute norms in an unfamiliar world – viewers are required to work things out as they go along. Ricky is himself an enigma, prone to exaggeration, mood swings and outright lies, and viewers soon learn to take everything he says with a large pinch of salt. From his claims to be a painter to his take on Simon and DJ’s relationship, from his reminiscences of idyllic childhood Christmases to his repeated assertions that he plans to kill himself, Ricky’s flair for fabrication renders everything he says suspicious. Which is not to say he’s an unsympathetic character, just someone acutely unsure of where they stand or what they want. Ricky spends the movie testing different hypotheses about himself, casting about for a model to conform to. His rudderlessness is nicely conveyed by the scene where he leaves an answerphone message for DJ. Having berated DJ for his callousness and threatened to run off into the matrimonial sunset with Simon, Ricky listens back to and deletes the message, rejecting another draft script of his future.
Simon, for his part, is quick to dismiss Ricky’s troubles as growing pains, promising ‘everything will be okay.’ But it is not just Ricky who is in an awkward transitional phase; at 71 minutes ‘The Houseboy’ is itself awkwardly poised between a short and a feature, and certain aspects of the film suggest a cast and crew not yet fully in command of the medium or their abilities. While there is enough here that is strong to suggest everything may indeed turn out okay that does not excuse the film’s (numerous) failings. What might, for example, have worked as a shorter or a longer film often feels repetitious, diffuse, and underdeveloped. One cannot help but feel that focussing on a smaller range of characters and events or else fleshing out what is there a little more would have been preferable.
The film’s plot - such as there is - involves Ricky punctuating stretches of moping around the apartment with meaningless hook-ups, dividing his time between leafing morosely through an album of old photos and clicking through pictures of disembodied abs and such as he cruises for sex partners on the ‘net. The fact that he is caught between irreconcilable poles – the homely and the hedonistic, the intimate and the impersonal, a fondly-remembered past and a scarily uncertain future – comes cross loud and clear, but the film’s atmosphere is too often one of rock/hard place gridlock rather than knife-edge tension. The loose, episodic structure might ring true, but it nevertheless robs the film of any narrative impetus. As critics were quick to point out with regard to Sam Mendes’ ‘Jarhead’ (2005), an inherent pitfall of seeking to represent torpor and directionlessness is your movie risks being torpid and directionless.
That said, ‘The Houseboy’ is actually at its best when at its lowest key; the footage of Ricky vegging out, daydreaming, roaming the streets and goofing around to amuse himself is often beautifully shot and powerfully suggestive of his ennui, isolation and immaturity. Wordless and vulnerable, Ricky - with his puppy dog eyes, his eagerness to please and the jingling, tag-like necklace he wears - really does resemble the pets he so resents being compared to. The film conveys his ‘natural’ lack of sophistication and street smarts with considerable subtlety and sensitivity.
‘The Houseboy’ tends to come unstuck, however, when drama is required. The more up-tempo things get, the more the film lapses into hollow histrionics. May’s acting can be stilted, the music is intrusively ominous in places and Schilly often overstates or needlessly reiterates information which the audience could be trusted to remember or infer. These regrettable tendencies intersect perfect storm-style with an excruciatingly heavy-handed shot of May staring fixatedly at a clown doll hanging from the Christmas tree as a dissonant drone telegraphs his imminent psychic collapse. The shot’s reprised later in the movie too, begging the question if Schilly had so little faith in his audience’s powers of intuition would not an intertitle reading RICKY IS CONTEMPLATING SUICIDE have done the trick?
Similarly, disappointing is the two-dimensionality of the characters who are not Ricky. It could be argued that this is intentional – after all, the film is about loneliness and the unknowability of others. It also returns repeatedly to the paradox of people’s being prepared to be sexually intimate but balking at attempts to make any kind of emotional connection. Ricky has no problems finding strings-free sex but struggles to find a confidante – his partners are exasperated, incredulous or freaked out when he starts talking about suicide, one of them attempting to reach out to him. But even taking into account what the film is trying to say about impersonality and the tendency of some gay men to hide behind stereotypes, it’s hard to excuse how thinly drawn certain figures are. Blake (Blake Young-Fountain) – a pretty, principled, mixed-race trainee social worker with ‘two moms’ - is too good to be true and too dull to emotionally invest in, regardless of the considerable charm Young-Fountain brings to the role. And the demoniac Dominic (Damian Fuentes) - who orchestrates orgies and distributes meth and smirks and broods and adenoidally barks his way through his scenes – is similarly flat. The film’s ending feels like a cop-out too, a hackneyed affirmation of the Christmas spirit which is gratingly out of keeping with the film’s general tone.
This is all the more disappointing given that ‘The Houseboy’ actually has some thought-provoking things to say about Christmas. The scene featuring a coke-addled ‘Santa-gram’ and his busty helper may be pure silliness, but it is indicative of Schilly’s engagement with questions of how sexual minorities lay claim to, subvert or negotiate new relationships with inescapable aspects of mainstream culture – pastiching or queering straight icons like Santa Claus being one tactic. ‘The Houseboy’s’ opening titles juxtapose cutesy images of snowmen and reindeer with a maudlin, piano-led soundtrack, setting the tone for a film which excels at revealing the melancholy dimension of festive iconography, and of kitsch in general. Ricky’s fond memories of childhood Christmases spent in the bosom of a church-going family make him feel all the more excluded, heightening his anxieties about how you ‘do’ homosexuality and how you’re supposed to reconcile it with ‘doing’ family. The ubiquity of Christmas stockings and wrapping paper also invites consideration of the dynamics of giving and receiving in Ricky’s relationships, foregrounding the material and emotional stinginess of most of the men he meets. Whether it’s drugs, time or sexual pleasure that’s at stake, Ricky’s partners prove far readier to take than to give.
Of course, such miserliness belies the goodwill message all those Christmas ornaments convey, and this discrepancy between signifiers of fellow feeling and evidence of anomie is central to the film. While Ricky takes things seriously – perhaps too seriously – those around him seem to revel in irony and knowing frivolity. Hence the ‘kitsch explosion’ of DJ and Simon’s apartment, with its ceramic Labradors, plastic gewgaws and gaudy seasonal decorations. O.T.T. tat functions in ‘The Houseboy’ as a synecdoche for camp in general, for the wider practice of cultivating an air of jaded cynicism or perma-smiling flippancy. Such defence mechanisms are, Schilly suggests, an entirely understandable response to an often-hostile culture and an unforgiving sexual marketplace. They are risky, though, and the film reveals how they open the door to a world where sensation replaces emotion and communication is obstructed by formulae and clichés. This is most chillingly apparent in the scene in which Ricky finds a boy sobbing in a bathtub, shut out from an orgy because he is so high, he can’t get a hard on. The boy initially asks Ricky for Viagra but then asks if he will kiss him and say that he loves him – “if somebody kisses me it usually gets hard.” Ricky initially balks, complaining, “can’t I just jerk you off?” but complies. The film’s critique of impersonal hedonism occasionally comes off as heavy handed, but here the portrayal of a world where saying it matters more than meaning it and lust has prevailed over love is affecting – all the more so for the omnipresent candy canes, snow globes and animatronic Santa’s.
One of the more unfortunate side effects of the film’s yuletide timeframe is that it invites less than flattering comparisons with Lynne Ramsay’s ‘Morvern Callar’ (2002). The two films have a lot in common: both feature a troubled and inscrutable young protagonist, Christmastime suicide attempts, domestic claustrophobia and generous helpings of sex and drugs. Both are also structurally indirect and meandering. That Schilly’s film lacks the finesse and the visual flair that Ramsay’s has going for it should be no surprise – after all, it also lacks the budget. But ‘The Houseboy’s’ incongruous feel-good ending and lapses into heartstring tugging also appear all the more grating next to the beautifully spare and restrained Ramsay movie. Despite the numerous blots on ‘The Houseboy’s’ copybook, those aspects of it which do work suggest there is every reason to believe Schilly will produce better-realised films than this. As it is, the all-too obvious growing pains afflicting ‘The Houseboy’ can make it hard to fully engage with Ricky’s story.
Country: USA
Budget: £
Length: 71mins
Filmography
‘Morvern Callar’, 2002, Lynne Ramsay, Company Pictures
‘Jarhead’, 2005, Sam Mendes, Universal Pictures
Pub/2009
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