Movie Review – Sweet Home Alabama (2002)

Overall 2.0 / 5.0
Gay Content 1.5 / 5.0 (gay secondary character)
Gay Positivity 3.0 / 5.0

The movie is mediocre at best. The plot and characters fail to track. Protagonist Melanie’s (played by Reese Witherspoon) zigzag journey (from sweet to ugly to uncertain to enlightened) disconcerts and jars the viewer. Other characters, while charming, are all one-note. In fact, I wonder why the writer even gave them names instead of just descriptors: Good Guy Southern Gentleman Romantic Interest; Closeted Gay Guy; Flamboyant Gay Fashion Designer; Unpolished Southern Mother; Icy Elitist Politician Mother; and so on. Meanwhile, the lazy script forces a bittersweet ending by excluding the possibility of any alternative. The silly ending just re-emphasizes how the movie, and its leads, lacks chemistry and sparkage.

I am considerably more intrigued by the gay content in the film. It’s not that the gay characters had major roles. They didn’t. But I do observe two curious phenomena in this film. One is the re-visioning of small town, rural life as convivial to gay people. Second, even more fascinating, the good guy scores points by being gay-friendly.

In small town life is that, yes, everyone knows everyone’s business; but there’s also an extended family vibe. This movie’s re-visioned small town life posits that, yeah, Bubba might be a black sheep, but he’s OUR black sheep. Unfortunately, though that’s possible, it’s also unlikely, and the representation disingenuously glosses over a more hateful and destructive reality. I see this both ways. On the whole, I like positive, inventive portrayals that show a world that could be. Nevertheless, I find the Hollywood myth of the rural South very curious.

But the movie reveals a far more interesting theme when good guy Jake (Josh Lucas, channeling Matthew McConaughey) champions gay and recently outed Bobby Ray (Ethan Embry). First, let me emphasize, this is a positive theme. In fact, it’s WONDERFUL that the hero of the movie is gay-friendly and explicitly endorses being gay-friendly and, by extension, implicitly condemns homophobia.

Still. What does it say that the gay character requires endorsement by the popular straight character to be accepted? To a certain extent, this scenario disempowers the gay character.

Yes, it’s great that his straight compatriots accept and endorse him. But look at it this way. What the movie says is, “Hey, you can accept a gay guy in your social circle as long as he’s accepted by the popular guy (or, at base minimum, some hetero).” What if the popular guy in some social group doesn’t accept the gay guy? Will the rest exclude him? Or what if no one guy is brave enough to stand up and say, “Hey, let’s include him.” So no one does. Without that straight guy, the gay guy is disenfranchised and condemned to outsider status, without the agency to help himself.

Writer Sarah Schulman made an observation to Slate.com about the movie “Rent” (2005) which applies just as well in this case.

“In a time when people denied the existence of gays and lesbians, work that asserted that gays and lesbians existed with some minimum of human integrity could be coded as progressive. But since the AIDS crisis, most Americans personally know people who are openly gay. At this point, to simply represent or acknowledge that gay people exist is no longer inherently progressive, and to depict gay people as people who have no agency is retrogressive.”(1)

I love that Jake scores good guy points off Bobby Ray by defending him, a positive trend because it correctly postulates that homophobia is bad. But it also strikes me as exploitive. I might be less critical, though, if Bobby Ray didn’t encapsulate the disempowered Gay Eunuch stereotype.

He’s gay in name only; otherwise he’s sexless and powerless. As a gay eunuch, he’s not threatening. And that’s what bothers me about Jake scoring good guy points off him; he never really accepts Bobby Ray as a living, breathing gay man; and the audience never has a chance to accept him as such vicariously.

I maintain that straight men find gay men threatening because they worry, on some visceral level, that sexual gay men will do to them, what has been done to women: sexualize, objectify, and demean/disempower them. Consider the straight men who say they have no problem with gay men as long as the gay man doesn’t come on to them. If the gay men are gay eunuchs, it’s fine; they’re non-threatening. But as soon as the gay men evince a form of sexual power, they become a threat, and the straight man’s tolerance plummets. I’m glad that Jake accepts Bobby Ray and defends him; that’s positive. But Bobby Ray is like a genital-less Ken doll in the film, and I find Jake’s defense disingenuous because I don’t think he’s defending a real gay man, but instead a non-threatening facsimile.

But! This is also an artifact of the character of Bobby Ray, who’s more plot device than person. He exists for Reese to behave badly towards in one scene, establishing how low she’s sunk by becoming part of that hoity-toity New York society. Then he’s there for Jake to score good guy points later on. In between, he serves various plot-related functions. He’s never a real person.

Having considered all this, it certainly raises my eyebrows to learn that the scriptwriter, C. Jay Cox (who also wrote and directly “Latter Days” (2003), is openly gay (2); and that GLAAD nominated this movie for “Outstanding Film – Wide Release” in its 2003 Media Awards. But given a moment of reflection, it makes more sense. The category specifies a wide release film, and in all honesty, how many of those contain a notable (even if secondary) amount of gay content that is, at least superficially, genial and good-natured toward gay folks?

Overall, I can’t really recommend the movie on its own merits; it’s kind of just dumb. And as far as the gay themes go, while I like the character of Bobby Ray and I’m intrigued by the themes suggested by the movie, I’m ultimately underwhelmed.

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(1) June Thomas, “The lesbian writer Rent ripped off,” Slate.com, 23 November 2005, http://www.slate.com/id/21310171 (15 May 2007).

(2) Mike Goodridge, “Small-town boy: with Sweet Home Alabama, out screenwriter C. Jay Cox confronts his rural roots,” The Advocate, 1 October 2002, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1589/is_2002_Oct_1/ai_92084110 (15 May 2007).