The 2014 Tribeca Film Festival turns a spotlight on LGBT themes, with no fewer than 10 films explicitly focusing on the subject. In the limited time I had at the Festival, I decided I had to see one of those films, both to evaluate how it treated sexual orientation and because of the compelling cast attached to it.
(Incidentally, two of the five “non-LGBT” movies I screened this weekend also had important sexuality-related storylines.)
Life Partners, from director and writer Susanna Fogel, co-written by Joni Lefkowitz, widens its scope beyond what many entries in the queer cinema genre typically tackle. The film explores both lesbian and heterosexual partnerships while, at its core, remaining a tale centered on friendship. I found the movie to be an amusing, if by-the-numbers, romp through modern-day relationships of several sorts.
Life Partners tells the story of two best friends — one gay, one straight — searching for love while on the verge of turning 30. When Paige, played by Gillian Jacobs, meets Tim (Adam Brody) and their relationship begins to turn serious, Leighton Meester’s Sasha finds herself competing for the attention of the woman who had been the anchor of her life.
As the push-and-tug of this dynamic unfolds, the girls’ two friends, Jen and Jenn, engage in endless catty behavior that sends waves through the community’s all-too-interconnected lesbian scene. Gabourey Sidibe is Jen, self-assured and with an affinity for neon-colored plastic-frame eyeglasses. Beth Dover plays “Two-N Jenn,” the annoyingly clueless, comic-relief, Karen-from-Mean-Girls character found in too many female-centric movies. The Jens provide a few laughs, a B-plot or two, and a conflict that nudges the story toward resolution, but they are not well-fleshed-out roles — nor are they particularly original or funny as secondary characters.
Two Saturday Night Live veterans, Abby Elliott and Kate McKinnon, give delightful turns as over-the-top lesbians who find themselves entangled with Sasha and the Jens. Both actresses play their parts well, with Elliott in the meatier role. McKinnon especially nails the comedy as an absurdly aggressive and confident tomboy.
The structure of the story throws very few surprises our way. All the requisite hurt feelings, misunderstandings, and readjustments to new situations are there. Paige and Sasha’s character flaws are not as run of the mill, however, and the development they experience to overcome those shortfalls is satisfyingly scripted.
Paige demonstrates just how large the gulf between the two friends has become when she attempts to set Sasha up with a coworker. The scheme goes predictably wrong, and Paige shows herself to be less interested in Sasha’s happiness than in fixing all the “problems” around her. Many relationships have a “fixer;” Paige has the tendency to direct the narrative of all those in her gravitational pull, introducing friction into her interactions with Sasha, Tim, and even her neighbor (Mark Feuerstein).
For her part, Sasha must overcome her codependency on Paige before she can pursue a serious romantic connection. That tendency to codependence is reinforced by Sasha’s knack for repeatedly finding herself with women who still live with their parents. In fact, though Sasha does not live with her own parents, she does enjoy their continued financial support as she clings to a long-held — and potentially outgrown — aspiration to be a musician. The safety nets provided by her parents and Paige have prevented Sasha from stepping through that last rite of initiation into adulthood.
The Paige/Sasha friendship is a nice window into the sort of female relationship we don’t often get to see on film. Unfortunately, the chemistry between Jacobs and Meester never quite clicked for me. It seemed as if the two women were acting at each other, delivering lines back and forth with a playful, self-conscious twinkle in their eyes. Clearly, those involved with the movie had fun making it, and that translates into a film that’s also fun to watch. But in this instance, camaraderie does not equate to cohesion.
The central success of Life Partners is that it is a film about lesbians without being a lesbian film. I am far outside my depth, being a heterosexual, cisgendered male, to pontificate on the state of the portrayal of lesbians in modern media. Perhaps some LGBT activists will be disappointed that this movie is not more blatantly pro-gay.
For my part, I appreciated the respectful characterization of Paige and Adam’s connection as well as the lesbian-positive perspectives. Countless Lifetime movies have demonstrated how easy it is to demonize the males in a girl-power flick, but Life Partners studiously avoids the trope.
While I may poke holes in some of the other unoriginalities and the stilted interplay of the actors, Fogel and Lefkowitz have created consistent, realistic characters with flaws that are nuanced and familiar to all. Those accomplishments, combined with the refreshing nonchalance toward lesbianism in all its varieties, make Life Partners a film that will tell an important story about growing into a mature adult, capable of both independence and commitment, to many young women regardless of their sexuality.