Let me start at the beginning, which I have heard is a very good place to start. It’s just that it gets a little bit complicated with Spoiler Alert, the tearjerkingly effective new romantic dramedy from The Big Sick director Michael Showalter, as the beginning turns out to be the ending only to ouroboros itself back to its start.
Starring Jim Parsons (The Big Bang Theory) and Ben Aldridge (Fleabag) as Michael and Kit (yes, Knight Rider jokes happen), a couple whose life together gets upended by the latter’s cancer diagnosis, you could say that Spoiler Alert doesn’t play it straight… but that might be one gay pun too far. Let’s just say I was happily impressed (when I wasn’t bawling my eyes out) by the meta touches and offbeat moves this movie decides to make when it could’ve easily been far lazier in its choices.
What’s Spoiler Alert about?
Credit: Focus Features
Based on Michael Ausiello’s memoir, Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies, the film follows uptight workaholic Michael, who finds love when a coworker drags him reluctantly to jock night at the bar. Once there, Michael immediately locks eyes with the dreamy Kit (Aldridge), who’s confidently dancing with his bestie Nina (Nikki M. James). Conversation quickly loosens them up (Kit laughs in all the right places), and before you know it, there’s romance. And it’s not just a jock-bar house beat throbbing in the air.
The boys take it pretty slow all things considered, which is to say that Kit and Michael go their separate ways that first night of meeting cute, and then take their time getting to know each other. But the movie skips confidently forward in time to display their walls coming down. Michael’s feelings of inadequacy and Kit’s troubles with commitment both seem to dissolve in one another’s presence, and there’s a genuine sweetness in watching them discover the best parts of themselves through one another’s eyes. Kit even manages to finally come out to his parents (played by Sally Field and Bill Irwin) thanks to Michael’s steadying presence. And before you know it, closets are being cleared, years are passing, eyes are wandering and tempers flaring…
But let us, like the film, step back a moment. Because before a single iota of Michael and Kit’s romance has been delivered unto us, before the jock parties and coming-outs, and before the heady stuff of a long life lived together coming undone, the film has already flash-forwarded to its unhappy diagnosis denouement. Right up front, Spoiler Alert blankets its banter and antics with the ghoulish specter of grief perched ahead, an unwelcome ghost of Christmases Future. (Sidenote: This is 100% a Christmas movie.) From one angle, this entire movie could be framed as a death dream, a paroxysm of a brain as it blinks out — the gay (well gayer) All That Jazz.
That’s perhaps a lot of Brechtian existentialism to pin on this big-hearted, old-fashioned, and sometimes too-sitcommy-for-its-own-good little drama. But all of that is what the film’s title itself refers to: the “Spoiler” being the oncoming sickness. It’s a film that steps outside of itself to comment on itself on more than one occasion. So why not? It is, after all, strained of me to criticize a movie for being “too sitcommy for its own good” when it uses an actual sitcom within its narrative as a storytelling device. Screenwriters David Marshall Grant and Dan Savage (yes, that Dan Savage) haven’t gone quite so far as to craft the self-referential equivalent of what Scream did for slasher movies, but Spoiler Alert is acutely aware of other tearjerkers, both in form and content. See the Terms of Endearment reenactment that’s featured prominently in the film’s trailer, or the casting of Steel Magnolia’s Field as another bereft mother.
Spoiler Alert’s circular structure gives this love story its oomph.
Credit: Focus Features
Spoiler Alert might tell us its ending up front, but it does so in the same way a magician uses a waving hand, directing our attention one way so it can sneak into our hearts around the back side. You might even say — if you were speaking to your film studies professor, anyway — that there’s a queering of the heteronormative structure happening here, with the surface layer of the story we’ve seen a million times gaining new meaning through a freshly flipped perspective. And given the fact that this is a mainstream gay romance between two men, it’s safe to say some “queering” was called for.
Still, Spoiler Alert could’ve just taken the easier route, plunking two dudes down into the straightforward story we’ve seen Julia Roberts and Campbell Scott play out for us before, and probably been just fine for it. But it would have ended up being a little less weird, less surprising, and ultimately less moving without the little risks it does take, so I give props to Spoiler Alert for not just being that.
I haven’t read his memoir, but the fact that Michael Ausiello is a real-world, internet-famous writer who got his start recapping television shows — the modern equivalent of every rom-com heroine working at a fashion magazine, for sure — seems to have given this story its meta-fictional out. Our narrator being a person who made his name deconstructing the ways storytellers have previously told stories makes Spoiler Alert’s playful form make sense. This is Ausiello recapping his love story, with the benefit of hindsight and the curlicues of creative touches.
If all of that sounds distracting, I promise you the film itself goes down smooth and straightforward enough in practice. If you’re just looking for a good tearjerker, Spoiler Alert will jerk your tears but good. There was a quiet moment late in the film where the communal sound of the sniffling, sobbing audience surrounding me reminded me why we should still have access to movies that aren’t about superheroes at the multiplex. Let us get our cry on together, studios!
Setting up its destination at the front allows the film the freedom to take its time making us first fall for Michael, Kit, and Michael and Kit together, before we get where we know we’re going. And that tension at the back of our minds is enough to lend the familiar romantic fumblings real weight beyond broad (if true to life!) gags about a bedroom full of Smurf toys killing the mood.
Spoiler Alert is a romance topped by two fine performances from Jim Parsons and Ben Aldridge.
Credit: Focus Features
As Michael, Parsons is softer, sweeter, and more endearingly goofy than I’ve seen him before. He grows on us pretty fiercely as this love affair opens him up. But Aldridge steals the whole film. His Kit is impossibly easy to fall for with all that charm and a big smile, while still being full of contradictions and difficulties that make themselves known as the first blushes of affection deepen and we watch the two men navigate the path of life lived together. Spoiler Alert sees the short and the long-term with equal clarity, sussing out the transition from one to the other that can sometimes happen without us even noticing. Plus, the film understands how we feel once we realize we crossed that threshold three weeks back. And then what the hell do we do with all of this now that it’s here?
Of course, all of that’s wiped away once mortality smashes itself through the door. Time upended, fractured start to finish. What’s best about Spoiler Alert are the moments when it pauses to take stock of necessary silences, which I was thankful Showalter is smart enough to do on multiple occasions.
In particular, there’s a scene played without words at a transformational moment in the story, where Michael and Kit react to real bad news by taking photographs of one another as their stiff lips crumble. That says enough about genuine intimacy for a dozen films: the deep comfort between these two people; their ability to speak encyclopedias of emotion without saying a word. The movie nails it. And as we look at the news and see LGBTQ+ people being gunned down for simply loving in public spaces, perhaps we could all use our own transformational moments of silence — and love stories like Spoiler Alert that keep telling us to keep loving until somebody sees us, and somebody listens.
Spoiler Alert opens in select theaters Dec. 2, expanding nationwide Dec. 16.