Was It Good For The Gays: ‘The Object Of My Affection’

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If you're going to make a movie about queer people, you're likely going to get a divisive response. Does it reinforce negative stereotypes? Does it provide an accurate cross-section of the diverse LGBT community? How many think pieces will it incite? In this regular column, we'll look at depictions of queers in cinema and ask, Was It Good For The Gays? Today we look at Nicholas Hytner's 1998 romantic comedy, The Object of My Affection.

Based on Stephen McCauley's novel of the same name, the film, written by Wendy Wasserstein (who was attached to the project for over a decade) and directed by Hytner, was a moderate box-office success despite receiving mixed reviews. It sets up a familiarly quaint plot that was later employed in the atrocious Madonna film, The Next Best Thing, and the truly funny Gayby: a straight woman and her gay best friend decide to have a baby together.

The film stars Jennifer Aniston as Nina Borowski, a Brooklyn-based social worker who comes from a privileged, wealthy background. It's at a party at the home of her step-sister, Constance, that she meets George Hanson (Paul Rudd), a handsome first-grade teacher who came to the party with his boyfriend Dr. Robert Joley, a social-climbing academic who's working on a book about British playwright George Bernard Shaw. It's at the dinner table that Joley suggests to Nina that George might be looking for a new apartment and could move into her spare room in her Cobble Hill apartment — which is all news to George, who learns of his imminent breakup from Nina. Humiliated, but without anywhere else to go, he accepts the offer.

The pair become fast friends, having similar backgrounds (both Nina and George feel out of place among their wealthy friends and family; Nina, a lowly social worker, does not meet her step-sister's expectations of her abilities, and George doesn't impress Joley or any of his friends with her job at a cooperative school) and interests. They hang around the house together, chat about their romantic lives — past and current (Nina is floored when George tells her he once slept with his high school girlfriend, Lucy Jane), and take a ballroom dancing class. There is some tension between George and Nina's boyfriend, Vince, particularly when Nina tells George that she's pregnant and would rather not raise the baby with Vince.

Eventually, the bond between the two becomes stronger, and Nina dumps Vince and asks George to raise the baby with her.

Of course, this is where it all becomes complicated. What begins as a platonic love between friends turns into something else, with Nina developing stronger feelings for George. And, honestly, who could blame her? If Paul Rudd, the world's ideal man — adorable, sensitive, fit in a way that always surprises me — were walking around in his boxers and an open button-down shirt, wouldn't you try to make a move?

And it happens: while cuddling, as a straight woman and a gay man always do, Nina and George kiss, and then suddenly Nina gets even more amorous and goes to take off his pants — but then they're blessedly interrupted by the phone, stopping the awkward straight-gal-on-gay-guy love scene we definitely don't want to watch. It's Joley, calling George to tell him he misses him, and inviting him on a weekend away to his alma mater where Joley is giving a talk on Shaw. It's there that George meets one of Joley's colleagues, the prickly and pompous Rodney Fraser, and his young companion, an aspiring actor named Paul. While George is obviously turned-off by his ex, he's definitely attracted to Paul, and the two quickly start dating behind Rodney and Nina's backs. Naturally, this complicates Nina and George's friendships, especially when everyone else makes it plain and clear to her what her problem is: she's fallen in love with someone who will never fulfill her in the ways she wants and needs.

By the end of the film, Nina realizes that she can't raise her child with George after all, and tells him so; she asks him to move out as soon as her daughter, Molly, is born. But an epilogue does feature all of the characters several years in the future, with a elementary school-aged Molly singing a solo in her school pageant directed by George, who is with Paul, but has a good relationship with Nina, who co-parents with Vince, even though she's dating a cop named Louis she met when she was mugged earlier in the film. It's one big happy family, which, admittedly, seems a little too feel-good Hollywood ending to seem realistic. (It was, after all, tacked-on after the original ending, similar to McCauley's novel, cut to credits after George and Nina break-off their friendship.)

Was The Object of My Affection good for the gays? Well, I don't know if it does much for us, as it's not a movie about a gay man — it's a movie about a single woman who has a gay friend.

It's worth examining the film and how the story was informed by screenwriter Wendy Wasserstein's own life. Wasserstein, who died of lymphoma in 2006 at the age of 55, was a celebrated playwright, winning a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony for her 1989 play The Heidi Chronicles. As Julie Salamon's entertaining biography of Wasserstein, Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wassersten, asserts, she also had a penchant for falling hard for her gay friends, a group of men with whom she surrounded herself as a theater professional — including fellow playwrights Christopher Durang and Terrence McNally, as well as André Bishop, who was the artistic director at Playwrights Horizons and later Lincoln Center (both theaters served as premiere venues for Wasserstein's plays). Part of her infatuation involved the desire to have children with the men around whom she was the most comfortable, and several times in her life she found herself frustrated that the men she admired so much did not return her affections.

Salamon writes that Wasserstein immediately had a crush on the film's director, Nicholas Hytner, who shared her background in the theater, having directed many widely acclaimed productions in England for the Royal Shakespeare Company (as well as the West End and Broadway smash, Miss Saigon). He was, of course, openly gay. The pair became fast friends, and she wrote in her diary that she wished to have an affair with him. Around the time they filmed The Object of My Affection, Salamon writes that Wasserstein "had been actively pursuing her quest to have a baby." (She succeeded, two years later, giving birth to a daughter named Lucy Jane — the same name as George's high school girlfriend in the film — although Wasserstein never publicly identified the father.)

In between the filming and her daughter's birth, The Object of My Affection opened and closed quickly to tepid reviews and modest box office returns. Both Hytner and Wasserstein were burned by the experience, especially since the studio forced a happy ending as opposed to the original, more realistic one.

All in all, The Object of My Affection is a sweet little movie that's well-written, directed, and acted. It was Jennifer Aniston's first meaty role compared to her previous romantic comedy offerings, and it was the first serious performance from Paul Rudd, who until then had only one substantial role under his belt — the teen comedy Clueless. Aniston and Rudd are both quite good. Rudd, in particular, offers the multi-layered version of a gay man — albeit seen through the eyes of a straight woman. He's sensitive and non-threatening, but he also actually goes after what he wants rather than exist solely to prop up the protagonist's character and stand alongside her as her lot develops. But don't get me wrong — this isn't exactly George's story, even if there are a handful of scenes in which he's existing without Nina around. The film does little to examine or offer a look into the gay male experience other than the typical stereotypes placed upon him that turn into silent indignities — he's asked for interior design advice from Constance, he's set up on a date with a completely mismatched suitor by his brother, and he's seen as a potential sexual object by Nina.

It's the kind of movie that barely allows for George to be homosexual, by which I mean actively having sex with men. Yes, there's some cuddling between George and Paul, but it's matched by an equal amount of snuggles between George and Nina. As I already said, the film is more about Nina's story than it is George's, but it still feels like the film plays it very safe and tame, with George being more asexual than he is homosexual as the target audience for the movie wouldn't be interested in seeing Paul Rudd made out and simulate sex with other men.

But at least it offers the best visual response for whenever I'm completely bored by whatever problems straight people drop on my plate:

Ultimately, I don't think this one was particularly good for the gays, but it also doesn't set out to assert an agenda at all. It's a romantic fantasy, especially given the fairy-tale ending with the perfectly unconventional modern family. But is it a terrible film? Absolutely not. It's dated, so obviously a late-'90s affair full of good intentions and missed marks. But there's something about Hytner's delicate direction and Wasserstein's smart dialogue that saves it from being a disaster.

Previously in Was It Good For The Gays:
But I'm a Cheerleader
Keep the Lights On
Philadelphia
The Birdcage
Brokeback Mountain
The Children's Hour
In & Out
Cruising

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Photos: 20th Century Fox

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