Review: Our Son (2023)
“It must be hard fighting for the right to marry and then just ending up in a divorce court like everyone else.”
What happens when your not-so-nuclear family goes nuclear? For queer families, these questions may not be different than the ones straight families ask, but the stakes are higher. Family takes on another deeper meaning when you have to overcome such imposing obstacles: structural, societal, and personal, to create yours. But infidelity, jealousy, and resentment do not discriminate. They are present in all families, and in Bill Oliver’s second feature film Our Son they are on full display.
With a pared-down style and a restrained directorial approach, Oliver attempts to right the wrongs of past films in the genre by centering around a gay couple while they tackle what has become the most normal of family issues: divorce. Our Son tells the story of Gabriel (Billy Porter) and Nick (Luke Evans) as they separate and battle for custody of their eight-year-old son, Owen (Christopher Woodley). The audience swiftly meets this picture-perfect family with their well-worn routine and upper middle class social circle, before realizing that there’s trouble in paradise. Isn’t there always? Gabriel is unhappy, he confesses to cheating on Nick, and before Nick can stop him, Gabriel files for divorce.
For Nick and Gabriel, starting a family was not as simple as it is for straight couples. It required dedication, resources, and a strong support system to build the life that is now unraveling. When Nick finally meets with a divorce attorney, we learn that although Gabriel has been Owen’s primary caregiver and stay-at-home parent, Nick is his biological father. His biological mother, whose egg they used and then implanted in a surrogate, is a friend of Nick’s from college. The grief of divorce is paralyzing for anyone, but how does it feel to spend so much time, energy, and love creating a family, a life, and a marriage that was previously impossible, only to have it slip through your fingers?
Nick’s nephew Max directly states this about halfway through the film, when Nick comes clean to his family about the dissolution of his marriage: “It must be hard fighting for the right to marry and then just ending up in a divorce court like everyone else.” Though this scene and the film’s premise raise many interesting questions, it answers few of them; preferring to let the audience ponder them. Any good work of art forces the audience to ask more questions than it answers, and Our Son is good for this reason and for many others, but it also left me unsatisfied.
The film goes to great lengths to make Gabriel and Nick as “normal” as possible, while also calling attention to the fact that their family is not the norm. At the film’s outset, we see that this family’s structure is nearly identical to what most people would define as normative. Gabriel is a stay-at-home parent, primarily responsible for raising their son and caring for their family. But he harbors resentment for shouldering this burden and looks outside their marriage for excitement and comfort. Nick works a high-pressure and high-paying job that supports their more than comfortable Brooklyn lifestyle, but hasn’t the time to be a present partner or father. Their family roles are so starkly defined and so closely modeled after a typical suburban straight family, that the only thing that sets them apart is their sexual orientation and gender.
Their struggles mirror those of families we’ve seen fracture in the media for decades. From Kramer vs. Kramer to Marriage Story, there are countless representations of American families navigating the treacherous waters of divorce and estrangement in film and television. And Our Son is no different. Or, if you ask me, it’s not different enough. Gabriel must forge a new identity as an individual, not just as a husband and father. Nick must learn to step up as a parent and let go of the life and the marriage he wanted. Their story so closely mirrors those we’ve seen before, beat by beat charting the well-worn journey from rupture to reconciliation, that they begin to lose specificity or nuance. They are more archetypes than fully formed human beings, and the film opts for placid simplicity to its own detriment.
I understand the impulse to rectify the embarrassing dearth of queer representation in American media, and the desire to emphasize the equality of those families by showing an audience how “just like everyone else” they are. But that choice limits you as a storyteller and creates less space for the complicated, uncomfortable stuff that makes stories compelling. The film is admirable in many ways: the performances are honest and grounded, the supporting cast is superb, the filmmaking style is beautiful and humanizing, but none of that can make the story interesting.
It’s a difficult thing to square. On the one hand, queer families are of course more similar to non queer families than different, and yet there are aspects of the queer experience - whatever that means - that make them fundamentally different. The film does grapple with this in a handful of scenes, which are the film’s strongest. When Nick attends brunch with his friends post-separation, the group discusses coming out to their families and their relationships with their own parents, contextualizing the story in a deeper history of pain, rejection, and loss. When Nick and Gabriel talk with their own parents about the divorce, each has a beautiful scene in which they come to terms with how they have failed as partners even though they’ve succeeded as parents. These scenes allow the cast to shine and briefly allow the characters to live with the sticky contradiction of trying to be normal while also embracing the ways they are unique.
And in this regard, I speak from personal experience. I have two moms who raised me and my sisters and my biological father is also a gay man. My moms took great pains to include him and his ex-husband in our lives, making them an extension of our family. I share this because I know what it is to create a family that cannot happen by accident. It took years of work and jumping through hoops to make our family and my siblings and I carried this knowledge with us always. Though we lived in a very progressive city and knew several other families like ours, there was no shaking the awareness that we were different.
As I got older, I began to understand the ways my parents were conditioned, and conditioned us, to make ourselves “acceptable” to the rest of the world, while still trying to celebrate what made us different. The problem is, those two impulses are like oil and water and we inevitably had to make ourselves smaller to fit into the narrow box of normativity. We marched at Pride and never had to hide the truth of our family, but in countless situations, we tailored the specifics of how we lived to make ourselves seem “normal”. So when I watched Our Son, it was not as an unbiased viewer. As someone who grew up in a family similar to the one portrayed, and similar to that of the filmmaker, I’m grateful this film exists. I resonate and identify with a lot of emotional truth that was given a showcase in the film, something that is still all too rare. But as grateful as I am to see a family like mine represented with such care, I’m hungry for the deeper truths of our stories to be shared. The scary ones, the ones without clear answers or acceptable faces. I want our flaws and mistakes to be celebrated as much as our achievements and better angels. We deserve imperfection more than we deserve normal. Normal is overrated anyway.
Our Son hits select theaters tomorrow, December 8, before a VOD release on December 15.