The embarrassment of riches in low-budget gay movies online - embarrassment, anyway - finds its typically problematic expression in All Over the Guy (2001). If good intentions were the end-all, this one would be stellar - a labour of love you could really love. Simultaneously engaging and plodding, this is a messily balanced one straight couple-one gay couple ensemble that sidesteps its most important asset: Richard Ruccolo's Tom. Tom is intelligent, conflicted, searching, pained - an under-achiever by aggressive choice. It's a justifiable reaction: against parents, against expectations of the world, against intimacy. With Tom, it's not just that still waters run deep. It's that they never stop churning. Ruccolo brings an mesmerizingly unsettled drive to his role: he offers imbues this picture with most of the true emotional motion it desperately needs. I wish the writer, Dan Bucantinsky, who also plays the lead role (Eli), had seen this and given up focussing so much on himself. It's Eli's movie, but it's Tom's world. My heart sank when Bucatinsky and the director, Julie Davis, kept glueing the narrative back onto the predictable path of Tom coming around to Eli. What the writer and director view as "damaged" is constantly undermined, in Ruccolo's performance, by a rational, three-dimensional complexity. The last scene is particularly egregious (spoiler alert). When Eli threatens to walk away one last time, the movie makes Tom leapfrog a huge kiss onto Eli. Watching this unconvincing surrender, we are jarringly reminded of all the other times when Tom has done the same, to disastrous effect. You think that what Tom would do here, for once, is not kiss Eli, but eventually plant his hand on Eli's and not let go, until Eli's hand yields in true understanding of the hard road ahead. It's not Eli who needs to show Tom the way, but the other way around. Being there, hand in hand, is what lovers are for, if our love is to last.
Review of All Over the Guy
