The Mattachine Family

As earnest as it is vapid, The Mattachine Family takes an awfully long time to say not very much about gay families and gays with babies. It desperately wants to be both amusing and heartwarming, but is neither. We get all the by-now-standard diverse gay movie stereotypes - the mixed-race lesbian couple, the flaming Asian best friend, etc. It's supposed to be finger-on-the-pulse contemporary, but actually feels depressingly seen-it-all-before. Nico Tortorella plays Thomas the gay husband who is tortured about whether to be or not to be a father. We're clearly meant to find Thomas endearing, but I mostly found him infuriatingly self-centred and Tortorella's performance annoyingly mannered. The notion of fatherhood for Thomas revolves entirely around personal fulfilment, with not even a second's thought given to what might be good for a child. Which left me really wishing he'd get a dog and not subject some poor kid to his emotional neediness. I should have trusted my instincts and switched off when the first 15 minutes made it grindingly obvious where it was all going, but I hung in there, hoping to be surprised. I wasn't.

The film centers around the realities of being a LBGTQ family, with adoption, work, friendship, and sacrifice all being addressed in the film. The main plot of the movie is the story of Thomas, who is struggling with himself, deciding to follow his heart and move forward with the life he wants, or to sacrifice his dreams and go to be with his husband in order to keep his marriage together. The character of Thomas in the movie is really very emotional, so I didn't particularly empathize with him. Then there's the fact that the dramatic conflict is predictable the first time it unfolds in the movie, so I wasn't sure what I was expecting when I watched it. One thing to say though, Juan Pace's face really wowed me and there were some familiar figures in the movie, Emily Hampshire and Garrett Clayton.

The only thing that moved me in the movie was a part of Thomas' narration, "I've only loved three people in my life, and when people talk about this kind of thing, the implication is that love is finite, but love is supposed to be infinite, and that love can stretch out into eternity, like the starry sky that stretches out at night. My first love was Sam, who was a journalist when I met him in college. He took me hiking and made love for the first time. The next morning he slept next to me and I said his name over and over again like I was praying, Sam, Sam, Sam, the universal name. Years later he got cancer and passed away quickly, I didn't know it until months later, but my love was still there, just like the dream I had the night before. The second was Oscar, my best friend and my husband, a name that came with absolutely no rightfulness. The third is Arthur, not my son but more than my son. When everything in life is a mess, and I think to myself how can this be, I think of a poem I read that reminds me of what I should really be doing, that everything disappears sooner or later and too soon. Tell me, what are you going to do with one wild and precious life? I don't know what the future holds, I just know that it's definitely not going to be the only one, there's going to be a wilder and infinitely more precious choice, and that's what life is all about."

Ps: Favorite soundtrack from the movie: Surplus - Spectre Jones.

When a film feels it has to beat its message to death to get it across, it loses much of its effectiveness, and that's very much the case with director Andy Vallentine's debut narrative feature. The picture tells the story of an upscale Los Angeles gay male couple, Thomas (Nico Tortorella) and Oscar (Juan Pablo Di Pace), who become foster parents to a six-year-old boy (Matthew Jacob Ocampo) whose drug-addicted mother (Colleen Foy) is incarcerated. But, when mom is released from prison, she wins back custody of the child to raise as her own, a development that tears Thomas apart. His anguish is exacerbated by many of his LGBTQ friends becoming parents and Oscar's lack of interest in fostering another youngster, causing a serious rift in their relationship. To its credit, the premise behind this comedy-drama is admittedly refreshing for a work of gay cinema, but its execution misses the mark due to its unoriginal, undercooked, redundant screenplay. For instance, some of the humor is decidedly catchy, but much of the basic dialogue sounds like it could have been pulled from episodes of Queer as Folk. And then there are the trite characters and scene settings, many of which resemble entries from the Big Book of Gay Stereotypes, a lazy approach to telling this picture's story. What's most tiresome, though, are Thomas's endless laments about losing custody of his foster child and his indecisiveness about how to resolve his despair, script elements that become irritatingly circular and repetitive. Even the title is somewhat problematic in that it could easily be interpreted in several ways, several of which could be taken as misleading (which I'm certain is not what was intended). In short, despite this production's attempts at doing something inventive and different, "The Mattachine Project" is nevertheless one of those projects that clearly should have gone through a few more rounds of revisions and rewrites before being committed to celluloid.

Acting was amazing, story was on point and relatable for lgbtq+ families looking to start. During a Q&A the writer brought up that families aren't just an accident in our community, they are heavily thought out and planned. This film shows that.

I do wish they end of the movie wasn't an over shoulder shot, seemed like it was a reshoot and the actor wasn't available. I understand what they tried to do, but it felt forced and cheap to be honest!

I would see this move over and over again once it is more available after festivals.

Thank you for making a movie like this on a subject that is hard for couples to find information on.

The Mattachine Family

I'm not sure what other reviewers saw but I sense this movie has got exaggerated marks due to a whole array of tick boxes, gay, children, emotional context, stable relationships and setting the movie in the sun.

At best it was a TV movie, the script was mush, entirely predictable and seemed to have an agenda that children are required to have a fulfilled relationship.

The music grated throughout it was so annoying!

After all this strange meandering the movie concluded that gay people collected together form their own family. I felt they overplayed Oscar's resistance to have children, if it was all so important, you were in a solid relationship, you had the time and the money you would agree to it.

I'm giving this a 3 outta 10, I never want to see this tripe again.