'Affection' gives gay life a reel edge
By Jay Carr, Globe Staff, 04/17/98
Gay life has never seemed more effortlessly mainstreamed than in ''The Object of My Affection.'' In its airy way, it shows something of a breakthrough in its portrayal of gay characters. Bypassing the usual consternation attending homosexuals in Hollywood films (''In & Out,'' ''Birdcage''), it represents a modest first by presenting its gay alliances as making more sense than its heterosexual ones. The big thing it's got going for it is the warmth projected by Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd as they negotiate the film's central dilemma, that of a confused woman who wants her amiable and mutually consoling friendship with her gay male roommate to include sex.
To complicate matters, Aniston's character, a social worker, is pregnant. It's partly her ambivalence over her pushy fiance, John Pankow's labor lawyer, that makes her want to press Rudd's nice-guy teacher into serving as a buffer. What's most likable about the film, aside from the nonstop cuteness projected by Aniston and Rudd, is that it's willing to try and encompass the kinds of messy, complicated relationships we know exist, but seldom see in the tidily resolved realms of sitcom or Hollywood movies. There's much more to like than dislike in ''The Object of My Affection,'' even if Wendy Wasserstein's brightly efficient script ends up backing away from real or protracted pain.
The screenplay changes Stephen McCauley's wistful novel in ways that make it snappier, more extroverted and accessible, altering the ending, introducing new characters. Within the modest boundaries it sets itself, it's spirited and enjoyable, fueled by a warmth that carries it past its compromises and presents what for a Hollywood comedy is a pretty sophisticated notion, namely that friendship can be both more rewarding and more complicated than sex. It acknowledges that friendship has chemistry too. At any rate, we believe that Aniston's Nina and Rudd's George feel comfortable remarkably soon after he accepts her invitation to move into her Brooklyn walk-up after breaking up with his lover.
So readily do you believe in their compatibility, in fact, that you're willing to go with her perhaps-unrealistic hope that there can be more to their relationship than the differences in their sexual preferences are likely to permit. The key scene is one where she silently crawls out of bed with her sleeping fiance after sex so that she can relax in the kitchen with her roommate, to whom she feels closer. Predictably, things do not stay simple. Nicholas Hytner directs the amatory gyrations with snap and finesse enough to make you realize how subtly the film replicates one of the book's themes, namely the way the topography of a friendship can alter itself beneath your feet.
In short, Aniston, Rudd, and Hytner make rather more of the material than I expect is on the page. They're helped unfailingly by Alan Alda and Allison Janney - as Nina's silk-stocking-district in-laws, dropping names and spreading drollery over the thinness of their New York stereotypes - and especially by Nigel Hawthorne, who so memorably collaborated with Hytner in ''The Madness of King George.'' Just when ''The Object of My Affection'' hits a dramatic lull, Hawthorne brings a needed touch of class and stylish grace to the proceedings as a waspish drama critic stung by his boyfriend's attraction to George. Hollywood has been derelict for years in acknowledging all that can be shared between a man and a woman. ''The Object of My Affection'' entertainingly tries to fill the gap.
