Gay confessions of a sexual
fantasy world
by Alexander Walker, 24 June 1998
Nicholas Hytner's third film - his second American one after The Madness of King George and The Crucible - sounds like a bumper edition of Oprah or Geraldo. Sex problems by the cartload, all awaiting airing and solving. Homosexuals, heterosexuals, bisexuals, unmarried mothers, single-father families, friends, lovers and even those mixed-up people called critics. Everyone with something and something for everyone.
The Object of My Affection is a romantic sitcom swollen to the size of a still-overcrowded confessional box. George (Paul Rudd) is a gay nursery-school instructor to the children of rich Manhattanites. He's just been dumped by Robert, his campus professor lover (Tim Daly). In he moves to mope with Nina (Jennifer Aniston), a Brooklyn sex counsellor, in her economy-chic walk-up flat guarded by the Jewish yenta downstairs. Nina is pregnant by Vince (John Pankow), a pushy Left-wing labour lawyer whose radicalism rejects marriage. So will an expectant mother turn an abandoned gay into a straight lover and a surrogate father?
The script, her first for the cinema, is by playwright Wendy Wasserstein and it's an artful piece of issue-dodging disguised as sexual envelope-pushing. Everything happens in a morality-free zone. Whatever George is getting up to in the spare room with his new Latino boyfriend Paul (Amo Gulinello), it's not presumed to be anything medically risky or even socially blameworthy by Nina. Nina's child might possibly be damaged by not knowing which of the extended family should be called Daddy, but that's not the focus of anyone's concern.
Gays are presented without limp wrists, which is all right; but no suggestion that such ruptured unions ever lead to slit wrists is tolerated. Aids is a word that goes completely unmentioned on this soundtrack. It is a fantasy world scrubbed clean of all disease, opprobrium and even physical imperfections, done up in ad-man's style which is one designed to sell the appearance of the way we live now (or some do) without putting off anyone who might think such folk are sinful, unclean and socially irrresponsible. Even the child, in an epilogue five years on, has turned into a hip-gyrating moppet, a tiny sex symbol in a school musical, winning the applause of all the other characters who presumably approve the image of precocious sexuality on show.
As there are no fixed reference points of morality by which to judge the main characters - everyone goes with the flow - it's the minor characters with convictions or even prejudices who come off most entertainingly. At least they're not always griping about their love life, or lack of it. Alan Alda is a super-rich literary agent devoted to the money ethic ("Defend a celebrity," he tells Vince, "I can get you two million dollars for the book rights, and you don't even have to write it yourself"). Allison Janney, as his name-dropping wife, is devoted to the snob ethic ("We got hung up with King Hussein," is her apology for a late lunch). And Nigel Hawthrone is a queer English drama critic devoted to the Oscar Wilde ethic ("He lives with a woman, does he? How Bloomsbury.")
These folk are a relief from the endless stream of self-referential "relationships" of the kind that provide the fodder for the nose-bags of chat-show hosts. The only mildly surprising feature of the film is its approving emphasis on the enticing possibilities of being gay compared with the narrower range of life-enhancing choices of not being so and being lumbered with families and offspring, motherhood and marriage. It never occurs to it that such wisdom may simply be part of the whole gay fantasy.
It's depressing to find Nicholas Hytner's name attached, without the slightest mark of personal distinction, to this gloss-finished collection of good-lookers, happy problems and sappy superficialities. From craftsman to journeyman in three movies: well, fancy!
