Mark Reviews Movies: SPOILER ALERT

Spoiler Alert, Focus Features

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 8, 2022

The "spoiler" of Spoiler Alert arrives right at the beginning: Someone is gravely ill and lying in a hospital bed. It's not the ending that matters, because that's rarely the case and this particular ending is the universal one for everybody. Look next to the dying man, though, and there's another man, his eyes equally filled with tenderness and tears. That's the story here—one of love through just about everything that life can throw at two people, even, yes, and inevitably death.

Despite and because of the ending, this film is a love story. It's a good one, at that—neither content to see everything through rose-tinted glasses nor lazy in treating this as a tragedy from the start. It traces a romantic relationship from its sweetly awkward inception, through the flash of years and the difficulties that emerge, and, yes, finally to the push-and-pull of hope and defeatism that comes with a series of diagnoses, which become worse each and every time.

That this is based on a true story doesn't come as much of a surprise at the end, because there's a level of authenticity to just about everything that happens here. The screenplay by David Marshall Grant and Dan Savage is an adaptation of Michael Ausiello's memoir Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies, a title that the filmmakers and definitely the studio marketing people almost surely want to evade as much as possible.

That's probably a smart move, because rarely do people seek out movies that they know will be sad. On the other hand, it's a mistake. As it stands, the whole of director Michael Showalter's film already possesses, by way of its opening scene, the cloud of death, hovering above everything that unfolds. Knowing that forces us to watch these assorted moments with a greater appreciation for how significant the little things of a relationship are and can be. It's the whole point.

After the flash-forward opening scene, we meet Michael (Jim Parsons), a writer for the most famous TV magazine, essentially living out his dream life and career. He has been obsessed with or, as those with obsessions often put it, passionate about television for the whole of his life. As a kid, he would watch daytime soap operas with his mother. After she died a few years after the death of Michael's father, he started imagining his own childhood as a 1980s family sitcom.

The character's memories, which do play out as a multi-camera TV show with a laugh track, are certainly a gimmicky bit of storytelling, but it's grounded in the way this man tries to compartmentalize the more difficult parts of his past and present within something comfortable and comprehensible. The proof that it works is when one such flight of fantasy interrupts the climax of the story without disrupting the emotional impact of the scene.

Anyway, the loner Michael heads out to a club one night with a co-worker, spots Kit (Ben Aldridge) staring in his direction from across the room, and starts talking to him. The depiction of their courtship is smart, in how the two have to navigate their own insecurities and the growing realization that this relationship might be much more than either one anticipated, and funny, especially in the payoff to Michael's hesitation to have Kit over to his apartment.

They're simply better individual people when they're together as a couple, whether that be how Michael develops the social life he never had or how Kit is finally inspired to tell his parents that he's gay. Sally Field and Bob Irwin play those parents, by the way, and they're each distinctly delightful in these roles, which take on another purpose, obviously, once the story moves toward the ending announced at the start.

That movement is portrayed wisely, too, because it isn't some preordained thing in the lives of these two men. Their connection becomes deeper. Time passes in a series of Christmas photos, and suddenly, we're in the relative present-day of this romance, in which everything appears cheery and comfortable.

It is, of course, because Michael and Kit still love each other, but the years, the schedules, a bit of jealousy, and some of that comfort have made things difficult for their relationship. So much time has passed in between the joy of the first year of them being together and this patch of trouble. Surely, there will be time to figure out how to fix whatever has become broken, if that's what these two want—which they seem to, if those long pauses in conversation and loaded looks from across the room are any indication.

To explain what happens would be useless, since the film more or less tells us what's going to happen at the top. How it happens, though, elevates this story beyond its clever portrayal of a modern romance, its gimmicky depictions of the protagonist's psychological processes, and even its sweet and honest view of how love persists even as it evolves.

The last evolution of this bond—as Kit's body and treatments fail him, while Michael can only stand by him, care for him, and try to find a way to accept the ending we already know—is frank and thoughtful in ways that come as a surprise, given how hopelessly optimistic and sentimental some of the preceding material has been. We need all of that, though, for Spoiler Alert to work, which it does.

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