The streamer’s latest formulaic festive movie is more of the same but with an LGBT twist, competent but lacking chemistry
When 2018’s likable coming-(out)-of-age teen movie Love, Simon was released to an audience of unprecedented scale, a common riposte was that it wasn’t quite queer enough. The high-gloss YA tale of a white bread suburban teen accepting his sexuality was picked apart for its sanitised PG-13 worldview and by-the-books storytelling, playing it a little too straight for some. But it was the film’s sweet vanilla flavour that made it such a radical step, dragging a story usually told in the dark from the arthouse to the bright lights of the multiplex, giving gay teens something just as big and brash as the many, many, many straight-skewed high school films they had grown up on. Because, for some, the fight for basic rights should also include the fight for the right to be basic.
Since then, it’s been less open floodgates and more slow trickle for more mainstream LGBT content, from the cosy Love, Simon spin-off series Love, Victor to Kristen Stewart’s
Christmas romcom Happiest Season. The latter arrived as both Hallmark and Lifetime decided to include gay characters as leads in their festive fare, rather than sassy confidants, with last year’s The Christmas Setup and The Christmas House (a sequel to which also lands this month). Inevitably
Netflix has now done its part with Single All the Way, an inoffensive addition to its ever-expanding container of Christmas content to half-pay attention to, made notable only by its diversity.