Mulligans (2008)

I do love Charlie David but he always seems to miss his mark as he's once again done with this movie. What troubled me as soon as this movie started was the Father and Son. They both looked the same age, (I actually felt the son should have had the father role). It bothered me throughout the whole movie, who ever did the casting really jumped the shark on those. I've seen many Charlie David movies and I always end up with the feeling that he's holding something back. Once again, if they had an older father or younger son, the movie would have received more stars for a rating, Also, they characters looked a bit too old to pull off the college students.

When I saw the opening scene, the script, editing, and cinematography, I thought "Mulligans" was TV movie, then I saw IMDb and I was wrong, this wasn't any, but pretty much of it. Even now I still can't believe it was theatrical movie.Honestly, the plot really predictable. I could eventually saw ahead from the first 20 minutes and I think the ending a little bit illogical.Another lack is wrong casting. Dan Payne as father character, came out gay form closet after 20 years married, was too cold, there were any emotions, still he didn't a "father" in most of way. Charlie David as young gay was too obvious to be gay. And Derek Baynham as Charlie David best friends was too old played a straight college student.For theatrical movie, "Mulligans" looks like amateur work. If you see well, the editing really poor. For example, when Nathan was in his garage and saw Chase passed him with full bag of cloches he looked like surprise, stupidly Jarod was just 5 meters away from him waiting for Chase. Even the beer bong scene clearly was fake and the golf playing too.But, still, if this movie was a TV movie, didn't really work as good movie either. 6 from 10 will be the highest.

"Mulligans" is a pleasant enough example of a genre I have a certain weakness for--the gay/rural movie. While the more common urban gay movie tends to be about neurosis, overdramatics, and "witty" banter, the gay rural is generally less pushy and more disarming, with guarantees of pretty scenery and pretty male semi-nudity (often cued by nighttime swimming). The danger, of course, is that the director will get lost in the prettiness and forget to tell a story. "Mulligans" barely avoids this trap, although the story it tells is a lot less daring than the writer/star Charlie David apparently imagines. The movie is never actually painful to sit through, but we're all very familiar with the beats of the coming-out drama by now; the twist here is that the "torment" of the two men in question (Dan Payne as Nathan, a middle-aged, closeted golf enthusiast, and David as his college-age son's best friend Chase) is pushed to the sidelines--which is probably for the best, as the astonishingly beautiful David is a hopeless nonactor. (The only moment we feel sympathy for him comes at the beach scene near the end, when he tries to force tears and is clearly in agony from the effort). The reactions of Payne's wife, Stacey (Thea Gill) and son Tyler (David James) take over, simply because they're more unexpected. Baynham starts out giving a flawless impersonation of a slightly spoiled and entitled frat boy (like the ones in 80s movies and their latter-day imitators, such as "American Pie"). Then David, trying to sound casual, comes out to him, and Baynham--shaken, but trying his best to be broadminded--brings something unexpected out of the stereotype. It's a well-written scene, which seems to come from observation and probably reflects the experiences of many gays in the audience. The movies have rarely touched upon the relationships between gay men and their straight friends, which can be more solid and enduring than similar friendships with other gay men--the usual method is to pour on the wisecracks or play "is he or isn't he really straight" games.The actual transgressive act between Nathan and Chase (don't those names scream Harlequin romance novel?) is awfully tame, even by gay rural standards. It's not just the brief vanilla sex scenes themselves--it's that there doesn't seem to be any new physical awareness or tension between the two characters afterwards--nothing breaks loose. Payne just carries on acting stoic and sensitive, in a 1950s soap-opera way, and David carries on posing and reflecting light, while we wait for the contrived scene revealing their affair. It comes even more awkwardly than expected, but at least the film's meditative rhythm gets stirred up, largely due to the exquisite Thea Gill's performance as Stacey, the only character who truly "arcs". Gill initially plays Stacey as a determinedly perky helicopter mom, full of nervous energy. Most of the humor and pace of the first half of the movie comes from her. When someone makes a conversational detour she doesn't care for, she says, brightly, "Okay then" and steers the talk firmly away, like a slightly hysterical cruise director determined to keep everyone happy and active. (It becomes a mini-routine). Once her world crashes down, though, it really crashes--she retreats into herself, and it's a little scary to see what that artifice was hiding. Gill brings a poetic intensity to her stunned silence--she'll really never be the same woman again.

I watched the first 50 minutes of this, then I gave up. It was by and large unbearable. I have no problems with the basic premise, i.e. the son of a well-off family returns home for his summer holiday, brings a friend, the friend turns out to be gay, this causes the father of the family to confront his own feelings and his latent homosexuality. I buy it.The biggest problem with this film, as I see it, is that even though (most of the time) I understand what it is that the filmmaker aim for - it's just very poorly executed. There isn't enough flesh on the bones for things to make sense. It's as if whoever wrote the script knows WHAT the characters need to do, but not WHY. For example, in one of the early scenes, the son of the family makes a big song and dance about how his friend should cover up when he's drying off after a swim. A few scenes later (after the friend has come out to him), the son questions why the friend is covering up (after a shower) when he's normally not shy. Rather than saying, "Because you told me to in no uncertain terms," it turns into an argument about whether the friend's coming out has changed things between them. And this is exactly my problem with this film: even though I understand why they argue and I think the question of what changes when someone comes out is valid, it's as if the filmmaker had to rush to explicitly make that point rather than allowing the audience to see for itself.In this respect, the film is shallow. I don't see that whoever wrote it actually understands what the characters go through and why they act the way they do.If you're not bothered about what motivates characters, then you might still get some enjoyment out of this film.