There aren’t that many times in my life that I’ve walked out of a film thinking, there is no way I could’ve written that movie, literally any part of that script. To see something so original and yet so familiar is a rare treat, worth the price of admission.
Any review of Fire Island is going to necessarily devolve into a review of the structure of Pride and Prejudice, since it is in every way an adaptation of the characters, tropes, and plot structure, so the only way to really talk about Fire Island without taking issue with Jane Austen is to discuss it in terms of its peculiarities.
I don’t have a lot of experience watching queer adaptations of classic 19th century works, but what I can tell you from my limited experience is that the bar for queering these books is set fairly high, since folks with Wilde and Forster were so effective in their homoerotic energies. There is always the danger in writing an adaptation of repressed, sexless romance predicated on the misinterpretation of letters of over-internalizing the sanitized sexlessness of the source material while gender-swapping female characters for male ones. This film is perfect happy to go down on you in a dance floor or do you bare back in a sweaty room. Our protagonist, Noah (played by the executive producer and writer, Joel Kim Booster), is the perfect balance of sympathetic, cerebral, but also outgoing, handsome, and confident, and his relationship with the fivesome of friends who make the annual pilgrimage to “gay Disneyland” shows off a pleasant variety of gay representations without falling into tropes, a compelling way to showcase intersectionalism without being consumed entirely by its discourse at the expense of a plot (i.e. our Asian heroes are on the hunt for some dick and they almost exclusively are attracted to rich, stuck up, preppy white boys).
Wife asked wistfully on the beach a couple days later, apropos of nothing, “Why did Charlie (the ingenue character) hang out with all those jerks?” Any film that creeps into your brain that far after you’ve seen it is worth recommending, but also, holy shit why is Charlie’s friend group so toxic without bleeding into his personality? There’s some discussion of in a scene between Will and Noah, in which Noah accuses Will of being the group’s “token Asian,” and seems to have something to do with some trope about gay men in America that Slate writer Jim Downs describes as such:
For all the talk of diversity, LGBTQ equality, and representation of gays in the media, many Americans still have limited exposure to gay men. Many know of comical gay men, like Jack from Will & Grace or videos of Billy Eichner’s street antics. They know of attention-grabbing gay men like Liberace and Billy Porter. They know of the hot gay men like Wentworth Miller and Gus Kenworthy. They also know the American sweethearts like Adam Rippon and Anderson Cooper. A subspecies they aren’t as familiar with, however, are the Type A, politically driven, never-take-their-eye-off-the-ball gays—a group of which Pete Buttigieg is an extreme example.
Part of Noah’s repeated misunderstanding of Will is due to his viewing of Will through this prism of race, class, and identity, and it’s what makes the conflict between those so juicy and complex. Rather than the original’s misunderstanding of apprehensiveness for rudeness, wrapped in the misalignment of men and women’s expectations of courtship, we have in Fire Island, an update and one specific to a time and culture, rich in a dozen overlapping anxieties about how one can be sized up and discounted before they’re given a chance to explain themselves.
Fire Island is decidedly uninterested in trauma plots, despite the cheap trick of letters revealing deep-seated pain and historically important information for one choosing a life partner, the adaptation is an exploration of gay joy more than gay pain. Howie’s (played by Bowen Yang) mismatch with his best friend is not an irresolvable and tragic gap, but rather a misunderstanding about the role of a best friend in this listless period of quarter life crisis. It’s a conflict that readers of Job might recognize (stay with me), the quality of friends to participate in mourning, observe it, rather than reject, deflect, or correct it. That recognition of difference and the adaptation of one’s self to the needs of others is what is central to Fire Island and to Pride and Prejudice. The path to get there is so astoundingly different but Fire Island’s faithfulness to the emotional core of Austen’s observation of desire makes for a satisfying time.
