Ide­al Home

A famil­iar trope in cin­e­ma sees a reluc­tant man­child sad­dled with a pesky kid for com­ic val­ue – the two will inevitably bond, some­one will try to sep­a­rate them, and there will be some sort of heart­warm­ing reunion before the end. While there’s noth­ing intrin­si­cal­ly wrong with tak­ing a well-known con­cept and attempt­ing to repack­age it for a new audi­ence, it’s dif­fi­cult to not look at such works with a par­tic­u­lar­ly scruti­nous eye.

Film­mak­ers, even when telling sim­i­lar sto­ries, have to find new ways to tell them. There’s not a lot of new sto­ry­telling to behold in Andrew Fleming’s campy new com­e­dy-dra­ma, which relies (unwise­ly) on its star pow­er for… Well. Everything.

Paul Rudd and Steve Coogan are Paul and Eras­mus, a bour­geois gay cou­ple resid­ing in San­ta Fe, New Mex­i­co. Paul is a beard­ed, per­pet­u­al­ly-anx­ious tele­vi­sion pro­duc­er, while Eras­mus is his flam­boy­ant British life-part­ner and a TV chef (but he might as well be Alan Par­tridge in a Stet­son for all it mat­ters). Their idyl­lic life of din­ner par­ties, drug-use and fel­la­tio is inter­rupt­ed by the arrival of Eras­mus’ grand­son, who is sent to live with the cou­ple after his father is arrest­ed. So far, so famil­iar. The cou­ple are ill-equipped for par­ent­hood and the child in ques­tion – whose name isn’t revealed until about halfway through the film – reluc­tant to set up home with ​“fags”, as he so elo­quent­ly puts it.

Amid the tonal chaos – where crass sex jokes are mixed in with a bizarre mon­tage sequence set to Suf­jan Stevens’ ​‘For the Father­less’ – Rudd deliv­ers his usu­al­ly win­ning charm as the only char­ac­ter with any sort of human tex­ture, as his char­ac­ter bat­tles with anx­i­ety (though this too is played for laughs). There’s a sense than Paul (the char­ac­ter) and Paul (the actor) both deserve bet­ter than they get, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Coogan’s boor­ish car­i­ca­ture of a gay tele­vi­sion chef and the script which seems to embrace every stereo­type going. There’s even a scene where the char­ac­ters throw an ​‘India-themed’ birth­day par­ty, which feels like a par­tic­u­lar bas­tion of bad taste, but is held up as a tri­umph by the characters.

Giv­en that it’s 2018 and the LGBT com­mu­ni­ty is still fight­ing for bet­ter on-screen rep­re­sen­ta­tion, there’s some­thing to be said for a film which attempts to show a same-sex cou­ple just going about their dai­ly lives, with­out being sub­ject to con­stant tor­ment by virtue of their sex­u­al­i­ty. Ide­al Home is not such a film. Here, a gay cou­ple (por­trayed, of course, by two het­ero­sex­u­al actors) are reduced to cheap punch­lines about blowjobs and an awk­ward sex scene. Miss­ing sev­er­al chances to tran­si­tion into an inter­est­ing exam­i­na­tion of mod­ern par­ent­ing, Ide­al Home is less of a fix­er-upper, more fit to be condemned.