Three To Tango

Three to Tango

Three to Tango starring Matthew Perry, Dylan Mcdermott, Neve Campbell, & Oliver Platt.
Directed by Damon Santostefano

In this made for Hollywood formula movie, Matthew Perry plays a young idealistic architect named Oscar Novak. Oscar and his eccentric business partner, Peter Steinberg, (Oliver Platt), are on the verge of landing a major deal with business tycoon Charles Newman (Dylan Mcdermott). All is going well until Charles asks Oscar to do him a little favor. Spy on his mistress, Amy (Neve Campbell), to make sure that there is no competition for his affection.

Why do you ask if Charles is so jealous, would he send another male to spy on his mistress? Because, during some asinine conversation between Charles and Oscar, Oscar inadvertently admits to being gay. Mind you, Oscar was admitting to being Hungarian, but Charles mistakes him for admitting to being gay.

It’s so easy to see the correlation…

So, he follows her around, falls in love with her, and spends the rest of the movie struggling with the fact that he is “in the closet” in terms of being heterosexual. Unfortunately, we the audience, have to go with him. Throughout the entire movie we have to sit and watch as he finds himself in compromising positions, no pun intended. If he comes clean, he risks losing the biggest break of his career. If he keeps up the charade, he risks losing the girl of his dreams. It all comes to a boiling point when he wins the “Gay Man of the Year” award, in which he has to make a decision about his future.

At this point, I need to explain my loathing for movies based on misunderstanding. I don’t find them funny. I find them frustrating and annoying. I don’t have the patience for them. That pretty much doesn’t change with this movie. The entire movie is based on Chandler…oops, I mean Oscar, running around trying to explain to everyone that he isn’t gay. The thing is, I don’t think that he knew for sure whether he was or not, therefore making it hard to convince others.

Of course everyone believes he is gay because he cooks, and he knows about wall treatments. Which, in this day and age, we all know are classic signs that a man is gay. And that is another problem that I had with the movie. How many times did I need to hear those characters that were homosexual described as being “that way”. (You can almost picture the hand moving in a slow downward tilt). Who describes a person who is gay in this manner anymore?

But seriously, the premise gets tired after the first half an hour. After that, you just feel uncomfortable for everyone involved. The actors, the director, the people sitting next to you in the theater. The movie gets so carried away with the entire “heterosexual in the closet” scenario that it leaves room for anything else.

Don’t get me wrong, there were times that I laughed out loud. But it’s not like I couldn’t get those same laughs from watching “Friends”. Actually, that is exactly what the movie is. For those of you who have watched the TV show, you know that Matthew Perry’s character has a complex about people thinking he is gay. In Three to Tango, they just took that concept, and stretched it out into a feature film.

My advice is wait for the video.

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