As a purveyor of all things Pride and Prejudice, I am always delighted when we get a new adaptation of Jane Austen’s amazing work. Fire Island, written by Joel Kim Booster and directed by Andrew Ahn, is the latest look at the story of class and romance.
Fire Island tells the story of Noah and Howie, two long time friends, who are making their yearly pilgrimage to Fire Island with their friends Max, Keegan, and Luke. At the Tea Party, they meet Charlie, Cooper, and Will. Charlie instantly hits it off with Howie, a blessing as Noah has made it his mission to get him laid. Noah finds himself bristling against Will’s every move. As the week nears its end, both men try and make sense of their lives and romantic hopes and dreams.
Joel’s script does so many smart things in modernizing the story. Re-imagining the story with gays at the center has long been a dream to see and this movie is a lot of fun. Much of Pride and Prejudice is centered around manners and how people should and do act, and the same can be said here. There’s a great mix of earnestness and hijinks that kept me laughing throughout the film.
It’s also a short but sweet look at the variances in the gay experience. Fire Island may indeed be a haven for the LGBTQ community, but this movie doesn’t necessarily wade into the stereotypes of people who go there. We do meet characters from different economic levels and there are a few who don’t even want to be there, which was a surprise.
The cast is a dream. It’s one thing to try and fit familiar rhythms of a character, but the cast of Fire Island so brilliantly render their versions of these classic characters while still forging ahead in a new direction. Joel Kim Booster is a fine lead as Noah and he does have fun banter and chemistry with Conrad Ricamora as Will. Matt Rogers and Tomás Matos steal every scene they’re in (that Alicia Vikander joke will make me laugh till eternity) and Nick Adams is so delightfully awful as Cooper that I wanted to see him continually get worse and get his comeuppance. The center of this movie though is Bowen Yang as Howie. He gets the Jane storyline but with an additional layer of emotional depth, and Yang fully delivers. He gets several of the movie’s show stopping scenes and he makes you care about this man and empathize with him, while never feeling pity. We want him to get his happy ending and when he does, we’re happy.
Fire Island is steadfastly determined to to move towards its inevitable happy ending, and in this speed, it removes some of the drama from its own narrative. Nearly every dramatic moment is dealt with and moved on from with a crazy amount of speed which gives much of the movie a surface level feel, even when it’s trying to hit harder topics. Taking a tale that is told over the course of months and putting it on a story that takes a week will do that, especially in a moment like when it is reveal Dex has posted a video of him having sex with Luke on his OnlyFans.
The use of a sex tape is not a foreign concept to the Pride and Prejudice oeuvre. It was also a significant plot point in The Lizzie Bennett Diaries, perhaps the 2nd best modern adaptation of the book. The fallout of this took place over several episodes and significant impact on the characters. In Fire Island, this moment is resolved within 5 minutes of screen time. This ultimately doesn’t let the moment ring as anything other than a small blip on the journey the movie needed the main character to have. It rang especially hollow given that throughout the film Will just tells people Dex is a bad guy but never once outright says why he knows this. Having a character willingly withhold that level of information solely to make a plot line work is not fair to the audience or the story.
We don’t even necessarily get a chance to examine the issues of desirability beyond surface level. Everyone that has what we would define as having a good body is frequently shirtless where as those who don’t aren’t. As nice as it was to see Howie being loved for himself, nearly everyone else in the movie gets some semblances of physical appreciation. There’s smart observations made about desirability, especially as it comes to race, so then why is the camera’s gaze so narrowly defined towards a specific body type? Thankfully, the characters don’t need to be stuck in that mire the whole time and I love that the characters celebrate themselves wherever they go, but they never go anywhere they are celebrated.
These are not quite unforgivable mistakes, but they do stand out as a glaring missed opportunities for the film. As such, Fire Island does manage to be a nice film, but ultimately doesn’t move past its shortcomings.