During the college years of Eddy (Josh Charles) circumstances dictated he move into a dorm to live on the campus, not something he was entirely happy with but he made the best of it. He couldn't get a single, so he had to share, and these rooms he took up were divided into three; one of them was already occupied when he arrived, by Stuart (Stephen Baldwin), a brash jock who was like chalk to Eddy's cheese. However, they began to get along, coming to a compromise where Eddy would do Stuart's course work and he would fetch Eddy food, all very cosy until Alex (Lara Flynn Boyle) appeared...
And the title should give you some idea of what happened next, well, not so much next as a few months later - not depicted in real time, thankfully, as by the end of this you likely would feel you'd spent more than enough time in their company. That was the main problem here, as while writer and director Andrew Fleming showed well enough how exclusive the central trio's relationship was, he didn't make them much fun to be around so that the viewer felt like the gooseberry. It was supposed to be a comedy drama, yet the comedy wasn't very funny and the drama was unconvincing, so why has it developed the following it has today?
It could be part of the whole nostalgia for Generation X and the movies which passed for entertaintment back then, or at least the movies which tried to replicate what it felt for them so a modern audience could look back and be all like "Ah, remember the time we saw Threesome! Those were the days! 'Scuse me while I wipe away a tear!" It's true this was miles ahead of Reality Bites, the film often held up as the encapsulation of the youth of the nineties, but to be fair that wasn't exactly the most difficult thing in the world, and most people would be turning to Quentin Tarantino if they wanted a fix of nineties cool. But there were other filmmakers around back then, believe it or not.
Andrew Fleming was one of them, purporting to draw on his own college experiences to fashion a romance that wasn't very romantic, and more likely to have you thinking they deserved each other, something the script is far from blind to. Alex ends up in the rooms because she was mistakenly believed to be male since she has a possibly male name, but after a period of guarded hostility, she, Eddy and Stuart grow to like each other in a manner intended to sum up the confusion of then-modern connections, whether it was male/male or female/male, but not female/female, that would be getting too complex and retitle the movie Foursome, the sequel that never happened. Not that it was going to. Anyway, before long Eddy is lusting after Stuart, Stuart after Alex, and Alex after Eddy.
What adds an unintentional layer of amusement is that Baldwin became a conservative born again Christian a few years of hard living later, so to see him be the erotic fixation of a gay character can give rise to a few titters, especially as Stuart isn't too bothered, liking Eddy as a friend. Though perhaps in a moment of prediction, Stuart does have a Jesus vision near the end which could be foretelling his eventual path though life - the climactic scene where the three of them finally get it on, not so much. Anyone expecting something more pornographic would be best directed to pornography, as Fleming was more interested in the plot complications than showing anything more sexual, though he did have a fixation on the rear ends of his cast which you might not notice unless it was pointed out. Again, the issue most would have here was that you just wanted to let them get on with it and not bother you with their self-absorption - also, does nobody study in movie colleges? Music by Thomas Newman, with too many horrible cover versions to boot.
Display comments