Red, White & Royal Blue (2023)
dir. Matthew Lopez
Rated: R
image: ©2023 Amazon Prime Video
Red, White & Royal Blue is a love story between Alex and Henry. Even in the best circumstances, the two men would be in for plenty of judgement and bigotry from people who refuse to recognize that love is love. The situation of this particular romance, however, is exponentially more complicated. That’s because Alex happens to be the First Son of the United States – in the alternate universe of the movie, his mother, Ellen Claremont, is the first female POTUS – and Henry is the spare heir to the British throne. The movie is a fun, whimsical rom-com fantasy that soars on the chemistry of its two leads, even as the uninspired direction and visual style leave much to be desired.
Based on the smash hit 2019 novel by romance writer Casey McQuiston, the movie Red, White & Royal Blue is as disappointing as it is charming. The charm takes center stage within the opening sequence of the movie. Alex Claremont-Diaz is sent by his mother to represent the US at the royal wedding of Prince Phillip, the heir to the British crown and Prince Henry’s older brother. There’s no doubt we’re in enemies-to-lovers territory when we hear Alex tell his best friend and travel companion for the trip, Nora, how much he despises Prince Henry. The enmity was born years earlier when Henry rudely snubbed Alex on the latter’s first major political trip as the son of the President.
The two young men, both in their early twenties, icily greet each other at the reception. Alex, more than a bit tipsy, harangues his bête noire, and, in his inebriated state, comically causes the impossibly huge and ornate wedding cake to topple over onto both of them. It’s an international incident on the cusp of President Claremont’s reelection campaign. In order to smooth things over, his mother insists that Alex appear with Henry for a series of photo shoots and interviews to assure the world that the two enemies are actually the best of friends.
As you might expect from a rom-com, misunderstanding and hilarity both ensue.
Except this isn’t the usual, straightforward (pun completely intended) romance. Alex is bisexual, but he hasn’t come out yet, even to his parents. Henry is under even more pressure to keep his sexual orientation under wraps because the British royal family is committed to projecting a staid, traditional image as the figureheads of the empire.
The entire time I was watching Red, White & Royal Blue, I sensed a dissonance between what I was seeing on screen and the real world. Let me be clear, the movie is a fantasy. In addition to the fictional first family, the British royals here have no ties to the House of Windsor. Henry’s grandfather, King James III, sits on the throne, making Prince Phillip the next in line after the death of his and Henry’s father several years earlier.
Still, and possibly because the real world has irreparably broken my brain, I had a hard time reconciling the relatively normal political climate of the film with the flaming garbage fire that is our current political reality.
It’s hard to watch a throwback to the days of The West Wing, where common sense and the better angels of our nature rule the day, when, here on planet earth, the overwhelmingly likely nominee for the Republican party is under four (so far!) separate indictments. The most serious of the charges involves his effort, the last time he was in office, to subvert the rule of law and the will of the American people. It is an open question if he will actually retake office.
As a resident of Texas, it was also hard for me to take seriously the central importance of my home state to the story. President Claremont, a Democrat, hails from the Lone Star State, and Alex has written a detailed plan for winning Texas in the upcoming election. I had to hold myself in check when the movie mentions that Texas is a purple state and, with enough effort, the Democrats can turn it blue. Meanwhile, in the real world, the last time we held a gubernatorial race here, the guy who is shipping helpless, frightened migrants out of the state on busses and planes by lying to their faces – there’s a term for this; it has something to do with humans and traffic, but I can’t quite remember it – won by almost eleven percentage points. He’s also seeding the Rio Grande river with buoys lined with razor wire, in order to cut to shreds any helpless person looking for a better life who happens to encounter them. Sadly, we ain’t a purple state, folks.
And lest you take me to task for overlaying real world circumstances onto this whimsical rom-com, the movie goes out of its way – usually to obnoxious effect – to be as realistic as possible. Red, White & Royal Blue presses into service not one, but two, MSNBC anchors to lend it an air of verisimilitude. The film becomes a de facto ad for the cable news channel – because I’m assuming no one from the right-wing fever swamp, excuse me, I meant to type the Fox News Channel, would have anything to do with R,W&RB – when both Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid appear as themselves to offer up analysis and election night coverage during the film’s climax.
I’m as big a fan of Maddow and Reid as the next member of the radical left, but why they would want to detract from being taken seriously as cable news anchors by leveraging their reputations to appear in a movie – or TV show, which Maddow has also done – is baffling to me. On an aesthetic level, the election night coverage during the climax is even more annoying, because within Maddow’s segments, she essentially recaps everything we’ve seen in the movie up to that point. The movie doesn’t need to tell us this stuff because we were all there for it.
R,W&RB also feels strangely dated when it comes to the story on the other side of the pond. McQuiston published their book in May of 2019, one year after the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but between then and now, a few things have happened to disabuse the public in thinking that the British royal family is a rock solid, unflappable institution. Don’t misunderstand me, the first publicly gay member of the British royals will undoubtedly cause an earthquake of controversy, but, post-Harry & Meghan, it will likely cause slightly less of a stir.
This is director Matthew Lopez’s debut effort behind the camera. The American playwright and screenwriter – R,W&RB is also his big screen writing debut; he shares a cowriting credit with Ted Malawer – has won numerous theatre awards for his stage writing. Lopez, along with cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt – a two-time Academy Award nominee whose work includes shooting two Lethal Weapon pictures as well as a nostalgic favorite of mine, Joe Versus the Volcano – team up to give the film a Hallmark Channel blandness. Goldblatt’s cinematography is flat and uninspired. Lopez’s direction offers little that is terribly exciting or engrossing.
Still, the movie offers up plenty of sparks between the two leads, American Taylor Zakhar Perez as Alex and Brit Nicholas Galitzine as Prince Henry. When Alex’s detailed plan for winning Texas is reported on by a political journalist with whom Alex has had an on-again-off-again fling, President Claremont sends her son home to put his strategy into action. Alex then convinces Henry to visit him on the campaign trail, where both men realize how strong their feelings for each other are, to the dismay of Henry, because of his precarious family situation.
The dreaded rom-com montage of the couple happily falling in love arrives right on time in Red, White & Royal Blue, but Lopez and his two leads make it work. A lot of it happens via text message exchange, and I’ve discovered that I enjoy seeing text threads as a new addition in movies demonstrating how humans connect with one other, providing they don’t go on ad nauseam. Lopez also transforms one phone conversation by making Henry, the one on the other end of the line, magically appear in Alex’s bedroom as the two chat while preparing to drift off to sleep.
An emotional flashpoint between the two men, one of the most effective of the movie, comes at roughly the midway point. At a dance club, one of Alex’s favorite songs, Get Low by Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, begins to thrum through the sound system. Alex impetuously drags Henry onto the dance floor and, as both men dance, they get separated within the crowd. If you’re familiar with the song, you’ll know that when people dance to it, they crouch down at certain points. It might seem obvious to have everyone in the room down almost to the ground as our heroes are left standing, looking longingly at one another from across the room. In Lopez, Perez, and Galitzine’s hands, this possibly cliché moment is transformed into something touchingly inspired.
There are also a few steamy moments between Alex and Henry, but, I’ll confess, I was a little underwhelmed by them, because – and this is my fault for exposing myself to hype for the movie – a few days before screening R,W&RB, I saw a headline about how graphic the sex scenes are. I can report that, as someone who has seen Blue is the Warmest Color, the sex scenes contained within R,W&RB are nothing that a teenager can’t handle.
Overall, Red, White & Royal Blue is a mixed bag. It offers up a romance that, until very recently, was verboten in mainstream movies, expanding inclusion and normalizing a very natural way that love expresses itself. At the same time, the actual technique employed by the storytellers is bland and unsatisfying.
Why it got 3 stars:
- I’m happy about how far the culture has come in depicting non-traditional forms of longing and love, but Red, White & Royal Blue isn’t very compelling otherwise.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Uma Thurman plays President Claremont with a… how shall I put it… not great accent. Every time she was on screen, it was like I was listening to a King of the Hill character.
- One of the best lines of the movie — from one of the movie’s unsung heroes, Zahra, President Claremont’s Deputy Chief of Staff, and Alex’s minder on the campaign trail — comes on the heels of seeing something disturbing: “…and I once saw Mitch McConnell eating a banana…”
- As Zahra, Sarah Shahi also steals the movie for about two minutes when she becomes the first person in the White House to discover Alex’s romance. Her hilarious turn in the scene is a highlight of the movie.
- In the first 20 minutes or so, I was tricked into thinking this was to be a neo-screwball comedy, because of the fast-paced dialog. That is quickly dropped by the end of the first act.
- There’s a nice 360° pan around the two lovers next to a private jet, which I always appreciate seeing because of the degree of difficulty.
- Dear Hollywood, please, please, please stop chronically underusing the great Clifton Collins Jr. In R,W&RB, Collins plays the First Gentleman, and he is given virtually nothing to do.
- Stephen Fry, here appearing as King James III, makes everything he’s in better!
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Red, White & Royal Blue is available exclusively on Amazon Prime, either via a Prime subscription or as a one-time rental or purchase fee. From Wikipedia: “The week after its streaming release in August 2023, Amazon announced that it was the number-one streamed film worldwide on its platform, and it had entered the top three of most watched romance films of all time.” Rae read the book a few years ago and loved it. She was as underwhelmed by the movie as I was.