The Mattachine Family

“Given the pressing need for a wider range of movies that happen to feature LGBTQ relationships, The Mattachine Family should be embraced.”

Title: The Mattachine Family (2023)
Director: Andy Vallentine 👨🏼🇺🇸🌈
Writer: Danny Vallentine 👨🏼🇺🇸🌈

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

—SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 3.25/5

Enjoying its world premiere at Seattle International Film Festival this weekend, The Mattachine Family paints a sensitive portrait of queer millennials in the messy throes of family planning. It’s a topic rarely seen in mainstream movies, one that director Andy Vallentine and writer Danny Vallentine, who are married, based on their own journeys into fatherhood. That familiarity with the subject pays off, with dialogue between characters feeling lifted from real world conversations and into a movie theater.

Viewers meet Thomas (Nico Tortorella) and his husband Oscar (Juan Pablo Di Pace) just after they’ve fostered a child for a year, only to have the young boy returned to his birth mother. The ensuing emotional upheaval pulls them into different directions, putting their marriage in jeopardy. All the while, Thomas’ best friend Leah (Emily Hampshire) and her wife, Sonia (Cloie Wyatt Taylor), are trying to conceive through IVF, while acquaintances like lesbian mom blogger Annie (Heather Matarazzo) and gay father Ted (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) live together and co-parent their child in a nontraditional setup. Throughout the film, discussions of surrogacy, miscarriages, adoption, etc. surface in refreshing ways.

Best of all, these bracing challenges manage to feel uplifted thanks to the film’s focus on friendship and courage. But the filmmaking itself leans overly earnest through Thomas’ tiresome narration, warm lighting, and canned shots that recall the “after” montages of pharmaceutical ads. The lack of subtlety extends to many of the performances, which don’t quite gel across the board—though Tortorella gives a heartfelt effort, with believable highs and lows.

Overall, The Mattachine Family falls in the category of “I’m glad this exists.” It may not scream technical virtuosity, but its unique story offers something new to the world. Its emotional moments do resonate, if not consistently.

Gender: 3.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

Movies that center around gay male protagonists don’t always give adequate spotlight to women. The Mattachine Family happily breaks that mold, following the route of ensemble works like classic TV series Queer as Folk (2000-05), which explores lesbian characters albeit in supporting roles. Here, Leah and Sonia exist to serve Thomas’ narrative, but they also have their own lives, their own friends, and their own problems. When Leah experiences a personal tragedy, and it’s Thomas’ turn to play the role of “supportive best friend,” the script feels mature and self-aware.

On the downside, one female character yanks back any of that headway. The aforementioned Annie, one of Sonia’s clients-turned-friends, falls squarely into the “ew, women” trap of so many gay male narratives. She’s a walking caricature as a social media influencer, the script belittling stay-at-home moms through the unchecked condescensions of its main character. When the two meet at a party, Thomas asks, “What do you do?” to which Annie hammily replies, “I’m a mommy!” (It’s meant to be a punchline.) In another, Thomas quotes song lyrics, and just because Annie has never heard of them before, Thomas all but rolls his eyes like a disdainful teenager.

Nor is it just Annie who gets short shrift. When another woman perkily says, ”I have to go pump before the girls leak everywhere!” it’s also mean to be a gag, with pumping/breastfeeding used as a gross-out factor. Through these unfunny moments, the fact of the film being written, directed, and produced by an entirely male roster feels distractingly obvious.

That said, it’s notable that behind the lens, actors like Tortorella and Clemons-Hopkins are gender-fluid and nonbinary, respectively, each using they/them pronouns. Onscreen characters could also be gender-fluid—no one’s exactly introducing themself as cisgender. It’s this ambiguity that makes The Mattachine Family effortlessly queer, which we’ll discuss more in depth below.

Race: 3/5

Although the main lead is white, characters of color have key and supporting roles. Thomas’ husband Oscar is played by Argentine actor Di Pace, and there are enough Black and Latino characters that no one feels tokenized. One of Thomas’ friends includes Jamie, played by Korean American Jake Choi, who has several scenes and a mini-arc of his own. (He starts the film single and ends up dating someone.)

However, one of The Mattachine Family’s main weaknesses has to do with race: It has no stance on transracial adoption and treats the situation with colorblind goggles. There’s no mention that Thomas and Oscar’s first foster child, Arthur (Matthew Ocampo), is Latino—and although it helps that Oscar himself is Latino, it casts Thomas in a poor light when he struggles to understand why Arthur should be reunited with his birth mother. His obliviousness looks worse when, in a fit of frustration, he calls Oscar’s mother a “junkie” for having lost her son to the foster care system, implying that Arthur’s mother is just another “junkie” who doesn’t deserve her own son either. Later still, Thomas adopts a Black daughter with no moments of pause about how it’ll be his responsibility to keep her connected to her Black culture. Though these details are subtle, they stand out and cement the feeling that the ethics and considerations of transracial adoption are outside the scope of what The Mattachine Family wanted to cover.

Not that I would call the film colorblind, thankfully. A couple stray comments about whiteness are welcome, since it avoids treating it as the invisible “norm.” When Annie rushes off in a scene, her co-parent Ted, who’s Black, calls it “a white emergency.” And when Thomas admiringly explains the 1950s gay activist memorialized by the Mattachine Steps that he and Leah climb together, Leah reminds him it was a white activist who got the plaque, and not an activist of color. But that’s where any references to race or ethnicity stop, making the film’s overall approach to racial diversity positive, but skin-deep.

Bonus for LGBTQ: +1.00

If it isn’t apparent already, The Mattachine Family is a queer film about queer people. It’s written and directed by gay men, the story based on their own journeys to becoming fathers. Key roles are cast with LGBTQ actors like Tortorella, Di Pace, Hampshire, and Choi, who have described themselves as gender-fluid, gay, pansexual, and sexually fluid, respectively. So it comes as no surprise that the film’s conversations about family planning feel so real.

It’s wonderful to see a movie that sheds light on this stage of life, of adults in their 30s and 40s considering whether or not (and how) to have children, as viewed through a queer lens. When gay films and TV series continue to hyperfocus on coming-out narratives, found in recent popular romances like Young Royals (2021-) and Heartstopper (2022-), it’s great to see Vallentine tap into a different source of drama for his film.

Mediaversity Grade: B- 3.58/5

Given the pressing need for a wider range of movies that feature LGBTQ relationships, The Mattachine Family should be embraced. If we’re lucky, its salient topics will be tackled by more and more queer filmmakers, each with their own experiences to inform what it’s like to start a family and parent in nontraditional ways.

Like The Mattachine Family? Try these other titles featuring transracial adoption.

Grade: BLiMay 12, 2023Great for: LGBTQ