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Poly Movie Review: Keeping The Faith
I think this is one of those movies that Netflix recommended to me based on adding some other "similar" movie. I wasn't even entirely sure, with a title like that, if the movie was on the list to review for polyamory or for skepticism. But with the happy surprise of the last movie, I was actually kind of hopeful about this one. It was the story of two young men who were best friends as kids, growing up to become a Jewish rabbi and a Catholic priest, and the tomboy who was also their best childhood friend coming back into town as a successful, beautiful, corporate CEO. Because it had big names in it, the movie was most likely to be not-poly, but the setup had some potential.Unfortunately, it flopped.
Not that the movie wasn't good (that's debatable, based on whether you like romantic comedies and movies that involve secrets), but it wasn't poly at all and it should have been.
These two men love this woman - she was perfect for them both. But because the rabbi is allowed to have sex (and because he is being pressured to find a wife before he becomes head of his church, or whatever), he immediately acts on his crush when the priest does not because of his vows of celibacy.
So the girl spends about half the movie developing a romantic relationship with the rabbi, but keeping the priest safely in a box labeled "do not touch". And as anyone who spends any time in the world of the Monogamous Mindset knows, when a girl puts a guy in the Friend Box, he's stuck there for life, no matter how strong her feelings for him ... those feelings are just very strong "friend" feelings.*
So, anyway, by the time the priest confesses his love and he has just about talked himself into leaving the priesthood for her, she is already thoroughly immersed in her relationship with the rabbi and totally oblivious to his growing attraction to her. So the priest has to swallow his embarassment and go back to thinking of her like a sister.
Now, you might be able to put this movie in the poly analogues category, because the three of them remain a strong group throughout the whole movie. The priest somehow manages to only be angry at having their relationship hidden from him, but he doesn't seem to feel any major jealousy. Well, there is the one fight where he gets drunk and yells at the rabbi that the rabbi stole his girlfriend, but mostly the priest seems to recover from his one- or two-night bender and move right into compersion for his two best friends, only nursing the hurt feelings of being lied to (which, frankly, I can totally understand).
****SPOILER ALERT****
The movie ends happily ... for a monogamous movie ... with the rabbi and the girl back together and the priest happy for them both and everyone is one big happy (monogamous & platonic) family. So it might fall under the category of poly analogues, where the only difference between them and us is that the girl would be sleeping with the priest too if it was us.
But the reason why I didn't like this movie is because I get upset at plots that put a convenient excuse in the way, blocking a poly relationship from happening. Usually, it's death, but in this case, it was vows of celibacy.
See, in the world of the Monogamous Mindset, a person can only romantically love two people at the same time if one of them is dead. It is only acceptable for a woman to say she loves two men if she is referring to her dead husband and her new husband whom she met a safe time-distance after the death of her first husband. So most MM movies conveniently kill someone off to allow the person torn in the middle the freedom to love them both and to force her to make a choice (Pearl Harbor).
In this case, the priest's celibacy interfered with his ability to pursue a relationship with the love interest and his religious faith gave him something to hold onto after he was rejected and allowed him to remain in the picture. Whereas with most romcom love triangles, when the love interest rejects one guy for another, he just disappears somehow (maybe he's a bad guy & goes to jail, or maybe he's a good guy and walks away voluntarily, whatever). But because this is a Catholic priest, he is safe enough to keep in the picture and safe enough for both the rabbi and the girl to continue loving because his faith and his vows make him a non-threat. In any other movie where he isn't a priest, the "other love" has to disappear because you can't have the "other love" hanging around your new wife. Or something.
This kind of thing can often be more tone than something specific. It's not very easy to quantify why some movies that end with a dyad still make it to the poly list but other movies don't. It's something in the way the actors and the director interpreted the lines that affect the tone of the movie. These movies never have a bit of dialog where someone says "Whew! It's a good thing my husband was killed in that war, so I can safely love you now without falling out of love with him or having to choose!"
So, in the last movie, where one partner had a serious illness that sort of forced the characters into a position where a love triangle could happen, the tone of that movie didn't strike me as negative. It suggested, to me, that these are people who live in a world where nonmonogamy was Just Not Done, so they needed some kind of extraordinary circumstances to leave them open to the possibility, to give them the impetus to even consider something outside of the norm.
But this movie just didn't have that same feeling. The way it was portrayed suggested more of a situation where three people happened to love each other in a world where they shouldn't, so they wrote the circumstances in such a way as to give them a monogamously acceptable way to do that.
Basically, they had to neuter one of the characters in order to keep him in the picture, which isn't the same as killing him off, but it belies a tone sprung from the same well.
I would love to see this movie re-written, where the priest and the rabbi are forced to re-evaluate their religious faiths in light of their growing love and attraction for the same woman (of no particular faith). Where the priest and the rabbi both decide that their mutual love for this woman is incompatible with what they have been taught about religion, which then makes them question everything else about religion, and which leads them to the realization that they have always been a happy threesome so there is no reason why they can't continue to be a happy threesome in a much fuller sense of the word. I'd love to see this movie where the woman does not put one of her best friends into the Friend Box, but allows her love for them both to flourish, and where she comes to the same realization that they have always worked best as the Three Musketeers, and breaking off into a dyad + 1 would change the dynamic in an unacceptable way.
Unfortunately, that was not the movie I watched.
*Once again, the Monogamous Mindset is a particular set of beliefs and viewpoints about monogamy that create the society in which I live. It does not mean that everyone who happens to be monogamous has this mindset, nor does it imply that people who are non-monogamous are automatically free of this mindset. MM is a set of rules and boundaries and mores that dictate how relationships ought to be, many of which are inherently contradictory, selfish, and harmful. One such set of contradictory MM rules is the rule that you are supposed to marry your best friend, but you're not allowed to be involved with your friends because that would ruin the friendship.
And that's the one I'm referencing here. There is this weird rule out there that people, women especially, can't get romantically involved with their appropriately-gendered friends because that would automatically (or could most likely) ruin the friendship. Men's magazine articles and lonely guys online like to lament about the dreaded F word - "friend". Being called a friend is like the worst thing a woman can do to a man who is interested in her, because it means he will never have a chance.
Of course I know this doesn't always happen and that there are exceptions, which is why I speak so condescendingly of the MM and of this rule in particular, so please don't leave a comment like "but I married my best friend and it's the best relationship I've ever had!" I know, that's what makes this rule so stupid. But it's out there, and it permeates our society, and is quite possibly responsible for a significant amount of unneccessary heartache.
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It's another area (like "don't rape" where education needs to be different & start much earlier. Maybe if we could eliminate some of the MM and teach people better/healthier ways to relate there wouldn't be a need (or even a perceived need) for such knee-jerk categorizing.
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First of all, my own personal experience tells me that a clear and unambiguous "no" and putting someone in the "friend box" doesn't stop *those guys*. It just makes the subset of *those guys* who are The Entitled Guys whine about being put in the "friend box" while they keep trying.
Second, based on conversations with girl friends (as a girl), and at all ages, the girls who do that aren't using the "friend box" as a deterrent or a way to clearly say "no", they honestly believe that having sex with a friend will fuck up the friendship. I have, literally, had conversations where I ask women "how are you supposed to marry your best friend if you're never allowed to date your friends?" and the women/girls can't answer that. So, yes, they are trying to tell the guys no and still keep the friendship, but it's not used *as* a deterrent, like coming up with an excuse or having your sister call you while on a date so you can have an "emergency" crop up and let you escape if the date is bad. The "friend box" isn't really an excuse to get them to stop because, as I said above, it doesn't actually stop them.
There definitely needs to be better relationship education to fix all this bullshit.
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So I'm not surprised at all to learn that some guys think that when a woman says she's afraid that sex will mess up the friendship, that it's really some secret code for something else, even when it's not.
Not that many women don't beat around the bush or hint, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and when a woman *does* say what she's thinking, she often isn't believed anyway.
The problem is, if we're going with stereotypes or "in many cases" here, that sex really does mess up a friendship because, just as often as women use that phrase for code for something else, men also use their "friendship" to get sex, and once they get laid, they really do quit being friends. So, although all this double-speak and game-playing and hints and other stuff is bullshit from all genders, many times the reason why a girl is honestly sincere about not wanting to lose a friendship is because there is a very good chance that the guy will, in fact, stop being friends with her once they have sex and/or start dating, and if she values friendship, a romantic relationship may not be worth that price.
Of course, that makes very similar assumptions about the guy as the guy is making about the girl. It'd be so much easier if everyone just said what they thought and only tried to pursue relationships with people who wanted the same kind of relationship.
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And that's not event getting in to the whole rap about guys who're "nice guys" and "stay friends" without trying to get sex ONLY because they're hoping one day the woman will "wake up" and realize he's the "one." Both sides get in to THAT mental trap, and while some guys do it I see (from my side, anyway) more women who worry about it than guys who actually DO it.
Makes me mental that a) there's so little good communication and b) sex and love and friendship are so poorly defined and badly intertwined by the mainstream.
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And yes to both A & B!
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I know that I *have* been friends with guys who I hoped would turn into something "more" someday, but I wasn't friends with them for the purpose of trying to get that something "more". Generally speaking, it's the friendship that made me want something more in the first place, and the friendship was the valuable part.
And, in most cases where he wasn't poly, in those friendships that did turn into "something more", not only was the relationship not all I hoped it would be, but the friendships got destroyed too and they were unwilling to maintain any friendship after the breakup because, and I quote, "you're not supposed to be friends with your ex" and "my new gf wouldn't want me to be friends with my ex".
Interestingly, only those relationships that started out as friendship without any expectation of "more" on my part managed to survive a breakup and transition back into friends, several of which last to this day, including my very-monogamous high school sweetheart, whom I helped nurse a broken heart over his most recent breakup just a couple of months ago.
I'm fairly certain that these examples also had no expectations on their part, but since I can only go by what they tell me, I'm just making that assumption on face value. I have no reason not to believe them, I'm just saying that I'm taking their words on faith here. In the case of the former high school sweetheart, I do know that he had no expectations when we started as friends because he was actually opposed to a relationship with me at first based on some false rumors he'd heard about me from an ex-boyfriend.
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That said, I'm not sure that you're totally right in your analysis of the trio. As far as I remember, while both men were totally interested in Anna, she never showed any romantic interest in Brian, so I didn't feel like A & B not ending up together was just the movie trying to get away from potential non-monogamy. I'm not contesting that it's a totally MM movie ('cause it is), but the friend-zoning at the end didn't strike me as out of the blue.
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In fact, the whole movie could have happened just fine without Brian in the picture at all, because there was enough plot and conflict just with the whole different-religions problem between Anna and Jake. Mismatched backgrounds and star-crossed lovers has been the plot of romance stories for centuries, so Brian's character really didn't have anything to do there at all.
It would have made much more sense if Anna actually had returned his feelings, or if we had followed the whole story from Brian's point of view like in My Best Friend's Wedding. Otherwise, he's just extraneous and the friend-zoning (under the blanket of his priesthood) was how they wrote him off as a potential love interest in order to keep him as part of the group but not have non-monogamy or make him a "bad guy".