Threesome

Threesome is not an especially good movie, but that feels like too obvious a sentence. A 1994 TriStar Pictures movie called Threesome? A movie that simultaneously appeals to a prurient interest and promises to be wholesomely soft-focus about it? Almost every conclusion you could leap to here would be true.

But if it’s not a good movie, it’s still a likable one.

Josh Charles—one of the easiest and most foolproof ways to achieve charismatic likability—stars as Eddy, a chill, somewhat bookish college junior assigned to room with the bro-y Stuart (Stephen Baldwin). The two form an odd couple friendship that’s then stirred up by the arrival of the passionate, self-analytical Alex (Lara Flynn Boyle), who shares their dorm suite thanks to a paperwork foul-up.

Stuart wants to land Alex. Alex falls for Eddy—all it takes, understandably enough, is to realize he can look like Josh Charles and talk to her about books—but while Eddy does feel an intense click with her, it doesn’t translate into sex. When she first makes a move, Charles does a good job making you feel how Eddy’s skin is tightening around his bones as he tries to hold himself still. He’s gay, and he’s starting to realize he’s interested in Stuart. Once most of this is out in the open, the three make a Design for Living-style pact: no sex.

The best and headiest section of the movie follows. With sex still in the air but officially off the table, the three settle into a cozily intoxicating game of threeway chicken, where any amount of physical and emotional intimacy is a-okay as long as it comes with a wink. They cuddle. They stack up three-deep on a couch in the lounge and dry hump. Alex feigns riding Eddy in the back of a convertible. This all gets noticed, because of course it does—their 3S suite gets tagged 3SOME—but the relationship thrives in its unresolved state. Sure, maybe nothing else does, including the trio’s sporadic attempts to find actual sex and more conventional relationships with, gasp, interlopers¹, but they’re good.

Then it all tips over into semi-consummation, and they’re suddenly not good.

This is not, in the end, a love triangle that’s solvable by polyamory, and while that makes that a bit frustrating as a threesome movie, it helps it resonate as a coming-of-age film; they’re three kids encountering a problem they can only ever resolve imperfectly. At the end of the day, while these three care about each other, their orientations are incompatible. More than that, they’re ill-matched; their closeness is partly a product of situational intimacy and limited options. Still, none of that means that their feelings aren’t real right now, though, and they have to be worked out somehow.

The sex isn’t always all that sexy, and the dialogue is rarely all that sharp or all that real. You probably don’t need me to tell you that the Stuart-Eddy leg of this love triangle remains the least consummated of the three. It’s hard not to suspect that even if this is what writer-director Andrew Fleming put in his original script, it was still guided by what he knew studios, the MPAA, and broader audiences would sign off on.

But in a way, that slightly airbrushed mainstream quality adds to its clumsy meta naturalism.² These characters are convincing as suburban kids who are still figuring themselves out, who are still developing the depths to even vaguely count as “deep.” They’ve been raised on the mainstream, and they’re still aping it and carrying a lot of it around; maybe they always will be. Here, they’ll land willy-nilly on what seem like huge epiphanies to them in the moment—that Eddy is a “closet heterosexual,” for example—but swiftly turn out to be wishful thinking. They’re all just adult enough to blow up every stray bit of bullshit into a temporary thesis. There’s more than a whiff of reality there.

And while any direct expression of Eddy’s sexuality is watered down, Fleming and his actors make the most of what they have. When the titular threesome finally happens, anyone watching it out-of-context would be hard-pressed to know Eddy was gay at all … except for a single detail. Partway through the sex scene, there’s a surprisingly tender moment where Eddy shyly expresses his real desire and Stuart—maybe only out of a kind of gentle generosity—encourages him. For a second, all the boundaries blur: you can have this.

It all comes as much from tangled-up liking and college-aged emotional intensity as much as from lust. (And in fact, in a change of pace, the most vividly portrayed horniness here is Alex’s, not Stuart’s.) They’re feeling themselves out more than they’re feeling each other up.

It’s hard to pitch a movie that basically boils down to “these characters are as cheesy and awkward and full of dumb opinions as many real college students, and later they have mostly unsatisfying sex,” but if the slight authentic cringe of all of that, especially when filtered through ‘90s gloss, isn’t intolerable, this is worth watching once. Hey, not all of us were cool at this age.

1. They prefigure all the jokes in Community about the study group—which has its own “anyone here could fuck anyone else” tendencies lamp-shaded—being toxic to outsiders. ↩︎
2. Admittedly, an eerie amount of this movie feels ripped directly from my own adolescence, at least as far as the emotional elements go, so maybe that’s why I feel like it’s true to life. ↩︎