‘Looking’ Returns with a Wrap-Up Movie That Celebrates Gay Relationships in All Their Forms

In the first episode of the HBO series Looking, Patrick (Jonathan Groff) went out into one of San Francisco’s many public parks to hook up with a guy he met on Grindr. It did not go well, in part because Patrick wasn’t really interested in something so fleeting and illicit. One of the aspects of Looking that made it so frustrating for gay critics in particular — and there were a LOT of things that frustrated many gay critics about Looking — was that it seemed to adopt Patrick’s naiveté about sex, about relationships, about people, about the world. Surely, the one narrative program about gay protagonists on TV wasn’t advancing the notion that Grindr culture was a symptom for  a lack of romantic fulfillment, was it? And yet there was Dom (Murray Bartlett) in the pilot, sexing up a young Grindr trick (Broadway’s Andrew Keenan-Bolger) and feeling glum about it afterwards.

I bring up this remnant of thinkpiece fodder from yesteryear because with Looking: The Movie, Andrew Haigh and Michael Lannan have wrapped up the series in a way that casts those early episodes definitively as first chapters in a story that ends with its characters having learned to chill the hell out and celebrate the myriad of gay relationships available to them. With that comes a sense of generosity, sincerity, and yeah, a little bit of wisdom, too. Not to mention an A+ sex scene that now gives Looking claim to the TWO best rimjob scenes in all of television history. As legacies go, I’d take it.

The movie begins with Patrick headed back to San Francisco from Denver, where he’s been living for the past several months. After moving in with Kevin (Russell Tovey) went poorly in the season 2 finale, Patrick fled to the Rockies, where he could develop his video games without having to deal with his love life. Which includes Ritchie (Raul Castillo), the third corner of Patrick’s particular love triangle, who had started his own relationship with adorable hater Brady (Chris Perfetti). Patrick’s coming home for a wedding — HBO would rather we not say who, but even a moderately close reading of the trailer leaves little doubt. When last we saw the gang, Agustin had started to figure his shit out and found a boyfriend in Eddie (Daniel Franzese); Doris (Lauren Weedman) was fighting against her instincts to sabotage her new relationship with Malik (Bashir Salahuddin); and Dom was in a deeply committed relationship to peri peri chicken.

Wedding or no wedding, it won’t surprise you that there are no high-drama crises to be weathered in this film. This isn’t a movie about wedding disasters or life-and-death struggles. The vibe feels very much like a reunion, but those old tensions and worries begin to creep in. Groff’s Patrick is a deceptively crucial character, and Groff plays him like an open book, even when he’s lying to himself. He’s gotten less … maddening, I guess is the word for it, by this point. He’s a bit more self-aware, a bit less demonstrably innocent, a bit less eager to ask for a pat on the back whenever he steps outside of his own comfort zone. Certainly he’s eating ass without any of the old hangups. I bring up the sex scene twice, both because hot gay sex scenes are still too rare a commodity on television to let it pass without comment, and because it’s an important character detail. Somewhere between the cable cars of San Francisco and the mountain air of Denver, Patrick learned to put the “casual” back in casual sex. He can stare down a hot young thing (22 years old!) while a Britney song plays at the club, take him home, fuck him senseless, and have a decently engaging conversation in the kitchen afterwards without getting all … you know … Patrick about it.

If there’s a unifying theme to the movie, maturity in relationships might be it. There’s still tension and squabbles. Patrick ultimately has to deal with the Kevin Question and the Ritchie Question (separately), and Brady’s there to be an (understandably) bitchy thorn in his side (and occasional surrogate for the show’s critics). But it definitely feels like the show is recognizing and celebrating the varied relationships among its characters. The ethics of gay marriage get brought up quite a bit: the idea that the normativity that’s been sought and gained by the gay marriage movement will necessarily water down the gay experience. There’s no real answer at the other end of the discussion, but it recurs enough (and organically so) that it doesn’t feel like a mere talking point. Some characters end up at the altar, others end up happily ducking away to fool around with a groomsman, others might even be contemplating kids. There’s an apprehension in the air as life events keep moving these characters farther down along the path, but there’s also a celebration that they’re at last creating the lives that they want.

There’s a runner through the movie about Patrick and Dom’s friendship, which was rooted in a one-time ill-fated hookup. And now here they are, beautifully affectionate and open with one another. The gay marriage conundrum says that while matrimonial rights were cruelly denied to us, that meant we were able to create relationships however we wanted; discrimination by the majority also meant the freedom to self-determine. So friendships can be physically affectionate, marriages can be what we make of them, and love is love is love is a Tyne Daley cameo. More than anything else, Looking: The Movie shows that Looking the series was always about navigating that vastly open road.

Looking: The Movie airs Saturday night on HBO at 10PM, and will subsequently be available to stream on HBO Go and HBO Now.