Jack is a 30-something-year-old ex-pat Brit living and working in New York when the INS refuses to renew his Residency Visa and he faces the real possibility of having to leave and go back to the UK which he left back when he was a teenager. Within the first few minutes of the movie, Jack’s brother, also living in the US, announces his wife is expecting their first child and then two seconds later is run over by a car and killed which sort of sets the pace for what soon becomes an over-wrought melodrama.I’ve twisted it slightly here, as Jack’s potential deportation isn’t threatened until much later when his niece is 7 years old and he has become a surrogate father to her and a crutch to his widowed sister-in-law. It adds to the impetus of wanting to stay in the US but the only way that he will be granted a Visa/Green Card in time is if he marries. The snag is he is gay. So he finds a willing lesbian friend to do this for him, and she moves into his apartment for appearance’s sake to make the marriage seem legitimate but almost immediately after the wedding Jack goes and falls in love with a handsome Spanish American man and is rarely at home.
The lesbian gets cold feet and wants out of the marriage for fear of being caught and jailed, the sister-in-law admits that she regrets that it wasn’t him that got killed that night and not her husband, and the niece panics that the one stable person in her life may disappear for good, and the boyfriend suddenly has to go back to Spain and nurse his sick mother!
This comedy/drama is about a very real inequality that is clumsily handled here …. that Jack’s only possibility as a gay man is to lie and fake it as a same-sex marriage although recognized by the State is not acknowledged by the INS ….. is full of good intentions. Written and produced by it’s star the (openly gay) Brit actor (and ex Boy Band singer) David W Ross who seems to be shirtless in a lot of his scenes (!) and who has made sure that we never stop seeing his character as the ‘martyr’ in this piece. The downside to this is that he has made both of his female leads both unhappy and a tad too angry for their roles.That aside, this wee indie movie had its enjoyable moments (besides Mr Ross’s well-developed torso) and even with all the angst, was still entertaining and won several Audience Favorite Awards when it did the Gay Film Festival Circuit last year before opening in Theaters in NY this weekend …. it is also available now as a VOD via Amazon & Itunes.
