How does the journey to parenthood change us—especially a journey that isn’t straight, in many senses of the word? That’s the question asked in The Mattachine Family, a new movie about a two-man couple trying to decide whether to continue pursuing parenthood after their foster child returns to his birth mother. It’s streaming now, and you can watch a trailer here.
Thomas (Nico Tortorella) and Oscar (Juan Pablo Di Pace) are happily married and living in Los Angeles, but also grappling with the return of their foster son, Arthur, whom they’d been raising for a year, to his birth mother. Oscar, who had been in foster care himself, had been the one pushing to start their family this way. Now, he seems more at ease than Thomas about Arthur returning to his mother. Oscar just wants to focus on his work, acting in a show that is filming in Michigan, where he could be for a long time.
This leaves photographer Thomas at loose ends in LA. He realizes he still wants a baby but is unsure how to proceed. The story is told from Thomas’ perspective as he considers his life with Oscar and discusses his future options with friends, many of whom are in various stages of their own parenting journeys. Leah (Emily Hampshire) is trying to get pregnant via IVF, though multiple attempts and a miscarriage have her rethinking the expense, especially since her spouse Sonia (Cloie Wyatt Taylor) wants to open a bakery. Annie (Heather Matarazzo) is co-parenting with platonic gay friend Ted (Carl Clemons-Hopkins); another man Thomas meets at a party is a gay dad by surrogacy. And Thomas’s friend Jamie (Jake Choi) isn’t trying to become a parent, but is a member of Thomas and Oscar’s found family, having moved in with them after his parents cut him off. He’s the free-spirited counterweight to the domestic coupledom of the other characters.
While the movie offers a sobering reminder of the temporary nature of most foster care placements, it skims lightly over the often convoluted bureaucracy of foster care that can add layers of trauma for both the children and parents involved. (See two recent memoirs, Safe and A Family, Maybe, for a harsher look at the child welfare system.) And we get little about Thomas and Oscar’s life with Arthur (Matthew Ocampo); the movie focuses on the men in the aftermath of their separation. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though; no one movie should try to do everything, and director Andy Vallentine has clearly chosen to examine a different part of the parenting journey here.
Thomas’s interspersed voiceovers give depth to the story, offering insights into his past and his thoughts about being a parent, and Tortorella conveys them through a heartfelt vulnerability without becoming maudlin. All of the cast members are solid in their roles, but Tortorella, a parent in real life, shines with their sympathetic portrayal of Thomas.
A light humor throughout keeps the weightier thoughts about parenthood and change from cloying. Although Annie, a parenting influencer on social media, comes off a bit like a caricature, Matarazzo gives the role her usual comedic flair.
Through Thomas’s musings and the characters’ interactions, the movie asks us to consider not only the various ways queer families are formed and the challenges we encounter, but also how the rise of queer marriage and parenthood has changed our views of ourselves and our queer community. Thomas reflects, for example, that growing up as gay, he never thought he would even have the chance to be a parent, but “The thing I thought I gave up became part of my story—my gay story. It wasn’t what I expected, but it’s mine. Maybe that’s enough.”
Vallentine, a gay father himself, explained in a Director’s Statement:
Thomas and Oscar both came of age during a time when certain rights like marriage and parenthood were not granted to gay people. They had accepted and embraced the life they thought would be available to them as gay men. While the vast shift in gay rights in the last two decades has meant more freedoms for gay people, it also meant the loss of a community and collective identity predicated on the status as an outsider. Thomas suddenly finds himself married to a man, and briefly, a father—two things he had never considered a possibility for himself—and is left to wonder about selfhood, friendship, and what it means to be a gay man in this time.
This is, however, both a deeply queer film and one that offers more universal lessons on parenting and personal change. Without spoiling things too much, I’ll say that the denouement feels perhaps a little too perfect—but I challenge viewers not to be moved by it.
While the film is self-contained, part of me wishes it were the pilot for an ongoing series, in which we could not only explore Thomas and Oscar’s story further, but also give more depth to the stories of the other queer parents and prospective parents around them, who are here largely used as counterpoints for Thomas. We are long overdue a series that centers queer parents parenting in queer community. (The Fosters, which was really aimed at older youth and young adults, is about as close as we’ve gotten, although queer shows like The L Word (and Generation Q) and Queer As Folk touched sporadically on parenting.) In the meantime, however, The Mattachine Family gives us a thoughtful feature film about one man’s journey even as it whets our appetite for more.
Watch a trailer below and view the whole film on Apple TV, Prime Video, and some other streaming platforms now.
A caution: This is not a movie for the kiddos. There are several scenes of Thomas and Oscar in bed that are decidedly for grown-up audiences.
Directed by Andy Vallentine
Written by Danny Vallentine
Executive Producer Zach Braff