This lushly filmed Russian River
love story will linger with lonely-hearts of all persuasions. Everett -- the
risibly fussy and preternaturally boyish Brendan Bradley: in the film his
character is aptly described as “twelve going on forty” -- is a young guy
trapped in a suffocating marriage to the more than slightly anal Miles (Tad Coughenour).
Everett and Miles are together out of habit and to protect their
developmentally challenged son Billy (Caleb Dorfman). When Miles and Billy
leave on a family trip, Everett finds his too orderly world (his to do list
from Miles begins with bathroom mold) unhinged by the appearance of that staple
of film romance: the handsome, available, footloose stranger. Chase -- Texas
raised Matthew Montgomery exudes a modern cowboy’s understated masculinity --
is a novice writer struggling to find a suitable metaphor for a painful
childhood memory. The boys duke it out over the story but find a bedroom
chemistry that’s impossible to resist.
Writer/director David Lewis – last
seen with the religious boys in love dramedy, Rock Haven – has upped his
game: thwarted love stories that appear designed for a yet to be launched queer
Disney Channel. The chemistry between leads Bradley and Montgomery fills in
lapses in story logic -- Redwoods invokes the clichés of the genre
without losing our interest. There’s definitely a hunger out there for the kind
of the film that will remind some of that queer heartland soap, Big Eden.
You’ll be touched and not in a bad way by how this one wraps up, oh, yes,
with the title: Five years later.
The unusually high number of
deleted scenes in the bonus features’ section indicates that Lewis was torn by
how much to trim from his attractive supporting cast’s subplots – actually the
film might benefit from an expanded understanding of Everett’s supportive
family, especially his sweet ties to his hunky brother (Simon Burzynski) --
there’s a case to be made for tossing many of the deleted scenes back into an
extended director’s cut. Additional features include a behind-the-scenes short,
the theatrical trailer and a funny, playful TV chat with openly gay co-star
Matthew Montgomery.