pry the oxford comma from my cold dead hands

[fox]

The name of the book, on the cover, was evidently Red, White & Royal Blue. That seems to be what Amazon is calling the film as well, in a different font, except when I went to double check I found that they can't even let the same decision stay made for this long:

So I'm going to carry on using the Oxford comma and the word "and" and we're all going to have to be okay with that.

Anyway, like I said, the movie was fine, and I think it was fine because it was cut down from the book, where I think exactly the same movie without the book holding it up might not have been as good. I'm just going to take a second here, and then hopefully be able to move on to other matters, to note that the cast of this movie are the best-looking lot to have appeared on my television in a long while, maybe ever, and I say this as a person who just spent a year and a quarter transcribing due South. Taylor Zakhar Perez as Alex, good lord. Something reminiscent of Rufus Sewell about the cheekbones, especially in profile when he does a similar crinkly-eyed smirking laugh, but/and then the dazzling smile and the big brown eyes and the eyelashes for days. The rest of them are very nice-looking as well, she conceded, hand-waving many beautiful people including Uma goddamn Thurman and Nicholas Galitzine, the other lead (the first words out of whose mouth are "When the revolution comes," which if it's accurate that the actor is literally a Russian prince—I mean, that is, descended from an exiled Russian princely family—is vaguely hilarious), but this Alex, holy shit.

I guess the rest of the post contains spoilers . . .

Things from the book that were absent from the movie

• Alex's sister June. I missed her. She was basically combined with the VP's granddaughter Nora into a single character named Nora, because the June-specific storyline(s) would have bogged the movie down unnecessarily, I guess? In the book, June is less happy than Alex is as a president's child because her degree is in communications and she wants to be a journalist, but of course she can't get a meaningful gig as a cub reporter because everyone correctly thinks she can't possibly be objective. He wants to go into politics, but she can't wait to get out, and these differences between them make the book deeper but wouldn't probably have improved the movie. I can dig that. I still wish June had been present in the movie for her role in the Alex-specific storyline, or at least because Alex's relationship with his older sister was interesting to compare to Henry's relationship with his own older sister, which brings us to
• the fact that Henry, not Beatrice, was the youngest of the three royal siblings. I imagine they swapped the two of them because it was the easiest way to age Henry up a bit—in the book he's on his gap year after university (specifically turns 23 in early March; "I knew he was a fucking Pisces," June says)—which is actually a thing that puzzles me a bit because I've always thought of a gap year as a break you take between leaving school and going to university, but apparently in this instance it's a break Henry is taking between finishing university and getting (as close as he can as an apparently senior member of the royal family) a real job, which he's hoping won't have to be military service—and Alex is a senior in college (specifically turns 22 in late March); but in the film Alex is a law student, making him probably as much as five years older than that, and Henry is a bit older as well. Which, as I said, I think is just as well, from a Watsonian perspective because the audience likes a slightly more mature heroic couple (and the stakes are higher, as well, I guess), and from a Doylist one because when your actors are in their late 20s and early 30s it's going to be harder to sell them as recent undergraduates.
• Any storyline for Beatrice at all. In the book, Beatrice has a history of drug use and a history with the tabloid press, and Henry says he came out to her and her alone when she had checked herself out of rehab because their father had recently died and without her he didn't know what he'd do. In the film the reason they're closer than either of them is to their elder brother is barely acknowledged, much less explained, and she is little more than a sympathetic woman-shaped person with whom Henry has about four scenes.
• Meaningful attention to the president's re-election efforts. This is the biggest plot difference.
  
  So an important character in the book is Rafael Luna, a gay Independent Mexican-American senator from Colorado whose campaign Alex worked on and whom he helped elect; he's a friend of both the administration and of Alex's father, the (white; see above, Uma Thurman) president's (Mexican-American) ex-husband, a Democratic senator from California. There's a lot of concern about the presumptive Republican challenger's eventual running mate and other congressional allies, and at a crucial juncture Luna joins the Republican challenger's campaign, shocking the living crap out of everyone. (Which I can obviously appreciate the sense of shock, but I don't actually see why they would have assumed the guy would be So Loyal All The Time when such a fuss was made over his being an Independent rather than a Democrat. If he were going to join your party, he'd have done it, Madam President, and the fact that he hasn't could have told you something, right?) So now they're (a) feeling stunned and betrayed and (b) scared that Luna is going to help the Republican (Richards is his name) pull the Hispanic vote and the youth vote both, with some sort of youth program he, Richards, is blathering about, and they're really up against it, and Alex has a whole concept about how they can flip Texas—which they'd want to do anyway, because his mom started as a congresswoman from Texas, and it hurt to win without carrying her own home state, but now it's really a thing because it's beginning to look like the re-election is in real danger. And then Alex and Henry's emails are put on WikiLeaks and they've been super careful but somehow someone gets a photo through an untinted windshield of them kissing in the back seat of a Suburban and Alex is in trouble with the campaign and Henry is in trouble with the royal family and this is really the Major Peril. They determine based on figuring shit out with the calendar that at least it wasn't Luna who outed Alex, not that that makes anyone feel much better, and then ultimately Nora gets an anonymous message conclusively showing that it was the Richards campaign that hacked Alex and Henry's emails, and it turns out that message to Nora came from Luna, who leaves the campaign, and everyone is friends again—I do miss the lots-of-campaign-intrigue of it all, but this is A Lot, and it would have complicated the movie a great deal.
  
  In the movie, Alex has written a memo about how to flip Texas, which basically boils down to voter registration drives. (In The Man in the Iron Mask (1998), Jeremy Irons as Aramis announces, "We will replace Louis with Philippe!" only to have John Malkovich as Athos reply, in that incredulous tone only Malkovich can summon, "That is your plan?!"—which has been on my mind a bit for reasons I can't fathom. 😄
• Nora being Jewish. It's just a quick mention in the book, when the president's family is together for Christmas, Nora is doing Hannukkah [with her parents] in Vermont, but the movie doesn't even have that.
• Henry's mother, Princess Catherine. As I said before, the royal family in both the book and the movie is a mystery to me. It seems clear that Henry's brother Philip is expecting to (have to) be king one day, which means either their mother is the monarch's only child or she's the only one with children. As it happens, in the book they specify that Catherine is the eldest daughter of Queen Mary, which tells me there's at least one younger aunt but doesn't tell us anything about whether she has one or more childless older brothers? But in a conversation about surnames, Henry says they generally used Wales rather than the technical royal family name (Mountchristen-Windsor) or their father's name (Fox—no relation). So Queen Mary will have created her eldest daughter Princess of Wales, which she'd only have done if she had no sons, and which George VI famously didn't consider when it was obvious Elizabeth would succeed him (he felt the title Princess of Wales belonged only to the wife of the Prince of Wales, and the Prince of Wales was always the heir apparent, and Elizabeth was never higher than heiress presumptive until she actually, surprise!, inherited—le sigh—though I guess if he'd admitted she was heiress obvious he'd have maybe created her Prince of Wales? She was technically Duke of Lancaster and Lord of Man, because Victoria had said no, a Duke is the one who holds the title and a Duchess is married to a Duke, so hey, maybe the Duke of Edinburgh was also the Duchess of Lancaster? the Duchy doesn't say.
  
  —anyway, the fictitious Queen Mary seems to have created her eldest daughter either Princess or just plain Prince of Wales, so her grandchildren are Prince Philip of Wales (or Duke of Whatever she's elevated him to now that he's married), Princess Beatrice of Wales, and Prince Henry of Wales rather than Philip Mountchristen-Windsor-Fox, etc., in the manner of the real-life children of Princess Anne, Princess Beatrice of York, and Princess Eugenie of York, who are all technically commoners. Poor Catherine has been basically a recluse ever since her husband died of cancer, but in the book she does show up at the end after the boys have been outed when the queen is being awful about it, to tell the queen she's losing her mind and Catherine will nudge her right off the throne if she isn't careful, and plus she's got to modernize—which is an interesting point to make to a monarch who will necessarily have admitted that her daughter is heir apparent, but never mind, I guess. (This role is sort of half painted onto Beatrice in the movie, because oddly enough the king in the movie is less awful than the queen in the book.)
• Alex's high school friend Liam. In the book, Liam and Alex fooled around some in high school and when Alex finds himself falling for Henry he belatedly realized that wasn't just A Thing Guys Do. He's not really central to any of the plots, even Alex's bisexual awakening; I don't miss him the way I miss June and Rafael and Catherine. (In the movie, he's referred to once, extremely obliquely, not by name, as one of the two guys Alex has ever been with in—one assumes—an otherwise lengthy list made up entirely of women.)
• Henry's best friend Percy. In the book, this best friend is closer to Henry than anyone but Beatrice, plus he has a thing for June (or Nora, or both); working with his series of charitable foundations is what Henry wants to do with his life rather than join the Royal Navy and do appearances representing his grandmother and then his mother and then his brother forever. Pez appears in the movie, but only once or twice when, I guess, they needed someone other than Beatrice to accompany Henry places and hang around with Nora.
• Alex and June's stepdad Leo. Ellen and Oscar's divorce and its effect on their kids and her remarriage and the way the three adults get along and the modern family of it all is important to the characterization of the people in the book, but not (I'd say) to the plot, and I can see how keeping them married and leaving Leo on the cutting room floor was a sensible movie decision.
• Identifiable dates and political figures from real life. In the book, Alex and June's mother was elected president in 2016 (sob, if only) and this re-election is happening in 2020, and they refer to real-life presidential families all the way through the Obamas. In the movie a couple of dates are visible on some social media threads, but I think just month and day, no year, and they certainly don't mention the names Obama, Bush, or Clinton (and I think not even Reagan, Nixon, or Kennedy, all of which do come up in the book). I'll come back to this shortly.
• The West Wing. It exists as a TV show in the book.

Things that exist in the movie but did not appear in the book

• Miguel Ramos. The book characters of Liam (sort of) and Rafael Luna (sort of) are amalgamated (sort of) into Miguel, a reporter who happens to be the other dude Alex once hooked up with, who is still into him and/but also keeps trying to use him as a source, which Alex is too smart for even before he falls in love with Henry. When the emails are leaked—in the movie it's the Daily Mail who publishes them, and they would—it's not entirely implied that Miguel is in any way responsible, but he is identified as the first American reporter to break the story and to have written about it extensively in the ensuing weeks; is that because he has a mad on for Alex after Alex flat-out turned him down? He's the closest thing the movie has to a villain, and the actor does a nice job shifting from a sort of hopeful gleam in his eye when he's trying to get closer to Alex to a proper mean glint in his eye when he tells Joy Reid (as herself) that Alex Claremont-Diaz is not a private citizen.
• Henry's grandfather, the king. Yes, in the movie just as in real life there's a king now rather than the queen who was on the throne when the book came out. [wry smile]
  
  Wait, let's pause for a tangent about the movie!royal family. In the movie, Henry says the family name is Hanover-Stuart, which is . . . a little less bonkers than I initially thought, because Victoria was the last Hanover, so skipping back past the Windsors and the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas doesn't land you before Victoria herself, at least. Which would be a thing because Henry at one point makes a reference to the reign of Queen Victoria, doesn't he. So never mind; they've gone with Hanover-Stuart rather than Mountchristen-Windsor because the latter is uncomfortably close to Mountbatten-Windsor and you can get away with that in a book but not a movie, I guess? Never mind, there was going to be much more of a tangent here but I don't need to do it; everything I said about Princess Catherine above is the same here except, ooh, Henry says she's the Duchess of Edinburgh, which must mean (a) she's not the Prince(ss) of Wales and (b) her late husband was created Duke of Edinburgh when they married, which in our world would probably have meant the kids would have used the surname "Edinburgh" at school. Henry's elder brother Prince Philip (of Edinburgh) is introduced at the beginning as Prince Philip, Duke of Cambridge, so I’d guess there already is a Duke of York? Maybe the king's brother? So presumably Henry will get Kent or Sussex or Gloucester or something when he marries. (In the book, Philip says something like "What are you going to do, make Alex the Duchess of Cambridge?", so he must have got a different dukedom upon his own marriage.)
  
  Anyway, the king is played by Stephen Fry, so what is that, a stunt? But I don't see the king as a homophobic jerk, the way we're certainly meant to see Richards, the Republican challenger (at least, in the book; I don't remember if he says boo about this matter in the movie). He could have played this king a lot meaner than he did—I mean, the king is a lot meaner to Alex ("let me disabuse you of the idea that your contribution to this conversation is in any way welcome") than he is to Henry, isn't he. It's hard not to see what (e.g.) jennaria has suggested, that he must have some Tragic Self-Denial in his past, when he tells Henry that his primary obligation is not to his heart but to his country, and when he says "the country simply will not accept a prince who is . . . homosexual," he plays it with a topspin that really seems to imply, ask me how I know. I don't know, maybe we wouldn't be getting that impression from an actor we didn't know was as gay as Christmas. But they must have known we knew that about Stephen Fry, mustn't they? (So I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.) At the end of this scene, it turns out people are spontaneously gathering outside the palace and in cities all over the UK with rainbow flags alongside their Union Jacks in favor of Henry and Alex being allowed to be together. NB this does occur in the book as well, including people holding posters reading "FREE HENRY," which I feel like we can maybe just about see in the reflection in the window here. What does not also occur in the book is what happens next, which is that Philip begs the king not to allow Henry and Alex to go out to greet them, and the king says "Henry, my boy, are you sure this is what you want? There is no turning back if you go out there now." I mean—maybe he means "You'll be out of this family for good," but that doesn't sound like what he means, does it? At worst he might mean "You'll still be my grandson, but you'll be off the rotation for royal appearances," but Henry didn't want to do those anyway; he thinks the whole thing is obscene. (Remember the very beginning? "When the revolution comes, it will be because of this wedding.") And then —
• Henry and Alex step out onto the balcony together and wave to the cheering crowds. . . . Look, it's pretty hard for me not to see this particular aspect of the thing as How It Could Have Gone With Harry And Meghan, and it's nice for Henry and Alex but I'm bummed about it in real life.

Things I liked a lot

• Most or all of the needle drops. "Bad Reputation;" "Get Low;" "Don't Stop Me Now;" "If I Loved You" from Camelot for heaven's sake; "Can't Help Falling in Love with You" dancing under a moonlit atrium in the Victoria & Albert museum (and I absolutely did not miss the book's use at that moment of Elton John's "Your Song").
• After they've been outed, when they're first permitted to speak to each other again, when Shaan the equerry brings Henry his own phone and Henry says "Hello?" Alex says "Baby," and that one second of vocal performance is something else. In the book he says "Sweetheart," and probably if they'd used the word "sweetheart" but the actor had loaded it up with the same subtext he shoveled in there under "baby"—I love you, I miss you, I can't stand that this is happening at all but it's even worse that we're apart and I haven't even been allowed to communicate with you at all, God, the sadness in your voice, I wish I could hold you right now—it would have been just as good? I'm not for one moment blaming the author for this exact moment not appearing in the book, by the way, because (a) it kind of did, only with "sweetheart" instead of "baby" as I said, and (b) it absolutely depends on the delivery. I'm not saying I'm going to download it and make it my husband's ringtone or anything, but listen, it's good.

Things I wasn't bananas about

• Just before they step out on the balcony, Henry says "I love you" and Alex says "I love you more," and that been a Thing in the hearts-and-flowers culture for a while, and I have simply never found it endearing. The only time it ever worked for me, actually, was in the Doctor Who episode I'm not going to look up right now in which Rory and Amy have one device between them that—I forget what it protects you from, maybe a force that feeds on your love for the person you're with?—and Rory insists that Amy take it (or that he keep it, depending on what the malevolent force does, I can't remember) because he'll last longer without it, or something like that, the point is, and he begs her not to make him say it, but eventually he has to: "The central truth of our relationship is that I love you more than you love me." (And she slaps him, of course, and they go on from there.) But like: When you're not in mortal peril, and you're not fighting with each other, what the fuck is that?, "I love you more"? It's not a contest, fellas. "I love you too" will do nicely.
• How much Alex (in the book) drinks. I'm neither a prude nor a teetotaler, but the first several times Alex and Henry hook up, at least Alex and possibly also Henry is observably drunk. Alex is the POV hero so it's not as clear how drunk Henry is. And as the POV narrator Alex doesn't ever give the impression that Henry does anything Alex doesn't want him to do—but the incapacity muddles the consent in a way I don't care for, and it keeps happening. It's an uncomfortably long time before they shag sober.
• When (spoiler!) Alex's mother is re-elected and she takes the stage with her family to wave to her own crowds, as the victorious do on election nights (so do the vanquished, I guess, though no one is as jubilant about it), Henry goes out with them at Alex's side, which is not what I'm annoyed about; it's that they didn't arrange it so that Henry was on Alex's right. See: At the beginning of the film, when they're doing staged appearances to mitigate the ruined-wedding-cake incident, Henry's equerry insists that Alex always stand on Henry's right side, which Alex asks if it's protocol or just that's Henry's good side. (Henry says "Both.") Later on they're getting along better and about to get their picture taken and Alex remembers for himself and scoots around to Henry's right. When they step out on the balcony, Alex is on Henry's right. I think I'd have liked it, when they're finally getting their pictures taken because Henry is with Alex rather than because Alex is with Henry, if Henry had been on Alex's right. Alas: Not to be.

I've been rambling about this all day. Better hit Post and move on with my life. OH, but first, I was going to come back to the Clintons and Obamas and West Wing of it all—because I am generally happier with the book plot and setting but with the movie leads and their being grownups etc., I think for the first time in my life I'm going to be happiest being a non-purist about canon and . . . combining them? That is, I'm going to take the movie as canon generally but revert Henry to being the youngest of his siblings, import June and Rafael and Leo and their storylines, and assume The West Wing as we know it was not a TV show in their universe because that allows me to cross them over and have Alex and June be friends with their immediate predecessors, Peter and Miranda Santos. [satisfied nod]