Breakfast with Scot is a story about a gay couple who are placed in charge of a young boy when his mother dies suddenly. The couple is lawyer Sam (Ben Shenkman) and former NHL player Eric (Thomas Cavanagh). The twist is that the kid comes off as a flamboyant gay stereotype and that makes Eric a bit homophobic.
Eric desperately tries to tone down Scot, going so far as to enroll him in a kid's hockey league. At the same time he tries hard to maintain his image as a tough hockey player turned sportscaster. Cavanagh does a nice job with this, managing to keep those separate images convincing.
The theme of image is woven through out the film. Eric is tightly woven into his image as a hockey player, and a tough one at that. He struggles to make that work with being a gay man. For almost the entire movie, he never shows Sam any affection publicly. He worries constantly about Scot's flamboyant image. Scot does need to learn how to interact with people inside some level of societal norms, but that's the limit of how he needs to be reined in. Eric really can't be comfortable with anything beyond a very traditional image. He not at all comfortable about being viewed as gay. Ironically he seems to be deluded that this is a secret. His coworkers and neighbors know and his teammates knew it as well. Eric seems to be the one character who is most homophobic.
Noah Bernett, the actor playing Scot, is fairly remarkable. He shows a lot of range and considerable poise in switching from outrageous and over the top to serious. And he has a good sense of comic timing as well. The movie depends on Scot being believable. A lesser actor would have crashed the movie into hopeless parody. But Bernett gives Scot actual layers and depth. You slowly come to realize that this kid is a lot smarter and more self-aware than initially given credit for.
The film has a lot of minor characters and this constitutes a weakness because they become hard to keep track of, making them largely indistinguishable from one another. Things could have been greatly streamlined but cutting and/or combining a lot of them. The story really comes down to Scot and Eric. Even Sam, a fairly major character, tends to fade into the background. The program notes tell me he's a lawyer but from watching the movie, I couldn't have told you anything about him other than he's neater and more "responsible" than Eric.
The ending can be spotted coming a long way off. The movie's other major problem is that it lacks much of an edge. It has good intentions and a good heart but is thoroughly predictable. It deserves credit for the matter of fact tone it takes to gay issues and winning the support of the Toronto Maple Leafs in making the picture. It just makes me wish that much more that it had tried just a bit harder to be something original all the way to the end.
