110 min | PG-13 | December 2, 2022 | Focus Features
Spoiler Alert adapts TV journalist Michael Ausiello’s memoir about falling for Kit Cowan and then watching cancer take him. The title gives the ending away on purpose. Knowing how it ends does not make it hurt any less.
Spoiler Alert adapts Michael Ausiello’s memoir about the love of his life and the disease that takes him. Michael is a TV journalist who measures his world in sitcom plots and season finales. He meets Kit Cowan at a bar, and the two build a marriage out of arguments, holidays, and inside jokes. Years in, Kit receives a terminal diagnosis. The film hands you the ending in its title because the story is not about whether Kit dies. It is about a man who organizes his life around television narratives confronting the one story he cannot edit.
Jim Parsons plays Michael as a guarded man who hides behind references and self-deprecation. Parsons lets the wit harden into a defense and then peels it away as Kit gets sicker. Ben Aldridge plays Kit with an ease that makes the diagnosis land harder. He is the open one, the partner who pushes Michael to feel things in the moment. Sally Field plays Kit’s mother Marilyn with a warmth that refuses to curdle into a saint act. Bill Irwin plays Kit’s father Bob as a quiet man who processes grief through small practical gestures.
Michael Showalter directs from a script by David Marshall Grant and Dan Savage. The film stages Michael’s childhood memories as a multi-camera sitcom, complete with a laugh track and a studio set. The device externalizes how Michael narrates his own life, and it pays off when that sitcom logic collapses against real loss. Showalter cuts between the bright artifice of those staged segments and the flat naturalism of the hospital scenes. The contrast does emotional work that the dialogue does not always trust itself to do.
The film knows the hazards of its genre and walks into them anyway. It reaches for tears in moments that earn them and in moments that do not. The structure leans on montage and voiceover when it could trust the actors to carry the silence. Parsons and Aldridge keep the sentiment honest even when the writing pushes too hard. Spoiler Alert works best when it stops performing grief and simply watches two people run out of time.