Bernadette Peters’ Lesbian Turn in Bobbie’s Girl

Having Bernadette Peters as your whimsical lesbian aunt sounds great on paper, but Bobbie’s Girl might make you rethink that. Here her whimsy is such that it can’t be contained even as she tells her 10-year-old nephew his parents are dead. Addressing Alan (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) in the headmaster’s office of his boarding school, her Bailey Lewis somberly informs him “There’s been an accident.”

That’s as far as screenwriter Samuel Bernstein lets her get before she launches into one of her scatterbrained digressions. “That sounds funny, like some old mystery drama,” she babbles without awareness as a child, his life now changed forever, stares at her. They’ve never met before and her impulse is to play his parents’ death for yuks. Then she lets him drive her home since she’s a disaster behind the wheel.

Home is the Two Sisters bar in Ireland, owned by Bailey and her longtime partner Bobbie Langham (Rachel Ward). Bobbie is Alan’s biological aunt, who by her own admission never met him or gave his existence any thought. As Alan takes in the merry karaoke scene at the bar, Bailey broaches the subject of Bobbie’s brother and is again inexplicably tone-deaf.

Bobbie: What’s happened to him? Is he all right? Is he alive?

Bailey: No.

Bobbie: No he’s not all right or no he’s not alive?

Bailey: Both. With everything that happened, with the car and the roads and the headmaster, I don’t know how to tell you that your brother and his wife were smashed to pieces by a great big truck. I don’t!

Bobbie’s Girl (2002)

Bailey then dissolves into tears and requires comforting. Her exhausting emotional fragility is rivaled if not surpassed in annoyingness only by Bobbie’s taciturn nature. Bailey’s all stammering, yammering, and other eccentric affectations; Bobbie’s function is to wear a leather jacket, habitually frown, and generally act like an asshole. Bobbie’s also keeping a secret from Bailey, a breast cancer diagnosis that can’t stay hidden much longer.

Family and personal upheaval abound in Bobbie’s Girl. No one has more to adjust to than Alan, whose new surroundings are unfamiliar both physically and emotionally. His parents hadn’t appreciated his bookishness or interest in the theater but Bailey encourages him to read whatever he wants, even if it’s Bobbie’s copy of The Female Eunuch. He’s dazzled to learn Bailey’s a former Broadway actress and admires her flamboyant style, and that of her brother, David.

David (Jonathan Silverman), a Two Sisters bartender with regrettable highlights, lives with Bailey and Bobbie. He wears caftans to breakfast (and the occasional skirt to work) and calls dibs on Masha during a family performance of Three Sisters. When Alan initially addresses him as “sir,” he replies, “You gotta be kidding me! Do I look like a sir to you?” “No, sir,” Alan replies. Their bond is the film’s most impactful.

“The lad is a bit of a nancy boy, don’t you think?” Alan’s headmaster had already observed to his aunts. (“You’re a bit of a wanker, is what I think,” Bobbie replied.) To David, Alan casually confides: “I used to think I was a girl when I was very little. My dad didn’t like it. Then I figured out I wasn’t a girl and things got alright again.” David doesn’t press the issue but tells him “Well, you’re way ahead of me, Alan, if that means anything to you.”

While Bailey and David are genetically related, as are Bobbie and Alan, Bobbie’s Girl is about chosen family. Alan has the opportunity to live with his maternal grandfather but is more comfortable in a gay household with his sardonic feminist aunt and the theatrical, nurturing Lewis siblings. For a sensitive youngster who felt unaccepted at home and at school, it’s a dream come true — but at a steep cost, the edges of which are not softened by “zany” comedy.

The cancer subplot is handled with equal obliviousness. Bobbie’s determined to go it alone, which is impractical for a million reasons, and fights frequently (and pointlessly) with Bailey. There is only one blowup that rings true, that concludes with her saying “Right. Have a nice cry. You stand there crying and I’ll go and have my breasts cut off.”

Imagine if Ward and Peters had been given more scenes like that and fewer of Bobbie acting unreasonable while Bailey cries. She’s a jerk the whole time so that, at the end, she can finally stop being one. The laziness of the writing is hard to overstate. It gives Ward nowhere to go and Peters little to react to; it’s equally repetitive for the appealing Brodie-Sangster, whose Alan can’t help but take Bobbie’s outbursts personally. By the 37th time or so he flees a room while his caregivers act like children, you’ll wish that he’d adopt his aunts and send them to their room.

Streaming and DVD availability

Bobbie’s Girl hasn’t been released on DVD in the United States and isn’t currently on any subscription or ad-supported streaming platforms. Your options are VHS (where it’s scarce and priced accordingly) or trying your luck on YouTube.

^{Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.}

… But wait, there’s more!

I’ll review the LeAnn Rimes TV movie Holiday in Your Heart later this year, but in the meantime I’d like to note my primary interest isn’t in Rimes or the direction of Michael Switzer (who helmed Susan Lucci’s The Woman Who Sinned). It’s the IMDb goofs page that mentions Peters, in her performance as a diabetic, injects insulin into an arm vein. That’s a mighty big screw-up to make it into a finished product, so my imagination’s running wild about the rest of the film.