One of my comfort reads that I return to time and time again is Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. It’s a bookstagram and booktok favorite, and so when it was announced that it was being adapted into a movie by Amazon Studios, I wasn’t the only one excited (and a little nervous) about the news. After years of small updates, the movie was finally available to stream earlier in August.
If you aren’t chronically online and haven’t heard of RW&RB, the gist is that Alex, the son of the first female president of the United States, falls in love with Henry, the prince of England. Henry is gay but not out to his family, and Alex goes through a period of self-discovery as he realizes he is bisexual. In the background, Alex’s mother is running for reelection and Alex is wrapping up his undergrad degree as he works to pursue his goal of becoming one of the youngest members of Congress in history.
I watched the movie almost right away, and I had mixed feelings about it. My very first emotion was disappointment with a few of the most major changes, but as I reflected on it more, I realized that what likely happened is the studio was majorly trying to trim down a pretty dense story into one that would fit within a standard romcom length movie. RW&RB the book is over 400 pages, or roughly 110,000 words. This is pretty long for a romance novel–the industry standard is generally between 70,000 to 90,000 words. Of course, although RW&RB is at its heart a queer romcom, I think it’s all the other layers that really endeared it to its audience–that’s certainly what makes me love it so much. But much of that story is 1) internal character struggle and growth which is hard to show onscreen and 2) not specifically related to the love story between Alex and Henry. As the writers adapted the book to a movie, it seems clear they knew they needed to simplify the story to make it a roughly two-hour movie. (Listen, would I have complained if it had ended up being a 3.5 hour epic? No, but I’m also not necessarily a good representative of the general demographic).
All that to say, I think there are three things at the heart of the RW&RB book:
Story of queer love and joy
Figuring out who you are — not just your sexual orientation, but what you want to do with your life and who you want to be
Finding your community and learning to lean on them
Let’s look at each of these to see how the movie compares.
Story of queer love and joy
This is naturally where the movie excels. When the screenwriters were trimming down the book, they clearly chose to focus on this aspect. Which makes sense! It is most of the plot of the book, and it’s the easy logline for the story: Son of U.S. president falls in love with Prince of England. And they do capture this aspect well. The movie is a solid romcom, full of witty banter, sweet romantic moments, and aching moments of queer love longing for a world where it isn’t exceptional or controversial.
Listen, were there a few lines that made me cringe? Sure. I mean, with all the incredible dialogue McQuiston wrote in the book, why are they adding lines like, “Did your parents send you to snobbery school or does looking down on people come naturally to you?” *face palm* BUT, overall, it keeps the love story of the book–a fun and lighthearted romp balanced with sincere moments of struggle and heartache.
Figuring out who you are
This is the piece of the book that really makes it one of my favorite stories, and it’s also the piece that the movie cut out almost entirely. The book is from Alex’s point of view, and a key subplot is him figuring out who he is. Yes, figuring out his sexual orientation–a large portion at the beginning of the book is dedicated to him figuring out his feelings once his rivalry-turned-friendship with Henry becomes something more. The movie largely skips over even this struggle, though–Alex has already slept with two men, and so it’s not a large leap for him to realize he’s bisexual once Henry kisses him. It barely warrants a conversation with his best friend, Nora.
In addition to that, in the book, Alex is also struggling with who he wants to be, unrelated to his love life. He graduates from college in the book and has a goal of becoming a member of Congress by the time he’s thirty. He wants to help people, and he’s convinced that the best way to do that is to get into politics as quickly as possible and live life at full speed. Throughout the book, we see other characters questioning this plan, and ultimately, Alex comes to realize that maybe there is another way, one that is more of a slow-and-steady pace but can still result in him doing a lot of good in the world. We also see him wrestling within his family dynamics as his parents are divorced and his older sister, June, still somewhat feels the need to take care of him.
In the movie, this entire storyline is erased. Alex and Henry are aged up, so that they’re almost thirty, not in college. Alex still clearly has political ambitions, but they both play a smaller role in the story overall and are unquestioned in the story, as they add in a montage of him being sent to Texas to work on voter registration to support his mother’s reelection campaign. Alex’s big character growth revolves around Henry and deciding if he “feels forever” about him–a quote from the book that takes on an even bigger role in the movie. More emphasis is subsequently given to Henry and his decision to come out to his family, and therefore the country of England. This is certainly a storyline in the book, but by stripping away other subplots, it became a major plot of the movie, which I didn’t actually mind.
Relying on family and friends, finding your community
A key part of the RW&RB book is the community that builds around Alex and Henry, both expected and unexpected. At the start of the book, Alex has his sister June and the vice president’s granddaughter Nora–the three of them, referred to as the White House Trio, are inseparable. Henry closely relies on his best friend Pez and his older sister Bea, the only member of his family who he has come out to. Through the course of the book, each man becomes closer to these support groups, while simultaneously, the two groups merge into one big friend group. This is seen in interstitials showing messages from the group chat, and most clearly in the karaoke scene, with all six characters at the karaoke bar together (It also happens to feature one of the best lines of the books by Alex: “Bisexuality is truly a rich and complex tapestry.”)
The movie, in its attempt to trim things down, cuts out a lot of this friend group. Bea is present in the movie, but only in a handful of scenes. Most disappointingly, June is cut out of the movie entirely. Instead, it seems like the writers tried to merge her character with Nora’s. Which might work in theory (“Why does he need two women as his closest friends, let’s just make them into one person!”) but in practice, June and Nora play very different roles in the story and are very different people.
For one thing, June has very different opinions on their divorced parents responses and assumptions about June and Alex’s participation in political careers, and her viewpoint serves as the brakes to Alex’s “move fast and break things” personality. Nora provides no such thing in the movie, but in part because that counterbalance isn’t needed, as the movie also erases any uncertainty about Alex leaping into politics, as I mentioned in the previous section.
In general, June is much more emotional and empathetic, whereas Nora is analytical and blunt. At various points in the book, Alex goes to each of them for their unique take on whatever piece of his situation he needs help with. They balance each other, so when the movie tries to combine them into one character…it’s less than the sum of its parts. The most we see of Nora is in the scene when Alex is wrestling with his maybe-feelings for Henry, and Nora’s character ends up behaving more like June from the book, depriving us of the comical yet heartfelt scene that actually happens in the novel when Alex talks to Nora.
June isn’t the only character cut from the story, though. Henry’s mother, though mentioned, never appears onscreen. In the book, Henry’s mother is still lost deep in her grief years after the death of Henry’s father. But at the end of the book, when Henry’s grandmother aka the Queen of England instructs Henry to hide his relationship with Alex and the fact that he is gay, it is his mother who shows up for her son. She is the reason the Queen backs down, supported by her reveal that there are marches in support of Alex and Henry throughout all of the U.K., including outside Buckingham Palace. It’s a beautiful moment for Henry, who throughout most of the book feels like he can’t truly rely on his family.
Listen, the movie does its best to still capture the relationships that are present, and overall it does a fairly good job. But the focus is very much on Alex and Henry, another result of simplifying the story. While it isn’t entirely unexpected, I was very disappointed to not see June as a character, or to get the full joy and complexity of the six twenty-somethings characters onscreen together each figuring out life and love together and individually.
Final Thoughts
The final question for these Shelf-to-Screen reviews is which category the movie ends up in. (For a refresher on the categories, click here). How well does the Red, White & Royal Blue movie live up to the spirit of the book? Clearly there are large portions that were changed, and my initial reaction to the movie was to be a little disappointed. But I think that’s because the reason I love the book isn’t just for the fun romance romp; it’s all the other aspects that capture what it’s like to be in your twenties and trying to figure out your place in the world. It’s a journey I deeply resonated with when I first read the book, and it’s why I keep coming back to it. The movie, understandably, focuses on the romcom aspect almost exclusively. After reflecting, I don’t think that makes it inherently worse than the book; just very different. For that reason, I would put the RW&RB movie into Category 3: A well-done movie that captures much of the heart of the book, with changes that are mostly understandable, but still mean you should definitely read the book.
