Four Weddings and a Funeral

This is a rare example of a straight man having a gay best friend—two of them! Who have individual personalities! And never help anyone shop for anything! Oh, and they have love lives, with each other, which isn’t heavily emphasized until one of the couple dies. But he doesn’t kill himself or get murdered or die of AIDS—he has a completely banal heart attack, at a party, in his fifties, after spending his life drinking and smoking and generally having a good time. After he dies, the Hugh Grant character notes that while their group of friends had always rejected conventional settling-down, the two men had been “married all along.” There’s also this tearjerker, and notice how when the pastor describes Matthew as one of Gareth's "closest friends," he describes himself as a "splendid bugger":



But the movie doesn’t even make Matthew, the surviving member of the couple, be miserable for the rest of the film: during the “where-are-they-now” montage over the closing credits, we find out that he eventually gets married to some really hot guy. One of the nice things about this movie is that Gareth and Matthew aren’t stereotypically gay, but not in a way that seems the filmmakers are patting themselveson the backs for being so darn progressive. Their relationship provides the emotional heart of the movie, but being gay isn’t shown as anything particularly remarkable in their group of friends, and, while Matthew is the friend the Hugh Grant character repeatedly turns to for advice, it isn’t because he has any kind of gay superpowers. He’s just really levelheaded, and, as Hugh Grant points out, the only one of them to maintain a successful relationship. I could use more of this kind of gay best friend in the movies.