After watching about half the film I kept thinking that an educated, intelligent, successful person would never so easily hook up with some guy he had a chance encounter with at a liquor store, let alone almost immediately claim that he "really loved" the guy. And, if that wasn't sufficiently incredible, he certainly wouldn't stick around once the guy started hitting on him for money for drugs, followed by making a scene at a bar proclaiming that "you don't own me" and "I'll do whatever I want."
I even checked in this forum at that point to see what others thought about the plausibility of all this
and initially agreed 100% with a reviewer who wrote several lines beginning with "There is absolutely no way any sensible person would
" and who concluded "The implausibilities in the story are the film's major weakness." That's exactly what I felt too.
But I gave it some further thought and watched the rest of the movie
with a bit of fast-forwarding. There are a lot of people, intelligent or not, educated or not, sophisticated or not, who sometimes do totally irrational things when driven by infatuation or, more bluntly, by lust. It may imply a degree of vulnerability but people who seem to have their act together can still be vulnerable as well.
I doubt at this point in life I'd be so easily drawn into doing something so stupid, but then opportunities to be irrational with someone as sexy as the character Denny don't come my way
for reasons other than my sensible, world-weary personality.
Real people do incredibly stupid things when it comes to sex. If they're lucky, they're not too badly hurt by the experiences and they do return to making sensible choices
as was the case with Rusty.
Quite often people in movies do things that we would never do and act in a way that seems irrational to us, but most of us know real people who do such things. The news often reports on famous, supposedly well-respected, sensible people who do incredibly reckless things because of sex. We may even look back on our own lives and recall some amazingly implausible things we did
because of sex.
Nonetheless, even after accepting Rusty's illogical behavior as realistic for some emotionally fragile people and also noting that the two main characters in the movie are definitely easy on the eyes, it is still by no means a great movie. There was never any sense of Rusty being driven by his infatuation for Denny, we were just told that he really loved him and had to believe that was what was making him act foolishly. Neither the story nor the acting helped to make us understand why Rusty did what he did.
