SYNOPSIS:

Daniel Eiman is content with his life in quaint Leominster, Massachusetts, as he teaches English literature to teenagers. Until one day, when an awkward boy of fifteen confronts Daniel about a past life in politics. Immediately Daniel’s mind flashes back to seemingly brighter days in Washington when he strove with others to champion gay causes. We see glimmers of Daniel’s high-powered past: his friends, his success, his winning ambition, and something else—something dark and painful that he fights to keep at bay. Enter Keith Chambers, thirty-one and the son of Elizabeth Chambers, a successful Republican governor in a decidedly Democratic state who is a legacy in her own right. Idealistic and young, Keith is trained as a trial attorney but has spent his professional life pushing paper behind a desk, unrecognized for anything other than his brooding good looks and iconic family name. He’s a Princeton grad and a real ladies’ man, seriously involved with the beautiful and talented Ashley Cox—while he keeps another, sexier woman on the side. But we soon discover that Keith is somehow blocked, trapped in his own life. His family, particularly the governor, is pushing him to marry Ashley, and in spite of his celebrity and charismatic appeal he can’t seem to get people to take him seriously about anything, most frustratingly his passion for environmental advocacy. One night at a fundraising party, Daniel and Keith meet through Daniel’s close college-friend-turned-political-rival, Marty Chambers. Marty, a political tour-de-force in her own right, also happens to be Keith’s twin sister. While Daniel and Keith don’t exactly hit it off from the start, circumstances find them spending the weekend together; playing volleyball, swimming, eating, drinking—and bonding. It turns out to be just the rejuvenation Keith needs, and he finds himself startled by the intense draw he feels toward the passionate yet enigmatic Daniel. Over the following weeks, Keith seeks Daniel out further and they become fast friends. Keith begins to discover a world of thoughts and feelings he never knew existed, and Daniel begins to battle a past that he had vowed to obliterate. Just as they begin to submit to what is being revealed, Governor Chambers comes to suspect the nature or their relationship. When the governor sets in motion a series of events to ward off scandal, she forces Daniel and Keith into the quagmire of their individual obstacles: one must excavate his true desires from a lifetime of social programming, while the other must learn to love again after the most devastating of personal losses. A forties-style love story with a different sort of twist, ENTITLEMENT is a poignant, charming, emotionally charged reflection on the trials and triumphs of the spirit as well as a humanistic take on the deeper realities of finding wholeness outside society’s status quo.

ENTITLEMENT

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