popsublime

The film festival in Provincetown made a gradual post-pandemic return this past week, with Waters Edge Cinema hosting the majority of the screenings. I watched four films there over the past several days, as well as one at the Mary Heaton Vorse House in town, in addition to streaming some of the festival selections online. While it felt quite different from my routine at the festival in previous years, when I’d watch as many as twenty movies at the venues around town over five days, it was also nice to ease my way back into things this year because it’s been quite a long time since I’ve sat shoulder-to-shoulder with other moviegoers at a cinema, given the restrictions during the various lockdowns internationally throughout the past year and a half. Of course, that made it even more fun to see the five in-person screenings that I was able to attend at this year’s festival, so here are the details on my four favorite films that I watched.

I’d really been looking forward to seeing Summer of 85, the latest film from gay French director François Ozon, who’s long been one of my favorite filmmakers. The movie was just about as enjoyable as I’d anticipated, and well in line with the themes and tones of Ozon’s previous movies. A unique hybrid of a gay teenage love story and a darker-edged thriller, Summer of 85 is loosely adapted from Aidan Chambers’ 1982 young adult novel Dance on My Grave, and I could definitely feel the tendons of that particular source material connected to the movie at various points while watching it, especially in the adorably innocent scenes of Alex (Félix Lefebvre) and David (Benjamin Voisin) falling for one another and exploring the intensity of their physical attraction. Of course, the characters are somewhat too young and fresh-faced even to know what to do with that attraction to a certain degree, and so Alex becomes instantly jealous when David’s attentions suddenly turn instead to a young woman named Kate (Philippine Velge), whom the two boys have recently befriended.

And that’s where the storyline clearly takes a turn toward the tragic. Some critics have remarked on the clashing tones of a film that swerves from a fun and sunny gay teenage love story to a somber tale of heartbreak and loss, but having watched many of Ozon’s films numerous times, I saw plenty of worthwhile consistencies and linkages with his other movies and therefore understood why he’d have been interested in adapting Chambers’ novel for the screen in the first place. My two favorite films by Ozon, Time to Leave and Le Refuge (Hideaway), explore the difficulties, disappointments, and sustaining qualities of sexual and emotional relationships. Ozon always pursues those complexities ardently, rather than simply letting his films remain in an overly comfortable zone for his longtime viewers. Although the moments of discomfort in Summer of 85 can feel a bit too overt at times, and its plot twists a little too blunt, the actors all sustain the audience’s interest and make feeling concerned about these characters a rewarding endeavor, ultimately, even if invoking Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name was excessive, given my views of the shortcomings of that over-praised film.

If there’s any movie that could resurrect Vivante hair products overnight, it’s Todd Stephens’ gorgeous new dramedy-meets-road movie Swan Song, starring the legendary Udo Kier in what will probably be remembered as his best performance eventually, if there’s any justice in the cinematic universe. I’m a lifelong fan of Todd Stephens’ 1998 classic Edge of Seventeen, mainly because I came of age in Ohio in the ’80s and found his rendering of what it was like to grow up as a gay man in the Midwest back then to be so precise that characters in Edge of Seventeen matched up exactly with some of the people I knew back in my own youth. Swan Song situates its comedic and dramatic concerns at the other end of the age spectrum with Kier’s portrayal of retired hairdresser Pat Pitsenbarger, who’s unexpectedly called upon to perfect one final hairdo for his former client, the wealthy socialite Rita Parker Sloan (Linda Evans of Dynasty, totally fabulous), after she’s passed away. It’s the woman’s dying wish, which her gay grandson Dustin (Michael Urie) has helped to actualize for her. Jennifer Coolidge also makes a memorable and semi-villainous appearance as Dee Dee Dale, Pat’s haughtier-than-thou hairdressing nemesis.

So Pat sets off on a journey through rural Ohio on foot, hitching a ride or two along the way, to return to Sandusky on the northern border of the state along Lake Erie, where he’d previously owned a hair salon and lived with his partner David, who sadly died of AIDS back in the mid-’90s. Throughout Pat’s picaresque trek, he re-encounters ghosts of various kinds from his past, some of whom are figments of his imagination, culminating in an unforgettable performance at a gay nightclub, one that quite openly owes a debt to The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Terence Stamp’s seminal Oscar-nominated role in it. For many of the above reasons, I knew that I’d enjoy Swan Song even before watching it, but I was moved over and over again in ways that I hadn’t anticipated, mostly due to Udo Kier’s soulful and uninhibited embodiment of his character, with his famous ice-blue eyes and flamboyant gestures sweeping viewers along through every scene, while also conveying quiet depths of feeling in his long and distinguished career’s crowning achievement.

Halfway through watching Daniel Sánchez López’s Boy Meets Boy, I realized that I’d been smiling widely the entire time. Inspired by the likes of Andrew Haigh’s 2011 film Weekend, the story of Boy Meets Boy is simply the chance meeting of two 20-something gay guys, a dancer named Johannes (Alexandros Koutsoulis) and a doctor named Harry (Matthew James Morrison), who walk together around Berlin and talk (and flirt, and have sex with each other) over the course of a long day, after they bump into each other and make out on the dance floor at a club. Johannes then takes Harry to a late-’90s style internet café, so that Harry can print out his boarding pass for his flight back home to the U.K. What had me smiling for 45 minutes straight was how the camera usually focuses on the two guys and nothing else, which heightens their immediate intimacy for viewers. For example, at the internet café, when they take turns drawing images of each other using the old-school graphics program called Paint, we never even glimpse the computer or its screen at all, only their sweet and beaming faces, mutually happy that they’ve found someone whom they’re interested in, and someone who reciprocates that interest.

The film made me aware of something that I’d never before considered about gay relationships. They’re often quick and brief in my experience, in part because in the initial moments and hours of getting to know somebody, we’re allowed to imagine them as we hope they’ll turn out to be. Long-term relationships are rarer, of course, because the more fully we get to know somebody over time, the more we become certain about who they actually are, so then the exhilarating rush of imagining them as we hoped they’d be gradually recedes and settles into more mundane, realistic routines. While some people may find the chattiness of Boy Meets Boy boring or derivative, I felt the opposite. Gay men have received somewhat of a raw bargain in terms of how we’ve been represented on screen, historically, so I personally think that we can never have too many “naturalized” renderings of gay relationships on screen. The more stories I see about gay men who are just being themselves and living their everyday lives, the better.

I was so moved by Nora Burns’ David’s Friend, her hour-long theatrical show with the awesome Billy Hough, directed for the stage by Adrienne Truscott, and filmed for the screen by documentarians (and real-life couple) David Ebersole and Todd Hughes. Fortunately, Burns’ live performance of the show was recorded in Los Angeles on March 8th, 2020, just one week before the worldwide lockdown due to the global Covid-19 pandemic. Burns’ play, exquisitely written and performed with equal amounts of fierceness and tenderness, captures perhaps the most important period in our recent pop cultural history, from the time in 1979 when Burns met her close gay friend David while dancing at the long-defunct gay club at 1270 Boylston Street in Boston (“I went right from Donny Osmond to Donna Summer,” Burns recalls, “there was no AC/DC in between”), through their years in New York tearing up the city with wild scenes of sex, drugs, and hustling, right up until David’s early death from AIDS in 1993. Photo projections from throughout their friendship punctuate Nora’s monologue, as do flashback entries from Burns’ long-ago journals, along with notes and letters written from David to Nora, in which he professes his heartfelt (and occasionally drug-induced) feelings of total love for her, moments that made me cry twice in the span of Burns’ show.

Although Nora and David were most interested in simply enjoying their youth and living their lives to the hilt at a time when the world was still so full of possibility and interconnected in real-time (rather than through the mediation of devices and screens), they also made their mark on an urban art scene that would gain genuine nostalgic currency from then to now. Not only did they celebrate at legendary venues like Studio 54 and pretty much every single gay bar in Manhattan, turning up in the famous club photos of New York photographer Patrick McMullan, but David was also well-connected and admired (and gorgeous) enough to be hand-drawn by the likes of Tom of Finland. The lingering cultural PTSD in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis haunts the show and Burns’ own delivery of her monologue, when her eyes well up with tears several times as she recounts and conveys the tragic early loss of her close friend. What she and co-star Billy Hough, along with the stage director and filmmakers, have accomplished in David’s Friend is that they’ve now given Nora’s collected memories of David the chance to live again and be preserved forever.

One aspect of the Provincetown Film Festival that I always love best is how it makes me feel like LGBTQ+ life stories, and particularly those of gay men, really matter and still have a significant place in our ongoing social discourse. As the world has continued to progress and change in profound and crucial ways over these past several years of remarkable cultural upheavals and political action, I’ve sometimes wondered how much our collective experiences as gay men have spoken to people inside and outside of our own community. The artistic and communal events at the annual film festival in Provincetown help to promote and fortify a world and a future where those stories will continue to matter in shaping society and our own directions within it throughout the coming decades.

Sunday, June 13, 2021

Five Favorite Gay Cinematic Losers

There’s a book of queer theory from 2007, Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, whose central concept I still love today: “Modern homosexual identity is formed out of and in relation to the experience of social damage. Paying attention to what was difficult in the past may tell us how far we have come, but that is not all it will tell us; it also makes visible the damage that we live with in the present.” For this reason, the gay “losers” of cinema are always the characters that have interested me the most. Their more successful counterparts steer clear of the loser designation either by mimicking straight culture so well that they can pass for straight, or by following the gay rulebook so closely that they effectively give up their own sense of an individual identity. Within twenty minutes of thinking of the idea to write this post, I had already compiled a list of twenty gay cinematic losers, and that was just from browsing my own shelf of DVDs at home. Maybe I’ll write a sequel (or two) to this post eventually, but for now, I’ll focus on my five favorite gay losers of cinema, the characters who’ve stayed with me the most over time, and what they all share in common, as well as where exactly they diverge.

Miguel Arteta’s 2000 film Chuck & Buck, written by and starring Mike White in a gloriously unashamed performance as the perpetual man-child Buck, is somewhere in my top three favorite movies of all time. I remember that at the time of its release, actors as diverse as Jeff Bridges and Catherine Deneuve praised the movie and Mike White’s performance in it. During the course of the film, Buck tries to re-connect with his childhood friend Chuck (Chris Weitz), another kid from his neighborhood who’s now a straight, married music executive in Los Angeles, and whom we find out later in the movie had sex with Buck for a period of time in their youth. I related a lot to the film’s main storyline because I’d experienced exactly the same thing with a boyhood friend from school back when I was growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and at pretty much the same age. I assume that plenty of other boys had such experiences, too, but for obvious reasons, they almost never get addressed by the culture in any serious way.

To say that Buck remains stunted in the wake of that childhood experience, and in his totally understandable desire to relive that early experience again with Chuck and nobody else, is an understatement. Stuck in a kind of torturous yet blissfully unaware form of eternal youth, Buck writes a bizarre play about his boyhood friendship with Chuck, stages it at a tiny community theater right across the street from Chuck’s office building, and then invites him and his wife Carlyn (Beth Colt) to watch it on opening night, Buck’s way of trying to force Chuck to confront the truth of what had transpired between them. I recall that back when the movie came out, a somewhat lunkheaded gay writer I knew back then interpreted Buck as a kind of stalker figure, which completely misses the point of the film. The movie is, moreover, about the important question of whether we change or don’t change over time. The truth is that we both change and don’t change, but our pasts never change, and we all must find ways to reconcile with that.

The only ripped-from-the-headlines performance on this list is Christian Slater’s career-best portrayal of online gay porn purveyor Bryan Kocis (here named Stephen) in Justin Kelly’s 2016 film King Cobra. Kocis, who discovered the porn star known as Brent Corrigan (perfectly embodied by Garrett Clayton) and filmed the gay porn movies in which Corrigan starred early in his career, was brutally stabbed and killed in 2007 by two guys who were running a rival porn company (Keegan Allen as Harlow Cuadra and James Franco as Joseph Kerekes). Slater’s performance in the film has received far too little attention, probably because it’s so on-the-nose that it kind of floats along under the radar. Slater deftly hits all of the requisite notes of regret, frustration, and desire that most gay men can relate to at midlife, aging into their nether years while still trying to hold onto some semblance of youth and social connection. Molly Ringwald, in an underdeveloped role, plays Stephen’s concerned sister who’s aware of some but not all of her brother’s shady dealings.

What makes Slater’s performance special and precise is his subtle and fairly naturalized way of inhabiting the character. While some traces of flamboyance rise to the surface on occasion, Slater’s approach to the character remains mostly subdued, the most sensible choice for a middle-aged gay guy who’s living out in the suburbs and filming porn right in his own home, and just at the moment when the internet was beginning to gain traction as a viable source of income in the culture. The eventual tragedy of the film’s violently murderous climax is always lurking under the character’s surface in Slater’s skillful and quiet counterpointing of Stephen’s resignation and desperation. In a movie that’s focused on dramatic elements like sex and money, it’s easy for those sorts of subtleties to get overlooked, but at every moment while watching the film, I knew exactly where that character was coming from because of how specifically Slater channeled his particular nuances. I liked him, I feared for him, and I felt sorry for him all at once.

It’s probably a bit of a controversial choice to include on this list Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist from Ang Lee’s 2005 gay romantic blockbuster Brokeback Mountain. After all, it’s not entirely Jack’s fault that he falls deeply in love with a man who’s even more closeted than he is himself, and not just briefly but over a substantial series of years and semi-covert encounters. This role was clearly the pivotal point in Gyllenhaal’s career when he became a serious actor who’s in it for the long haul, and the performance gathers its power from watching Jack Twist transition from a randy young sheep herder and rodeo bull rider to an emotionally tormented wreck of a man who can’t shake how much he cares for Ennis Del Mar (the wonderful late Heath Ledger). If there’s one quality that all five of the gay characters on this list share: they fall in love with emotionally unavailable men, and then they never quite find their way out of that experience.

What draws the audience closer to Jack Twist, to the extent that there’s rarely a dry eye in the house by the time we reach his eventual end (and implied murder via a violent roadside gay-bashing), is his openness, at least in intradiagetic narrative terms, in processing his grief at not being able to share any type of stable relationship or more meaningful life with Ennis, due to Ennis’ own fear of cultural reproach for being gay. If, as Roland Barthes theorized in A Lover’s Discourse, the male lover “who waits and who suffers from his waiting is miraculously feminized,” Jack Twist’s expression of emotion through tears and anger at various points in the film allows the audience to empathize with him and, in a sense, care for him in the same way that Ennis wants to, and in fact does, once it’s already much too late for his caring to matter.

Gay American-Canadian director Thom Fitzgerald’s 1997 masterpiece The Hanging Garden is also somewhere in my top ten favorite films of all time, and it remains woefully unknown and underseen outside of Fitzgerald’s current home country. As a film that functions in the slippery terrain of magical realism, and in which each character is named after and wears the colors of a separate and particular flower, it’s not so easy to summarize the movie. Sweet William (Chris Leavins) returns to his childhood home in Nova Scotia after a decade-long estrangement from his family, to attend the wedding of his rowdy sister Rosemary (Kerry Fox, with Sarah Polley portraying the teenage version) to handsome Fletcher (Joel S. Keller), the guy whom Sweet William had fooled around with sexually back when they were all younger. We soon find out in flashback that Sweet William in his teens (bravely portrayed by Troy Veinotte in a performance that’s never been matched by another actor at that age) was both uncomfortably overweight and just starting to figure out that he was gay.

The film also centers around a suicide that may or may not have happened (the movie’s title is a double entendre) and its devastating and lingering effects on Sweet William’s entire family. Chris Leavins’ performance as the slightly older, openly gay, and slimmed down Sweet William remains one of my favorite performances of its kind nearly 25 years after the film’s release. His portrayal of the character is not only totally sexy to me, but also full of humanity, heart, humor, and consummate knowledge of what so many young gay men go through, but that rarely gets discussed or witnessed in any way by the culture-at-large. Coincidentally, I once ran into Chris Leavins at the long-defunct Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus in London, when the store was empty late one weeknight (after I’d just seen Daniel Radcliffe on stage in Equus), and we talked about the The Hanging Garden for a few minutes right there in the shop. He was excited that someone had recognized him from the movie, enough so that he said he’d be telling Thom Fitzgerald about it, one of the more memorable encounters of that sort from my life.

Finally, Christian Bale’s character Arthur Stuart in Todd Haynes’ 1998 film Velvet Goldmine is somewhat of a quintessential gay cinematic loser, even down to the way his character is written into the screenplay. Although the movie’s focus is on the era of ’70s glam rock and the brand of popstars who reigned supreme in those days, it’s really Arthur’s story, and he’s actually the one who’s writing it. Arthur had grown up in Britain as a closeted and socially awkward young gay man, a loner and outcast who was trying to come to terms with his sexuality through the glam rock stars whom he idolized, and against the pressures of his conversative family. By the time of the film’s “present day” setting in New York City in 1984, Arthur has become an investigative journalist who’s researching an article about the staged death of bisexual glam rock star Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who has since secretly reinvented himself as Tommy Stone (Alastair Cumming). Slade’s set-up shooting death had been a hoax, which was faked at a concert that Arthur attended back in 1974, at the height of Slade’s involvement with fellow glam rock performer Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor) and Slade’s wife Mandy (Toni Collette).

Arthur’s playful costuming, a way of taking on various facets of identity back in that youthful “glitter era,” gives way to his drab gray administrative uniform as a stoic urban journalist in the mid-’80s. Haynes’ camera often moves closely in on Christian Bale’s beautiful, expressionless face as he interviews various figures from Brian Slade’s past, piecing together Arthur’s own relationships with those in Slade’s inner circle in the process. We never quite know if Arthur has even come out as gay by the time we arrive at that slightly later point in his life, but Haynes’ screenplay and direction make it clear that the character identifies as gay, albeit perhaps silently. We also discover during the film’s gorgeous climax and denouement (unless it’s all just a fantasy?) that Arthur had a rooftop same-sex encounter, maybe for his first time ever, with Curt Wild himself, a potent memory that extends far into Arthur’s own future life. By closing the film in the way that he does, Todd Haynes in essence allows Arthur to embrace his extraordinary position as the star of his own private movie, ultimately. He also sends his audience a clear message about whose story is worth telling and whose story will endure.

Sunday, May 23, 2021

Sublet (dir. Eytan Fox, 2020)

Israeli director Eytan Fox’s latest film, Sublet, which is currently screening in film festivals prior to its theatrical release here in the United States this summer, captures the soul of Tel Aviv. That kind of intimate encounter is achieved both through cinematographic details, like panoramic shots of curved tidal pools rolling onto the beaches of Tel Aviv by day and by night, as well as through the central gay characters, Michael and Tomer, at the heart of this gorgeous two-hander. As viewers, we experience the city both through the fresh perspective of professional tourist Michael (John Benjamin Hickey, in a perfectly calibrated performance) and the more familiar perspective of Israeli native Tomer (Niv Nissim, who hits all the requisite notes of sexiness, jaded youthful humor, and depth). The movie opens with Michael, a 50-something New York Times travel writer, landing in Tel Aviv for an assignment over a five-day visit. When he arrives at Tomer’s apartment to sublet it for the week, the 20-something filmmaking student has totally forgotten that his subletter would be arriving that day, setting up a standard odd-couple scenario that turns out to be so much more than that. Sublet is the finest and most delicate May/December semi-romance in a far-flung location since Sofia Coppola’s 2003 Tokyo-set Oscar winner (for Best Original Screenplay), Lost in Translation.

Later in the movie, when Tomer’s mother (Miki Kam) asks Michael about his impressions of Tel Aviv over a quiet dinner at her home in the kibbutz near the end of his stay, he replies that the city is a unique mixture of intensity and laidback vibes, which is actually a great description of the film itself as well. Because Tomer’s bicycle gets stolen during the film’s early scenes, we experience the city — along with Michael and Tomer’s relationship — on foot at ground level as Tomer becomes a tour guide for Michael, and so the film unfolds with exactly the pace that such a relationship would. What’s special about Sublet as a piece of gay cinema is its cross-generational component. That element is handled in a sensitive manner that’s quite rare in gay movies, achieved through subtle moments that are fairly easy to miss: Michael’s glance of realization when Tomer’s mother mentions that she’d had him with a sperm donor and raised him alone, for instance, or Tomer’s gradual recognition of the hardships that gay men of Michael’s generation have faced over time.

Sublet also isn’t afraid to face more difficult truths about contemporary gay culture and why plenty of younger gay men today can struggle to find stability and contentment. After Tomer invites over a hot guy from a hookup app for a potential threesome midway through the movie, we catch on long-partnered Michael’s face a dismissive glimpse of disappointment as he excuses himself from the scene, despite his clear feelings of desire and physical interest. It’s such a deft momentary expression for an actor to convey, and it reminded me of a comment that I heard the actor/director John Cameron Mitchell make a while back, about how younger gay men have been poorly conditioned by the instant gratification of apps like Grindr, to the extent that any attempts at actually getting to know somebody (or even enjoying the pleasures of foreplay) just get totally omitted these days. Although Tomer claims to like the quickness of those sexual interactions that require “no drama,” Michael senses otherwise and so begins to nudge the younger man gently in another direction.

I was fortunate to see John Benjamin Hickey starring on stage as Henry Wilcox in Matthew Lopez’s epic two-part play The Inheritance on Broadway in late November of 2019, several months prior to the shutdown of theaters prompted by the global Covid-19 pandemic in mid-March of 2020, which occurred just a couple of nights before that play was scheduled to close its Broadway run. Hickey portrays a similar character in Sublet, someone who lived through the AIDS crisis, lost his first boyfriend to the disease, then survived to weather the cultural changes of the ensuing decades, only to end up overseeing the lives and antics of a younger generation of gay men in New York City, providing them with support and good counsel as an older gay man. Eytan Fox relies on Hickey’s gently timeworn facial features to ideal effect here, so that we, too, can feel the span of time that the character has endured, enabling a kind of closeness via Hickey’s performance that winds up feeling more internal, rather than being focused solely on age or the distinctions of external appearance. This is probably the movie’s most distinguishing emotional aspect, and Fox and Hickey both seem to be aware of that.

Niv Nissim’s performance as the younger and somewhat disenchanted Tomer is equally profound on many levels, believably inhabiting a character who doesn’t want to be tied down to strict definitions of sexuality or long-term monogamous relationships, nor even obligatory “happy endings.” He’s happier having more fleeting encounters with a wide variety of people, sexually and otherwise, while making art through unconventional horror films with the help of his young actor friends in Tel Aviv. (One of his student films that he shares with Michael was perhaps a little too clearly inspired by Rosemary’s Baby.) Tomer's predilections provide an important contrast to Michael’s own relationship with his partner David (Peter Spears) back in New York, with whom he face-times on his cell phone and laptop at a couple of strategic points in the movie. They argue and discuss, in particular, whether they should pursue having a child via a surrogate again, after their first attempt to do so went tragically wrong, as we find out during a deeply moving and matter-of-fact scene late in the film.

Where the movie goes from that point in its final act is better left unsaid, simply in terms of the audience’s emotional payoff. And while the film’s central pair of characters do move on and resolve their issues on a number of levels, where exactly Michael and Tomer will go in the wake of their encounter remains open-ended, even if it’s clear that the encounter has changed both of them in key ways as they return again to the familiar grooves of their individual separate lives. I’ve seen and loved all of Etyan Fox’s films, which collectively provide an essential document of gay Israeli life over the past three decades, but at this particular point in my own life as a gay man at age 47, Sublet is his movie that’s meant the most to me on an immediate emotional level, and also the one that I’ve related to most closely. I watched the film twice over the past couple of months, and both times I was moved to tears by the exact same scene. It’s obviously the scene that the director intended to make his audience cry, as a result of all that’s been expertly held back by the actors up to that moment, and then all that’s finally allowed to reveal itself more fully in the brightness of an airport’s waiting area, a space of anonymity and transit.

Wednesday, May 12, 2021

Pretty in Pink (dir. Howard Deutch, 1986)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Pretty in Pink, written by the late John Hughes, which came out exactly 35 years ago now, as hard as that is to believe. This week I attended a virtual live Q&A event with Andrew McCarthy, whose new memoir Brat: An ’80s Story was just released. I was glad to have the chance to ask him a couple of questions during the event, to which he gave great answers. His answer to my question about his character Blane in Pretty in Pink ended the Q&A session. I was curious about a comment he’d made regarding how Molly Ringwald, who plays Andie in the film, had argued after the auditions that he was the right actor for the role, the kind of guy whom she’d fall for herself, whereas John Hughes questioned whether McCarthy seemed too shy and reserved when compared with typical leading men. It’s this gendered dichotomy that interests me most about the movie, especially its questioning of masculinity and masculine roles, at least as they stood back in the mid-1980s, right when I was wrapping up junior high and heading into my high school years.

I asked Andrew McCarthy specifically about what it felt like to be seen as a kind of template or role model for younger men back in the ’80s, and his response to my question was at first slightly perplexed. “Did it really happen like that? Is that how people saw me?” he wondered in reply, recalling how frequently he’d been told back then that he needed to lift weights and beef up to transform himself into a standard matinee idol. What’s interesting is how that’s essentially the only masculine type that existed in Hollywood films. Any male performer who seemed too sweet or too sensitive bordered on something not quite masculine enough at that point in time. Andie’s lifelong friend and other suitor in the film, Duckie (portrayed so memorably by Jon Cryer), leans a bit further in that less macho direction: offbeat, artistic, even somewhat self-consciously effeminate, when he’s not lip-synching to Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” and pretending to be butch. Molly Ringwald has gone on the record as saying that she assumed in retrospect that Duckie’s character was actually gay.

This explains to me why I felt such an affinity for the movie as a teenager, and why I retain such deep associations with the film today. I was already pretty certain that I was gay at that point in time, but it was the ’80s in Cincinnati, Ohio, so my social options for open self-expression were still limited. Cinema, notably the sort that winds up feeling nostalgic years later, provides an avenue for considering other available forms of selfhood, and I think back then I’d convinced myself that Blane and Duckie, vying for Andie’s affections, were for me two sensible and accessible versions of (potentially straight) early manhood. Since I couldn’t yet fully imagine myself to be what I actually was, I let the movie’s fantasy overwrite my own visions of myself for a couple of hours whenever I watched the film, while simply admiring the well-told story of a heterosexual romance in John Hughes’ screenplay. I think John Hughes was probably closest to Duckie himself, and his teen comedies almost always placed the issue of class status near the heart of the drama. It’s no coincidence that Pretty in Pink’s opening shot is literally of a street sweeper driving down the road on the wrong side of the tracks.

James Spader’s character, Steff, the hilariously condescending, obscenely rich asshole best friend of Blane, is another type of male template in the film, and he’s no less fun to watch for being totally revolting, swishing around their high school in his crisp linen suits and sport jackets. There’s also a fairly obvious level on which John Hughes clearly implied (and the actors intelligently conveyed) that Steff isn’t only competing with Blane for Andie’s romantic attentions out of sexual jealousy. In the homosocial sense, Steff is also afraid of losing Blane to Andie, when even only as a best friend, he really wants to have more of Blane all to himself. James Spader is smart enough an actor to wink at the audience about that aspect of his character between the lines of dialogue that he so tantalizingly delivers throughout the movie.

So what was it about watching Andie and Blane go out on their first date, much to the frustration of Duckie, that so appealed to teenage me? I believe the answer to that question is also a clue to what’s given John Hughes’ teen movies their enduring status in American culture; he was able like no other writer/director to dignify what it feels like to be seen as who you are, in the very act of becoming yourself, by the first person with whom you fall in love. Many critics have pointed out that John Hughes took teenagers seriously and got what it feels like to be misunderstood in adolescence, and therefore they argue that’s the reason why his movies have lasted, though I think the truth is perhaps even more reflective than that. I think that feeling of finally being “seen” as oneself is successfully conveyed in John Hughes’ films because he was a perceptive enough screenwriter to actually be the one who’s doing the seeing, thereby allowing viewers of his films to see themselves and their own struggles in clearer focus.

And that’s how Andrew McCarthy actually ended up answering my question about whether he’d become a kind of archetype for young guys back in the ’80s. He said that he’s realized as he’s gotten older that he was very lucky to be an avatar for people’s own youth through his first several film roles, the key that continues to grant them some kind of access to their earlier selves. All three performers in the movie’s central love triangle — Andrew McCarthy, Molly Ringwald, and Jon Cryer — seem to know just how well-rounded their characters are and how carefully John Hughes crafted them in his script. Each actor infuses his or her respective character with their own personality in ways that make them continue to be indelible nearly four decades later. I can’t imagine their effect on popular culture waning anytime soon.

One of my favorite scenes out of many in the film is the movie’s dramatic climax, when Andie screams at Blane in an empty hallway of their high school after he’s given her the cold shoulder due to peer pressure from his wealthy friends. The set-up is theatrical, with the audience aware that both Duckie and Steff are watching from the edges of the scene as Andie and Blane fight it out in public, a Shakespearean device that I’m sure John Hughes was knowingly using. The unbridled bitterness of that scene, and of Duckie’s earlier falling out with Andie, only makes their reunion at the prom in the movie’s finale all the more moving and fulfilling for viewers. Duckie’s gentlemanly final bow as Andie’s steadfast friend, encouraging her to go to Blane and embrace the romance that the film wants her to have, ultimately represented the kind of guy who seemed worth striving to be back in my high school days. I remain grateful to John Hughes and the actors for giving young men back then — gay or bi or straight — a sketch of an ideal to aim for.

Sunday, February 7, 2021

Nomadland (dir. Chloé Zhao, 2020)

Due to the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing cinematic shutdowns throughout this past year, Chloé Zhao’s latest film Nomadland was one of the only movies that I had the pleasure of anticipating throughout 2020. Of course, the film’s release date kept being postponed, so that Nomadland wasn’t even theatrically released until well into 2021. I finally had the chance to watch it this past Friday night when the big multiplex in downtown Boston reopened for the first time since Christmas Day. Fortunately, the movie is screening only in IMAX theaters for its initial run, so I was able to enjoy its fine cinematography on a gigantic screen, which I doubt would have happened in any other year, when those screens would have been reserved for the usual blockbusters and superhero fare. Though as I think we’re all quite aware by now, no blocks around cinemas anywhere in this country are being busted anymore, and perhaps (at least from how dire things look at our present moment) they may never be again.

It’s in that same shellshocked, post-capitalist socioeconomic landscape, actually, that the stark and vital narrative of Nomadland unfolds, as the nomads of the movie’s title (based on Jessica Bruder’s eponymous 2017 non-fiction book) stop and start and scatter their way across the semi-obliterated vastness of the American west. Like Chloé Zhao’s previous film The Rider, which was among my favorite movies of 2018, Nomadland is a careful and distinctive hybrid of real-life documentary and loosely scripted fiction. Frances McDormand, in a demanding, career-defining performance, stars as Fern, who’d lived and worked for years in Empire, Nevada, a town of less than 1,000 inhabitants that shut down and essentially ceased to exist, having even its zip code discontinued after its sole industry of mining gypsum to manufacture sheetrock closed in 2011, due to lack of demand in the wake of the 2008 financial crash and housing market crisis. Fern then fled and hit the open road, living in her big white outfitted camper van, nicknamed Vanguard. The other middle-aged and older American nomads she encounters along the way, who’d made the same decision after their own lives went awry — and who now work in seasonal shifts at massive, mechanized Amazon warehouses or in cramped and busy kitchens at roadside diners — are the focus of the film and help to provide many of its most deeply moving moments.

McDormand should certainly win another Oscar for this role, a subdued yet tenacious emotional achievement that also doesn’t shy away from the rudimentary physical hardships that Fern must learn to tolerate in her daily life: urinating outdoors in frigid temperatures (one of the earliest images we see of her in the film), being stricken with dysentery and only a plastic bucket in her van as a makeshift toilet, seeing her treasured Autumn Leaf china plates get broken when she has to clean out Vanguard due to an ant infestation. It’s clear why McDormand secured the rights to the film and staked out this role for herself, though I’m not sure any other American actress working today could have or would have done that. And while she’s transfixing to watch in the movie, a film that she carries in every successive scene often just by the subtle calibrations of her gestures and facial expressions, there’s nothing showy or grandstanding about it. Her performance is entirely in service to the story and the importance of the film’s messages about freedom and capitalist exploitation at this particular moment in contemporary American history.

Some of the movie’s key scenes are filmed documentary-style around a campfire, with the transient community of nomads sharing various memories and anecdotes from their lives. One such woman recounts a male colleague who’d worked with her for decades and then was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, only to die one week before his scheduled retirement. Another woman who ends up being a fixture in the film, Linda May, recalls a similar shock and disappointment at discovering only $550 in her Social Security savings account after working for nearly her entire life and struggling to raise her children. These point-blank truths about the inherent corruption of living in a soulless capitalist system are revealed to us as testimonials, and they reminded me of the heart circles at Radical Faeries gatherings that I’ve attended, where people simply sit together and share aloud their feelings about their lives and experiences. Zhao’s empathetic direction (along with the attentive, humanizing cinematography of Joshua James Richards) both dignifies and enriches the stories of the film’s subjects, in a way that makes us feel like they could be, and perhaps even are, our own stories. As Fern connects with certain individuals, we connect with them as well, such as Swankie, an older woman who hangs a black skull-and-crossbones flag on the side of her van because she’s gradually dying from a brain tumor. After bonding with Fern, who looks after Swankie and even cuts her hair, Swankie departs for Alaska, where she sends Fern a video of the cliffside of swallows that she’s returned to see before she dies, hundreds of them who’ve built their mud nests and fly out together in dark murmurations over the water.

One of my favorite moments in the film is when Fern is in her van alone late at night, staring at a wallet-sized photograph of her late husband, who we soon learn had himself died a difficult and relatively early death. With just a few changing glances that shift quietly across her face, McDormand conveys their entire relationship in a way that few actors could do. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Fern’s fixed resolve to live “houseless” on the road is a result of her unresolved grief for him, a refusal to move on from a life and a landscape that have been permanently shattered, instead preferring to reside inside that endlessly broken present as a ghost, wondering why the world can’t just return to being the way it was when things were fine. She does receive an opportunity at having a stable new home through another drifter, Dave (David Straithairn, sweetly reliable), whose son and daughter-in-law have just given him his first grandchild, for whom he retreats from living his nomadic life. Fern visits them at their idyllic home and stays in their comfortably appointed guest room, with an open invitation from their family to stay for much longer, but she chooses to return to sleeping in her van instead and then departs early one morning without saying goodbye, after watching Dave and his son play the piano together late at night and silently realizing that she feels like an intruder in their lives.

The subject of suicide arises at two crucial points in the movie. The first is when Linda May tells Fern about the lowest point of her own despair, when she considered turning on the gas and drinking an entire bottle of alcohol, deciding that if she woke up, she’d light a cigarette to blow up everything and end her own life permanently. But compassion took over when Linda May knew she couldn’t do that to her two small dogs, and therefore she couldn’t do that to herself either. The film’s delicately sunlit and purely emotional climax is the second pivotal mention of suicide, when a wise and gray-bearded RV lifestyle guru named Bob Wells shares with Fern how he lost his son five years before, when his son tragically ended his own life at the age of 33. As someone who, at age 47, hasn’t really wanted to be alive for the past 25 years or so now myself, but who has continued to endure that feeling and wander somewhat aimlessly as a kind of living suicide, I related easily to Nomadland, and particularly to that central aspect of the film. I’m sure that there are plenty of other people who can’t relate to that or find it to be self-pitying, and therefore they may not like or might even outright dislike this movie. Maybe they’re the lucky ones.

Friday, January 1, 2021

Three Favorite Films of 2020

In a year as bizarre and unusual for cinema as 2020 was, writing my usual year-end post about my favorite films of the year was more of a challenging task this time around. In past years, I’ve written about five or six favorite movies annually. With cinemas closed and new film releases postponed for much of 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, I was able (and also fortunate) to see and determine three favorite new movies this year. Actually, the most challenging part was not being able to watch nearly as many films at the cinema as I normally would. Moviegoing has been a weekly, life-sustaining habit for me for almost three decades now. In a typical year, I’ve seen at least one or two films at the cinema each week, sometimes even more, averaging somewhere around 75 to 100 movies at the cinema per year. With cinemas here in New England open only in the first quarter and final quarter of 2020, I saw somewhere between 25 and 30 movies at cinemas, so only a third of what I’d see in a standard year. To get myself through this year’s midsection, I watched movies at drive-in theaters up in Maine and down on Cape Cod almost every weekend, though only two of those were new releases (Tenet and Bill & Ted Face the Music). Most of the rest were retro screenings of movies that I loved from my childhood and teenage years, and I wrote a few blog posts and poems about several of those this past summer: The Goonies, The Empire Strikes Back, and the original 1978 Superman, among others.

Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow was one of the last movies that I saw before the lockdown began in March, in a special advance screening at Harvard Film Archive, with Reichardt in attendance for a conversation and Q&A after the film. That was on March 9th, and details about the screening changed throughout the day as concerns about the pandemic set in. By the time I arrived for the screening, it was limited to 100 attendees so that audience members could easily distance themselves around the auditorium. I knew while I was watching it that First Cow would be my favorite movie of 2020, even while having no idea at that point that so few new movies would be forthcoming for the remainder of the year. A friend of mine sitting behind me who helps to run the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline expressed concern that a shutdown of only two weeks would make it difficult for the organization to survive, at a moment of uncertainty when we just didn’t know what the rest of the year would have in store. Even Kelly Reichardt voiced some surprise and uncertainty about the future just as the dire global situation had begun to unfold.

First Cow opens with a long shot of a present-day shipping vessel passing through a sound in Oregon, and a young woman (Alia Shawkat) walking her dog in a woodland area nearby. As her dog sniffs around and digs in the tall grass, she soon finds herself silently unearthing by hand the buried skeletons of two men who had lived and died there in the 1820s, during the early settler period in the Pacific Northwest, prior to the start of the California Gold Rush. Because it’s a shallow unmarked grave, we have an early sense that their shared deaths were tragic, as the film gently shifts to the scene of a woodland settlement two centuries before. Of course, the opening is also a metaphor for the kind of archaeological and historical excavation that Reichardt will herself be undertaking as the film’s director (she co-wrote the screenplay with her frequent collaborator Jonathan Raymond, adapting it from his 2004 novel The Half-Life).

The story centers on Cookie (John Magaro, so moving in my favorite performance of 2020), otherwise known as Otis Figowitz, who’s the designated cook for an encampment of itinerant, rough-and-tumble fur trappers. While foraging for wild mushrooms in the forest, Cookie comes across another young man named King-Lu (Orion Lee, quietly magnetic), a Chinese immigrant who’s hiding out in the woods to escape a gang of Russian vigilantes who’ve been pursuing him. The two form a quick bond and devise a plan to make some money together by selling handmade donut-like pastries called oily cakes to the random assortment of drifters who wander through their encampment. To do so properly, they also pilfer milk each night from the first cow to be brought to the settlement, sneaking through the dark to a meadow beside the house of the Chief Factor (Toby Jones). “History isn’t here yet,” King-Lu accurately remarks, encouraging Cookie to take advantage of their window of opportunity to benefit from a timely, well-placed business start-up. The pair’s cakes become an overnight sensation, literally. As their bounty of earnings grows, the narrative expands to include complex themes of colonization and capitalism, specifically the notion of property, embodied in an image late in the film of the first cow (who’s listed in the film’s credits as Evie) eventually encircled by a homely wooden picket fence, after the midnight milk thefts by Cookie and King-Lu go terribly awry and their cover is blown.

The film’s final half-hour is a suspenseful chase driven by the cruel hierarchies of class and rank, one that finds King-Lu trying to escape downriver in a canoe and Cookie healing from an injury under the care of two Native Americans in a tiny shack, which Reichardt said she and her crew referred to as the “ghost hut.” Even this extended chase scene, however, takes on the laidback and tender tone of the rest of the movie (accompanied by William Tyler’s delicate, atmospheric score), as the separated characters move carefully through the autumnal hues of the landscape, with any violence lurking at the periphery yet also held at a deliberate distance. The film’s ultimate focus is the authentic love and friendship of its two central characters, once they’ve been reunited in what will be their final resting place, and I was very grateful to have the movie’s last words, “I’ve got you,” echoing in my mind throughout the months following the screening.

Because cinemas around Boston would then be shuttered almost half the year until around Labor Day weekend, Miranda July’s Kajillionaire was the movie that I looked forward to seeing the most over the next several hard months, though I was unsure of whether or not it would ever actually happen. Fortunately, it was one of the few new films that didn’t get delayed by an indefinitely postponed release. I drove much further north to see it at a cinema in Auburn, Maine, and I was the sole viewer in a gigantic auditorium of about 250 seats on an overcast Saturday afternoon, one of a number of private screenings that I was able to enjoy in 2020, even if seeing movies in empty cinemas became increasingly eerie over time. Miranda July’s previous film, The Future, was my favorite movie back in 2011, and Kajillionaire continues to stake out her distinctive cinematic terrain, where strange characterizations and awkward comedic moments directly confront life’s deeper mysteries and conundrums. From the initial scenes, we know that we’re back in her world, a universe with its own individual terms, parameters, and boundaries.

July’s films are like post-industrial, apocalyptic fables in which enigmatic signs and events arise, ranging from magical to threatening. In The Future, a character is able to stop time and bring the planet to a standstill, while the moon speaks in the voice of an old man who appears elsewhere in the film. Kajillionaire, set in present-day downtown Los Angeles, is disrupted by a series of earthquake tremors that cause the characters to react as everything on the screen trembles and shakes for a few tense moments, culminating in a transformational cosmic blackout later in the movie, during which we the audience members float through outer space as dialogue continues undeterred on the film’s soundtrack. These devices border playfully on a kind of magical realism yet manage to come across as thoroughly integral to the action and movement of July’s films.

The movie follows the Dyne family, with their comically stoic 26-year-old daughter Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood in a manically controlled tightrope walk of a role, including some trans vibes) being taught the tricks of petty crime — a trade in which the family does not excel — by serious contenders for the worst set of parents ever to appear in any film (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger, both alternately hilarious and trenchant in masterful swerves). The trio of small-time crooks con, scam, and steal their way into post office boxes, airplanes, and strangers’ homes in an attempt to keep paying the rent on the tiny office cubicles where they live cramped together in a disused space adjoining a bubble factory, where the rear wall leaks thick pinkish foam that must be scooped up with plastic trash buckets every afternoon at exactly the same time, in order to avoid getting drowned out of their makeshift home.

During a quick detour to New York and back by air, on their return flight the family meets Melanie (Gina Rodriguez, fantastic and perfectly upbeat), who joins their heists based on her love for movies like Ocean’s Eleven and its ensuing sequels. Gradually, Melanie’s position on the team and her genuine affection for the totally resistant, repressed, and (until now) unloved Old Dolio, begin to challenge the authoritative hold that Old Dolio’s parents have had over her entire life and personality. Since her childhood, they’ve split the profits of every con equally three ways, so of course that’s how she inherently views every transaction, a mathematical equation that pays off grandly in multiple ways at the film’s irrepressibly romantic and liberating conclusion. Most importantly, though, the outwardly wacky surfaces of July’s films ironically allow her to get closer to difficult truths than most other artists. For instance, there’s a pivotal scene midway through the film when the Dyne family and Melanie pretend to be the actual family members of a man whose home they’ve infiltrated for a scam and who also happens to be dying alone in his bedroom. He wants to hear their familial sounds out in the living room and kitchen, asking them to watch television and clink silverware, to give him a sense of not being alone during his final moments. As someone who hasn’t had a family for thirty years now, I felt the gravity of that scene keenly, and even if it was beyond sad to witness, I also admire how Miranda July and her actors could pull off the demanding balancing act of evoking an otherwise obscured feeling to put me there in such an immediate way.

Finally, Eliza Hittman’s brave and essential drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always rounds out my short list of favorite films from 2020. (Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland may have made my year-end list as well, but its cinematic release was pushed back to February of 2021, so I haven’t yet been able to watch that one.) I loved the astute realism and grit of Hittman’s previous film Beach Rats when I saw it at the Provincetown Film Festival back in 2017, and her latest movie secures her place as one of our most promising younger American filmmakers. The well-timed and urgent storyline of Never Rarely Sometimes Always concerns the unwanted teenage pregnancy of a 17-year-old woman in high school and her right to choose an abortion, despite her surroundings in conservative suburban (and borderline rural) Pennsylvania, where parental consent is required to terminate the pregnancy that her parents are completely unaware of. Sidney Flanigan’s performance as the sullen and determined Autumn feels naturalistic, precise, and absorbing throughout, anchoring the movie and Hittman’s screenplay in a way that draws viewers directly into her character’s very personal and painful dilemma.

Equally impressive and also instrumental to the narrative is Talia Ryder’s portrayal of Skylar, Autumn’s supportive cousin, who accompanies her on a bus ride to New York City, where the two are shuffled from a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brooklyn back across the river to the clinic in Manhattan. The film becomes a bleak, picaresque journey for the two young women, who are left to fend for themselves over two unforeseen nights in the city with relatively little money (and then no money at all after the balance of the abortion is paid for by cash stolen from their job as supermarket cashiers back home), dragging their bulky rolling suitcase from Port Authority, through the maze of New York’s subway system, and then back again, dodging various potential pitfalls and dangerous run-ins along the way. The story teeters on the verge of becoming a darker tragedy without ever settling there, so that we worry about the characters and their safety almost constantly, without ever feeling that they’re imperiled. We want to try to protect them but realize that they’ll have to navigate the city and the problems that they encounter mostly on their own.

At the movie’s emotional core is the most unflinching scene of any movie from 2020, when the down-to-earth yet sisterly Planned Parenthood counselor at the Manhattan clinic asks Autumn, prior to her abortion procedure, a series of required questions on her relationships. Autumn’s hesitant replies, long silences, and heartbreaking expressions tell us all that we need to know about how her pregnancy came about. The film’s title comes from the four multiple-choice answers that Autumn can give in response to each question. Hittman’s writing and directorial approach in the scene are exactly as they should be, point-blank and matter-of-fact, to the extent that it’s the pivotal fulcrum of the film and Sidney Flanigan’s characterization of Autumn. Up to that point in the movie, we can feel her holding everything back as a way of holding herself together, and this is the key moment when she’s finally able to let go and acknowledge her own level of internal distress, at least as much as she can as someone who’s so afraid at such a young age. Then, the scene gives way to a vision of female solidarity as Autumn undergoes her abortion procedure with the women who work at the clinic by her side.

It’s revealing, then, that the two younger women’s ultimate fearlessness bumps up against the male characters in the movie numerous times, from an uncaring stepfather in Autumn’s home to a truly sleazy boss at the supermarket where they work, from Autumn’s cruel and abusive boyfriend to a leering flasher on the subway. Even Jasper (Théodore Pellerin), a college-aged guy whom the girls first meet on the bus on their way to New York and re-connect with later in the film, turns out to be somewhat sketchy if fairly harmless, exchanging a make-out session against a pillar in Port Authority with the much younger Skylar (who lies and says that she’s twenty), after which he withdraws money at an ATM to pay for their bus tickets back home. Because I’m not a young woman myself and therefore don’t face what they do on a daily basis, I’d never say whether the film’s male characterizations seem too heavy-handed or inaccurate. But I am a gay man, so I can speak to how disappointing and problematic my own relationships with men (and often just men in general) have been over the course of my life, even if I’d hoped that wasn’t always the case, and I still do hold some hope for that as much as possible at age 47.

In thinking back over these three films while writing this post, I realized that they all share in common characters who are on the run at some point in the movie. Although that’s a standard cinematic device that builds tension and mystery and empathy, I felt like it was an appropriate through-line to connect the movies that appealed to me the most in this particular year, which so often felt like a semi-internalized nightmare from which we were all wanting to flee continually, in an attempt to find some form of self-sustaining redemption to make our quiet, solitary lives in quarantine and isolation more meaningful on our own terms. All of these characters on the run in each film come to rest eventually in quite different ways. That this extremely lonely year has finally come to an end, honestly, just makes me want to keep on running even more.