Florida Agenda

By Warren Day

You might think 2005 was the best gay year in movies based purely on the release of “Brokeback Mountain.” But in terms of sheer quantity, 2011 has all other years beat, and the quality was damn good too.

I’m not talking about the small, independent films that you usually see only in GLBT  film festivals, but mainstream movies with one or more recognizable stars, the kind of gay-themed movies that escape the distribution ghetto to which most are assigned, and which your liberal-leaning relatives might see. And in addition, they are showing up on Best-of-the-Year lists. The celluloid closet is finally bursting open.

In June, it all began with “Beginners,” where Ewan McGregor plays an uptight straight son who learns how to take risks with his heart from his gay father, who comes out of the closet at age 75 and forms a better relationship with a thirty-something man than anything the son has ever experienced.  The unsurpassable Christopher Plummer is the father and he’s currently the front-runner to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and the film itself is appearing on some ten best lists from straight movie critics (yes, there are some).

If “Beginners” portrays the liberating normalcy of coming out of the closet at any age, then Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” shows the soul-crunching consequences of dwelling there your whole life.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays J. Edgar Hoover, the founder and longest-serving head of the FBI, while Arnie Hammer plays his never-left-his-side assistant Clyde Tolson. If Mr.

Tolson had been as good-looking as Mr. Hammer (he wasn’t), then it’s doubtful Mr. Hoover could have excised as much self-control as he did.  Straight audiences didn’t warm up to this almost tabloid version of a right-wing hero, but gays resonated with this unresolved relationship and found  meanings in the film that may have escaped others.

If “J. Edgar” dealt with one of the biggest bromances in American history, our next film lays out the biggest one in world literature, namely that between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.  In “Game of Shadows,” with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as the original dynamic duo, the script and the director (Madonna’s ex-husband) make the homoerotic nature of their relationship blatantly obvious.  Holmes looks like a heartsick puppy as he watches Watson marry, and then on their honeymoon night Holmes kidnaps Watson, throws the brand new Mrs. Watson into a river, and does all of this while dressed in drag.  Subtle it ain’t.

In “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” taken from the novel that’s been a world-wide phenomenon, the bi-sexuality of Lisbeth Salander is more subtle than it was in the Swedish film version. The first time Daniel Craig meets Rooney Mara, she’s in bed with a woman, but then she’s portrayed as more heterosexual for the rest of the movie. Directed by David Fincher, who did “The Social Network,” the film is grittier and has more resonance than the fine Swedish version.

Just the opposite happens in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” where the homosexuality of at least three characters receives more play than it did in the internationally-acclaimed TV mini-series. Rightly one of the best films of the year, and one of the best thinking-person’s spy thrillers ever made, Gary Oldman achieves a career high, with excellent support from Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch and John Hurt.  Like “Beginners,” the homosexuality or bisexuality of those three characters is treated with the same nonchalance as if they’d been straight, and that’s definitely a sign of cinema progress. For a good deal of this film, you may feel you don’t know what’s going on, but the director is merely letting you know how real espionage feels, where the whole nature of the enterprise is deception and confusion.

Benedict Cumberbatch

The British film “Weekend” escaped the attention black hole that most independent gay films find themselves in, and is appearing on some best of the year lists. Telling the story of how a relationship-inclined gay man and a very much non-relationship type gay man meet on a Friday and developed a strong bond over the weekend.  On some level, this is a rather run-of-the-mill story for gay films, so it was interesting that it received so many positive reviews from straight critics.

“Pariah,” which is still opening in theaters, is in some ways the gay version of last year’s “Precious,” as it traces the struggle of a Brooklyn 17-year-old African-American girl to come to terms with her sexuality and deal with her strait-lace mother.  Played by Adepero Oduye in a heartbreaking performance, she finds herself attracted to a girl even more closeted than she is.  The film succeeds in telling a particular story in a universal way, thus enabling whites and blacks, straights and gays, men and women to mutually find relevance and truth in its characters.

What is really amazing about these gay-themed movies is that to some degree they’re all worth seeing, and in what other year could you say that about seven movies with gay content?

And now we come to what may be the campiest moment in any film released in 2011, but it happened in one far different from any of those discussed here. I’m talking about Tom Cruise’s latest outing in the fourth “Mission Impossible” movie, but the scene didn’t involve him, but rather his comrade-in-arms Jeremy Renner (“The Hurt Locker,” “The Town”). The sole woman in the IMF team has been sent to entice a code from a multi-millionaire industrialist, while Jeremy is plunged down a shaft and suspended by magnetic force (I defy anyone to suspend belief enough to swallow that).  And when Renner barely makes it back up the shaft exhausted and bruised, he exclaims, “The next time, I get to seduce the rich guy.” Now the question is, was this in the script or was it an ad lib?

May the year 2012 further develop these delightful, diverse, and ever-deepening trends.

Warren Day

Send comments or questions to AgendaReviews@aol.com

By Warren Day

In “Weekend,” we finally have a well-received 2011 movie where the love story at the center is between two people of the same sex. Not where it’s a sidebar, as  it was with the excellent “Beginners” that opened in July. And this British independent film is receiving even better reviews, particularly from straight critics. Now why would straight reviewers react more positive to it than gay ones? And why should that bother me or you?

What is undisputed is that Great Britain has given us some of the best gay-themed movies ever made – “Maurice,” “My Beautiful Launderette,” “Prick Up Your Ears,” “Wilde,” “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” “The Crying Game,” “Beautiful Thing,” “Another Country,” “Velvet Goldmine,” and many others. Also fifty years ago it was a British film, “Victim,” with Dirk Bogarde, that was the first major release to ever say the word “homosexual” and to deal with homosexual persecution. So “Weekend” is a part of a distinguished lineage, even if its working-class British accents can be a little hard to understand.

It tells the contemporary story of Russell, a lifeguard for a community pool in Nottingham, England, a place most Americans probably haven’t heard mentioned since a certain sheriff was chasing a certain guy in green tights through Sherwood Forest. One Friday night, he attends a potluck dinner thrown by some straight friends whose happy relationships and contented lives make him even more aware of the loneliness in his own.

Somewhat in desperation, he stops off in a non-descript gay bar on the way

home and is ignored by Chris, the one guy who seems to interest him, but then when Chris can’t score with the guy he wants, he decides he’ll settle for Russell and a one-night stand. Since this isn’t an opportune beginning and since there’s no expectations beyond a fleeting hook-up, they’re less on-guard with each other, less concerned with projecting a calculated image. Over the first 24 hours, they become more honest and open than usual – the result of which is they catch themselves developing some mutual feelings, feelings that are intensified when it’s discovered, for a reason I won’t reveal here, that the relationship cannot continue beyond the weekend. Is a 48-hour weekend time enough to know someone well enough that you’re willing to walk away from a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in the hope you’ve found your once-in-a-lifetime love?

This film has been rightly praised for the naturalistic way in which their small disclosures and small discoveries about each other leads to something that seems both real and rare, and how the movie’s ending seems genuinely unforced and realistic. To critics who’ve long ago OD’d on the cutesy and predictable formulas of Hollywood romantic comedies (think Jennifer Aniston), this naturalism in both story and acting can be very enticing.

So while this difference from usual rom-com movies may give an understandable cause for straight critics to praise “Weekend,” the fact that it deals with a situation many gays have known either personally or from the experiences of their friends, may give it a tired and ever-so-familiar ring. While on the other hand, seeing two gay men in this situation may provide a fresh spin to straights that it won’t have for us, because you can hear this story being told almost any night in almost any gay bar.

Harvey Fierstein, who wrote and starred in both the play and movie-version of “Torch Song Trilogy,” said that when straights told him they felt his story wasn’t really a gay story, but a universal one, he would protest, saying he’d spent decades transferring heterosexual romances into terms he could understand, and he wasn’t willing to have his gay story homogenized into something generic. There are too few gay stories, Fierstein said, to have them tailored into one-size-fits-all. And as he further stated, he’d be offended if someone claimed that “Schindler’s List” could just as well be about some WASPs in Grover Corners, New Hampshire.

Good stories do have some universal truths, but not at the expense of its particular characters and their often unique struggles.

What I’d like to do is what critics should do more often and say you should probably ignore any reservations I’ve expressed here; chances are you’ll be glad you saw “Weekend,” and will find it to be that rare movie that expresses gay life in a non-exaggerated and non-cartoonish way. The fact that this film may remind you of similar incidents in your own life will make it personal and that will make it powerful.