Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!
"Friendship, friendship, just a perfect blendship
When other friendships are soon forgot, ours will still be hot!"
Yes, our theme on this week's episode of Thursday Movie Picks is Friendship. An apropos topic for me this week, as I just returned from a long weekend vacation with friends in Provincetown, MA. For those of you who don't know, P-Town is the very last city on the very tip of Cape Cod, and has long been a destination especially for gay men. It may have been the weekend before the "season" officially kicks off, but we all had a blast, and I had a lot of fun going on my first true friends-only vacation. So in honor of my friends, I have chosen the following movies about gay friend groups this week.
The Boys in the Band (William Friedkin, 1970) Gay culture pretty much started here, didn't it? The original gaggle of gay friends, Michael, Donald, Emory, Hank, Larry, Bernard, and Harold, are the quintessential catty group of gay BFFs. But in 1968, when the story takes place, one year before the Stonewall riots, LGBT people were still not "out". At least, not in the way we would think of as being "out". A lot of gay men I know find this to be VERY dated, but I still see it as an important piece of queer history: This is very much a time capsule of a specific group of people in a specific time and place, and it has a lot of value as such. But it still encapsulates how a LOT of gay men feel - full of joy and pride, but also confusion and pain.
Love! Valour! Compassion! (Joe Mantello, 1997) Very nearly an update of Boys in the Band to the mid-90s, this adaptation of Terrence McNally's play follows eight friends as they make visits to Fire Island during one summer. It's funny and affecting in equal measure, and a lot more good-natured than its '70s predecessor. But then, it takes place in a world where gay men were becoming more accepted, and where they had less reason to stay hidden. Of all three films I've picked today, this one is the least remembered, and I think that's not quite as it should be. It's a lovely film, with a great cast and a gorgeous script adapted by McNally himself.
The Broken Hearts Club (Greg Berlanti, 2000) A bit dated now thanks to its reliance on the trend-obsessed West Hollywood culture of the late '90s, Broken Hearts Club is fun, formulaic... and a little bit offensive to gay men, even though it's written and directed by a gay man and is about gay men! The characters' oft-stated ideal is to be as straight-acting as possible. Which... I mean, most of the main cast members are straight (including Dean Cain, Zach Braff, Timothy Olyphant, and Ben Weber), and are completely unafraid of playing up the more femme qualities some gay men have. But still, I have a huge soft spot for this movie, and for swoon-worthy Timothy Olyphant in it.
Tony Kushner's Angels in America is the greatest dramatic work of the twentieth century. Possibly of any century. The play is sterling, radical, moving - a tour de force of theater. So I mean it as the highest possible praise when I say that Mike Nichols's miniseries version of it for HBO is the film it deserved, in just about every possible way.
The performances are, to a one, superb: Justin Kirk as AIDS-stricken prophet Prior Walter and Ben Shenkman as his cowardly partner Louis Ironson; Patrick Wilson as closeted Mormon Joe Pitt and Mary Louise Parker as his Valium-addicted wife Harper (was there ever an actress so perfect for this part???); Jeffrey Wright and Emma Thompson in multiple roles but most notably as the nurse/former drag queen Belize and The Angel, respectively; and of course the headliners, Al Pacino (realizing for once in his late career that underplaying was the right way to go) as closeted Republican superlawyer/Devil Roy Cohn and Our Lady of Divine Actressing, Meryl Streep as both Joe Pitt's mother and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg taunting Roy on his deathbed (and also as the Rabbi who gives the opening monologue... FLAWLESSLY).
Everything about the production is perfect - the production design by Stuart Wurtzel, Thomas Newman's iconic score, the costumes by the legendary Ann Roth, Stephen Goldblatt's cinematography... and of course, the direction by the one and only Mike Nichols, who considered this his magnum opus. Every single directorial flourish - inserts of paintings and old photographs, select tracking shots which daringly push in to another scene happening at the same time in a different place or out to reveal an "angel's-eye view", the numerous Cocteau references - lands with a beauty and grace rarely seen on screen, be it big or small.
I could be ballsy and pick a best shot from each of the six episodes. I could be equally ballsy and go on and on about the brilliance of the text and then randomly plunk down a Best Shot at the end. Or I could just pick my favorite shot from my favorite scene from anything ever and call it a day.
Or I could do none of those things.
I didn't have time to rewatch all of Angels in preparation for this. I only made it through Millennium Approaches (or, for those of you unfamiliar with the plays, the first half: Parts 1-3), and I had intended to pick just one shot overall, but I got carried away and wanted to feature one from each part. Plus, I have one from Perestroika that I just love. So I now share with you my Best Shots from each part of the first half of Angels in America, and some of Kushner's gorgeous prose to go with them.
PART ONE
"Deep inside you, there's a part of you, the most inner part... entirely free from disease."
(This is my favorite scene of anything ever.)
PART TWO
(This one gets no text, because it's the first time we really SEE Roy. We heard him before, when he told his physician "Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual who fucks around with men." And GOD is Pacino brilliant in this part.)
PART THREE
"Prepare for the parting of the air... The great work begins. GLORY TO-"
Perfect reading of that monologue, and I love that it's a (mostly) unbroken shot of her from outside the airplane. Harper may have an "astonishing ability to see such things", but we have the ability to hear such astonishingly beautiful words thanks to Tony Kushner and Mike Nichols and, in this case, Mary Louise Parker.
I could go on and on about Angels and how brilliant it is all week. So I better stop now before I do.
Except to say that the play is just as timely now as it was when it premiered in 1993, in ways that are completely surprising. If you haven't seen it, you owe it to yourself to do so. If you have seen it, you owe it to yourself to do it again.
