[STONEWALL opens in Cleveland on Friday September 25th exclusively at the Cedar Lee Theatre.]
Review by Pamela Zoslov
Poor Roland Emmerich. The
director of action blockbusters like INDEPENDENCE DAY, GODZILLA and DAY AFTER TOMORROW, gets little enough respect. Now he's being
attacked for his “labor of love,” STONEWALL, a movie dramatizing
events surrounding the 1969 Stonewall riots, the New York City
uprising that's considered the catalyst for the modern Gay Rights
movement.
The German-born director, who
is gay, was so committed to the project that he financed it himself,
along with friends, and stepped in as director when no one else
would. “Nobody wanted to do it,” he said in an interview online,
“and I was stubborn, and then I got it done.”
But the release in August of
a two-minute, 23-second trailer ignited a firestorm on the Internet
and threats of a boycott. The charge is that the film shortchanges
trans people and people of color by focusing on a fictional white
male, played by Jeremy Irvine. (Irvine is not merely white; he's
English, as are some other cast members.)
The story, Emmerich said, was
inspired by a friend's experience as well as his own, and the movie
features a racially and ethnically diverse cast. The central
character is white, he explained, because he represents Emmerich
himself. “You have to put yourself a little bit in, and I'm white.”
The movie itself inspired a lengthy screed on the Gawker website that
suggested the movie, as much as the Stonewall Inn, needed to have
bricks thrown at it.
The lack-of-diversity claim
is a little unfair to the movie, which features characters based on
real-life trans and African-American activists like Marsha B. Johnson
(Otoja Abit). Danny's closest friend in the movie is Puerto Rican
“street queen” Ray/Ramona, a composite of trans activist Sylvia
Rivera and activist Raymond Castro, emotionally portrayed by the
lissome Jonny Beauchamp.
Good intentions are present
in abundance. What the film needs is a screenplay that doesn't induce
snickers in places and impatience in others, especially as it grinds
toward the two-hour mark and the titular riot hasn't even started. By
the time the first brick is thrown at the Stonewall Inn, we've sat
through an exhausting exposition of the Perils of Danny, the
Midwestern boy cast out of his home and living on the streets of
Manhattan with a band of colorful gays, who ham it up in homemade and
shoplifted gladrags, chanting, doing a can-can, and debating the
merits of Judy vs. Barbra.
The neophyte farmboy taken
under the wings of counterculture “freaks” is an awfully hoary
tale. At times the setting, with Montreal standing in for Greenwich
Village, looks like a road production of “Hair.” (A few songs, in
fact, wouldn't have seemed out of place.) Danny's experiences as a
reluctant street hustler are also strongly reminiscent of MIDNIGHT COWBOY, especially his hotel encounter with a fat èminence
grise who emerges in gown, wig and pearls à la J. Edgar Hoover.
The script is a mixed bag,
heavy on pathos and cliché but with more than a few truly stirring
scenes. It was written by playwright Jon Robin Baitz, whose plays
have earned him prestigious awards and a Pulitzer Prize nomination.
The movie takes us into the
troubled home life of Danny Winters (Irvine), a high school football
player from rural Indiana, where it looks like 1958 even though it's
1969. (The movie's period sense is often questionable, but in the
case of rural Indiana, I think the retrogressiveness is accurate).
Danny himself wears a modified D.A., looking like a cross between
James Dean and Justin Bieber. He's exploring his burgeoning gay
identity, along with Joe (Karl Glusman), a schoolmate he meets for
secret trysts.
Danny's misfortune is that
the coach of his football team is also his dad (David Cubitt), and in
neither capacity does the old man tolerate homosexuality. “There
are signs,” Coach Dad tells his wife darkly. Suspecting his son may
be “that way,” the Coach makes his class watch a laughably
alarmist hygiene film about homosexuality. Meanwhile, Danny declines
to shower with the rest of his teammates (“I don't sweat”).
When Danny and Joe are caught
in a compromising situation, Danny is shunned at school and at home,
his only ally his preternaturally hip and wise little sister (Joey
King), named Phoebe in obvious homage to Holden Caulfield (for
emphasis, she is seen reading a book of Salinger stories.) Coach Dad
kicks him out, while his mom assents in tremulous silence. Danny
worries that without his dad's help, he won't be able to get the
scholarship he yearns for to attend Columbia.
Suitcase in hand, Danny
boards a bus to NYC and lands in Castro street, where a colorful
troupe of loitering gay men awaits. They quickly initiate him in the
ways of the street — shoplifting, hustling, sleeping in flophouses,
and dancing and drinking at the Stonewall, a seedy, mob-run
underground club that is friendly to gays but subject to regular
police raids. The movie sets the context for the unjust and often
brutal treatment of gays in 1969. It was illegal to serve gays
alcohol, for gays to dance with each other, or to dress in drag
(women were required to wear at least three pieces of feminine
clothing.)
Danny is taken under the
slender wing of Ray, the troubled, good-hearted androgyne who shows
him how to survive on the streets. She also falls in love with the
handsome Danny, calling him “farmboy” and weaving a cockeyed
dream of domestic bliss around him. Beauchamp deftly navigates Ray's
mix of streetwise know-how and childlike pathos. “Know where home
is for me? Nowhere. Nobody wants me!” Danny consoles Ray when she's
beaten up by a “trick,” but romantically he has eyes only for
sexy activist Trevor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Trevor is leafleting for
the Mattachine Society, the venerable gay rights group whose
suit-and-tie conformity contrasts with the bohemian, gender-bending
style of Ray and company (“your little street gang,” Trevor calls
them). Alas, Trevor is not the faithful lover Danny hopes for when he
moves into his nice apartment.
The movie spends considerable
time on Danny's love life and misadventures on the mean streets, but
when it focuses on the Stonewall, it doesn't quite know what to do.
The police regularly raid the seedy club, which may have had as much
to do with its underworld activities as with the fact that gays
congregate there. Real-life figures are part of the action, including
the scary-looking Edward “Mother” Murphy (Ron Perelman), an
ex-wrestler and gangster who was known for extortion of gay men, is
shown kidnaping boys, including Danny, and forcing them into
prostitution. (Later, after serving prison time, Murphy became a
prominent gay-rights activist.)
The movie's narrative and
dialogue are corny and its period sense is wobbly, but the film
excels in vividly portraying brutalities inflicted on gay men and
women by police. Danny is the victim of a particularly savage
beating, accompanied by sexual taunts and slurs, by a pair of New
York's finest. (In real life, such a beating would have left him dead
or at least hospitalized, but thanks to movie magic, he emerges with
only a few bruises.) His consciousness is raised, and he becomes one
of the prime movers in the rebellion that took place on June 28, 1969
(and continued over four more nights).
For some reason, Stonewall
has proved a challenging movie subject. Nigel Finch's 1995
“Stonewall” looks, on the basis of segments I've seen, more
entertaining and with better music, but not much more realistic.
There are also a couple of reportedly worthy documentaries, the 2010 STONEWALL UPRISING and the 1985 BEFORE STONEWALL. I found the 2010
documentary THE DOG, about the real-life man behind the bank robbery
in DOG DAY AFTERNOON, effectively conveyed the gritty texture of
Greenwich Village gay life and activism in the late '60s and early
'70s.
Movies about historical
events are always subject to controversy. Ana DuVerny's Selma focused
on the organizers of the March in SELMA, but it offended people who
thought it slighted President Lyndon Johnson. Emmerich's movie is
being criticized for its “straight-looking” white hero and for
allegedly slighting trans members of the LGBT community.
It may be better to look at
the glass as half full. It's important that there is a commercial
movie about this landmark event in the LGBT rights movement; if it
inspires viewers to learn about the history of the long and storied
fight for equality, then it has performed a valuable service.2 1/2 out of 4 stars.
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