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| Beautiful Thing | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Beautiful Thing a comedic drama of everyday, thick-accented Londoners, Beautiful Thing ranges from kitchen-sink grittiness to the rounded edges of an after-school special. Most of the soundtrack tunes are by avatar of cuddle-core Mama Cass Elliot, whose "Make Your Own Kind of Music" ("Nobody can tell you/ there's only one song worth singing") becomes an anthem for a young boy realizing that he's gay. London looks less grotty than usual, thanks to some not-bad housing project somewhere in Thamesland. The action takes place during a heat wave, and director Hettie Macdonald tries to give the projects a tropical languor. Underneath its candy shell, though, Beautiful Thing offers a realistic portrayal of how mutually antagonistic a single mother and an almost-grown son can be--a portrayal that also includes the mother's brave and backhanded assertion to her gay son: "Somewhere you'll find people who won't want to kill you." Macdonald's handling of the two boys makes them indistinct. Glen Berry as Jamie handles his adolescent gayness with impossible aplomb; Scott Neal as Steve, the battered neighbor kid Jamie falls for, is also not a memorable actor. The first-rate Linda Henry plays Sandra, a hard-bitten, goodhearted single mom who supports her son by working as a bartender. Tameka Empson is delightful as Leah, the short, crazy trollop who likes holding 2am worship services dedicated to the Mamas and the Papas. Beautiful Thing is full of unusually thick slang. Sandra's furious response to her son's trying to hide the truth from her. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Hanging Garden | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The story line of "The Hanging Garden," about the perils of growing up gay in a troubled Catholic family, is familiar, even conventional. But the original way writer-director Thom Fitzgerald approaches the material is haunting and invigorating. Seen simultaneously as an abused child (Ian Parsons), an obese teenager (Troy Veinotte) and a well-adjusted adult (Chris Leavins), Sweet William is less a character than a representation of three different ways of coping with life's vicissitudes. Fitzgerald's intricate narrative structure juggles time and space to raise questions about the reality of what we are watching. Did the suicidal adolescent survive to adulthood? Is the adult observing his real or imagined past? Is he a ghost or an alternate version of how the boy, with better luck, might have turned out? The interweaving of dimensions, like the ornate floral imagery of the lush Nova Scotia setting, creates the rich tangle of emotional complexity that characterizes lyric poetry. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Wilde | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
October 16, the date of Oscar Wilde's birth 143 years ago, has been chosen for the West End premiere of the new film about the poet, playwright and homosexual martyr to Victorian moral values and English social hypocrisy. But well before then, the long-awaited movie Wilde, which has just had its first screening privately in London, will have set the town talking.
The movie opens with brilliant unexpectedness. We expect to see rough trade on the West End pavements. Instead we get rough-riders on horseback, firing guns and whooping it up at the gallop in the Wild West. You couldn't have invented a better calling card for this British production's reception in America - or a more accurate one. For in 1882 Wilde visited Colorado on a speaking tour of the US and went down a silver mine to baptise the precious seam named after him and tell the miners: "I hope to collect the royalties".
Change has taken its time, out it has made the Wilde tragedy feel like past, not living history. What remains is the pain of seeing a great artist pulled down to dreadful humiliation and obloquy. Fry's final scenes are short but powerful. They show a broken man, his limbs stiff from the prison treadmill, his nails cracked and blackened from menial labour, his formerly soft aesthete's features now blocked and squared by his jail-bird haircut, and with calluses on his lips instead of bons mots.
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