jim-314

I really wanted to like this movie. I generally like coming-of-age movies, and surf movies, and growing-up-gay movies. But I found the characters in this movie (with a couple of exceptions) a bunch of unlikable louts who spend much of the movie in testosterone-driven chest-butting, and I just couldn't care about them. The loutishness leads to a certain predictable amount of melodrama, and some psychologically simplistic soul-searching on the way to tying up ends. The only likable characters were the protagonist's younger brother (the gay one, who takes a lot of psychological abuse for his gayness), and the sympathetic grandfather (the only guy in the family who seems to show any affection for the younger brother). These are secondary characters. The young brother's coming to terms with his sexuality and tentative romantic exploration with one of the surfers is a minor subplot of the film. On the up side, the young guys (and gals) in the film look great, and the surfing footage is really nice, especially some of the underwater footage. But by the end of the movie, I was not sorry to leave the company of a group of characters that I mostly found unpleasant and unsympathetic.

"The Fifth of July" may be among the most satisfying stage scripts of the last three decades. For those of us who were young when the play's characters were young (in the Vietnam war era), it movingly touches on the idealism and disappointment of that time. It has a vein of sentimentality, but does that have to be a bad thing? Perhaps not. Even with its sentimental moments, the script is full of sharp, funny dialogue that is "theatrical" in the best sense. How well does that theatricality translate to film? With mixed success. This adaptation uses most of the original Broadway cast of the play. I saw the same cast on stage, and I remember really liking this TV film when it first came out. Now, seeing it again a couple of decades later, it strikes me as regrettably stagy. Swoozie Kurtz's flamboyant performance nabbed her a Tony on stage, but seems strident and one-dimensional on film. Likewise, Richard Thomas comes across as surprisingly mannered and overwrought for an actor who built most of his career in TV. He works too hard and ends up unconvincing. In contrast, Jeff Daniels (as Thomas's devoted but under-appreciated boyfriend) steals the movie with a subtle, natural performance. In general, the supporting players come off better than the leads, and it's fun to see a very young Cynthia Nixon. This is a competent introduction to a beautiful script, but it's still pretty much a film of a stage production. Like so many adaptations of this sort, it fails to convey the power of the live theatrical experience, and at the same time, it isn't a very good film as film. I couldn't help wondering how this would work if someone turned it into a "real" movie that emphasized cinematic values over stage values. I'd like to see someone try some day.

This film is an ultra-low budget production, shot on video. The production values are minimal, and it's not particularly good looking. The bright-light scenes are flat, and the low-light scenes are grainy. You have to make an effort to look beyond the production values to see what's good in this movie. If you can do that, and focus on the script, you'll find a provocative, intelligent drama here, that gets more and more interesting as it goes along. It doesn't take long to figure out that the writer-director, Yair Hochner, is frankly queer. Not "gay" in some inoffensive, assimilated, "Will & Grace" way, but in-your-face Queer with a capital Q. This drama of hustlers leading complicated (and often dangerous) lives, hearkens back to the aggressive low-budget queer cinema of the late eighties; that is, to movies like Van Sant's "Mala Noche" or Araki's "Living End." Hochner didn't make this movie for straight people (be warned, straight folks!). Among the best things about the film is that the director captures the way gay guys really talk to each other. He also shows the fluid boundaries in gay relationships: two guys might be lovers one day, pals another day, or sex buddies when the need and the attraction arise. They make families among themselves to replace their biological families. Sex might be a job, a romantic expression, or a bit of mindless fun... And just because a guy is gay doesn't mean he can't be a father (and a good, responsible father at that). But this is no sentimental view of golden-hearted whores. It's bleak, and often brutal. Two hustlers work together for a client one night and sense an emotional bond; circumstances, however, lead to a string of missed connections, and the hope for love unravels in a way that reminded me of one of Thomas Hardy's bleak anti-romances. Still, the end isn't entirely hopeless (and yes, the movie does come to a pretty clear end, even if it's not the conventional tying up that some viewers seem to want). One character appears destroyed by his bad luck and brutal circumstances; the other forges a new bond that just might help him prevail over his hard life. It's not a romantic ending, and there's no happily-ever-after; but it's an ending that makes sense.