unavitavagabonda

At first glance, this is nothing more than a slight, upbeat story -- along the lines of the Step Up franchise -- of how pursuing one's artistic dream (music, dance, and drag, in this case) redeems everything. But there is both more—and less—going on in this film. Here, the filmmakers, both white men, set a love story in the midst of the ballroom scene in a poor section of Los Angeles. The mostly black, mostly trans kids of the House of Eminence live to "walk" the runways at competitions and dream of "taking home tens" and trophies. Leave It on the Floor depicts the poverty, homelessness, and marginality of its characters' lives but somehow imagines those conditions as having no impact on their existences; they've been thrown out of their homes and done time in prison; no one has a job. And yet they happily fall in and out of love, treat each other reasonably well, and live in a sort of idyll of sister/brotherhood. It's a Disney fantasy of poor queers of color; on the other hand, it's essentially the only film about poor queers of color. Deconstructing this flight of fancy will provide more insight into class, race, and gender than does the film itself; on the other hand, the characters are at peace with their queer, trans, outcast selves; they build friendships and families and fall in love. There's not much "realness," but there is a kind of pushing back against "realistic" stories of ruined, gritty, miserable black lives, and that's a provocative stance, the film's many weaknesses notwithstanding.

There's something so icky about Patrick Moote and his false-feeling and false-sounding voyage of pseudo-discovery that it's hard not to be merely insulting about this documentary. Suffice it to say that virtually nothing about Moote's quest for a larger penis, nor his superficial exploration of why his "low average" endowment matters so much to him, is satisfying. Rather, so much of the documentary comes across as insincere and staged (though it professes to be an "as it happened" record of a sort of Super Size Me experiment in living) that the main reaction the film provokes is exasperation. For example, though the film is billed as a "sometimes painful search to find out whether penis size matters," it is patently uninterested in that question, a few desultory, unrevealing interviews with a few random women respondents notwithstanding. Anyone with a brain knows the answer to that question: Penis size doesn't "matter" (whatever that means) to the vast majority of people. To the people to whom it does matter, however, penis size matters a very great deal. Moote is one of those people to whom it matters, or such is the conceit of the documentary, so the only real question of the film is "Why does it matter so much to Patrick Moote?" But Moote sidesteps that question because answering it might have required him to be genuine. Rather, Moote takes the viewer on an odyssey of penis therapies, gets some very good advice along the way (which he appears to discard), and learns exactly nothing that might put a dent in his scorching self-obsession (and I'm not counting the hallmark sentiments hurriedly expressed at the documentary's end, the conclusion of a shaggy dog story if ever there was one). What becomes clear instead is the extent of Moote's masochism and the degree to which he must have eroticized the humiliation he supposedly feels. In other words, his shame and penis-related self-esteem issues become both his favorite topic and a kind of weapon that he wields against others. (That's most clear in the scenes in which he discusses his under-endowment with his parents and his ex-girlfriends; if you're not careful, you'd think Moote was being vulnerable and candid. Another likely interpretation, however, is that Moote draws pleasure from making people squirm.) I never believed his fiancée turned down his marriage proposal because of his penis size (there are so many other reasons why she might not have wanted to marry him, his fulminating neuroses and Olympian narcissism among them, that she'd never have needed such a superficial motivation). I never believed he seriously intended to try most of the treatments he supposedly considers. Mostly, I never believed that Moote was actually naïve enough to believe that pills and penis pumps (both of which he does try) would have any effect on the size of his junk. In other words, he depicts fake angst for fake impact. As a prolonged, Borat-like publicity stunt, it's certainly original. As a documentary, it never measures up.

One expected so much more from this film. In relatively rare moments, Anthony Hopkins seems on the verge of doing something great, but most of the time you keep looking at his facial prostheses and wondering why they don't fit and when they're going to fall off. Superficial regarding just about every single issue it touches upon, including film censorship and studio executives, the film's main quality is that it's relatively brief. The miscastings are nothing short of hair-raising(Hellen Mirren soldiers on, as she will, but looks constipated throughout; Scarlett Johanson as Janet Leigh is about as wrong as it's possible to get; Toni Collette is wasted in a very minor role and a very pointless British accent; and James D'Arcy as a simpering, neurotic Anthony Perkins seems like a Saturday Night Live parody). The greatest failing of Hitchcock lies in making its subject appear so small and so ordinary.