Chris Wisniewski: There was something almost too easy about our first installment of this Queer Cinema Notebook. Frameline, NewFest, and Outfest provided more than a great excuse to get started; they also offered a glut of LGBT-themed content for us to sift through, debate, and, in a few happy cases, champion. But queer cinema’s annual moment in the sun is fleeting, and as the summer stretched on, it became clear that our next installment posed a more serious challenge.
Without a healthy reserve of festival committee-approved offerings to draw upon, what would we write about? For eleven months of the year, Queer Cinema (if there even is such a thing) exists on the margins, and we spent most of this summer, as in most years, wondering where the queer characters were in the first place. (There are, apparently, no gay people in Gotham City, and with audiences, gay and straight alike, swooning over Batman, who noticed that New Queer Cinema trailblazer Tom Kalin delivered his first feature since 1992’s Swoon, the alternately captivating and off-putting Savage Grace?)
The more we saw, though, at both the multiplex and the art house, the more we realized that the “mainstream” movies with queer content or subtext were just as thought-provoking as (though more discouraging than) their out-and-proud indie and foreign cousins. So what did we learn on our summer vacation? For starters: Ellen and Portia can get married (hooray!); Lance can dance with the stars, as long as he’s dancing with a woman; and Judd Apatow’s male protagonists can love each other—really love each other, man—as long as they do so in a totally not-gay way.
Michael Koresky: Apatow’s certainly a good place to start. Over the past couple of years, his films have been praised for bringing to the surface the inherent homoeroticism of the Hollywood buddy comedy. This is seen by more than a few critics as somehow groundbreaking (“The Rogen-Apatow collaboration has come a long way from the ‘You know I know you’re gay’ riffing in The 40-Year Old Virgin,” claims Village Voice‘s Robert Wilonsky. “At last, they’re out of the closet.”) But the thing is, they’re not out of the closet. At all. So, the question must be posed to Apatow: where are the gay characters?
The very title of Apatow’s once-ignored, now-venerated debut and origin myth, Freaks and Geeks, infers a marked interest in social marginalia, a defense of the outcast. But it should be clear at this point that Apatow and Co.‘s fascination lies primarily with their own white, hetero selves, and that any conspicuous images of male bonding remain defined as safely straight. For me, Pineapple Express was the last straw: one long gay joke disguised as an enlightened “bromance” (ugh, that word), it’s perhaps the ne plus ultra of this new faux-sensitive comedy, in which the acknowledgement of affection between straight men (see also Superbad, Blades of Glory, etc) somehow grants the filmmakers a free pass to indulge in the kind of easy, queasy laughs that wouldn’t be out of place in gay-panic epics of the Eighties. To wit, after a feature-length awkward dude courtship, James Franco and Seth Rogen suggestively grind against each other in order to free themselves of duct-tape bondage: Audience go “ewww!”
Considering that Azazel Jacobs, the director of Momma’s Man, is the offspring of American avant-garde filmmaker extraordinaire Ken Jacobs, one would be forgiven for expecting his film to be more experimental and abstract than the seemingly conventional narrative that plays out. Yet buried beneath the poignant clutter of this occasionally familiar stunted-youth-in-life-transition tale is a surprisingly complex, elegantly detailed meditation on creativity and artistic growth. While Ken Jacobs may work with found footage, purposefully elongating time and reassembling it into tapestries of pointed Americana, his son has constructed a personal fiction film using the detritus of his own life: the downtown Manhattan loft where he grew up, the gadgets and tchotchkes strewn about it like cherished memories, and his parents themselves.
Momma’s Man was one of my personal favorites from Sundance this past year (the others being the forthcoming Ballast and the surprisingly complex Baghead, already in release) so I’d urge anyone at all interested in the state of the American Independent to make this a priority. It’s rough around the edges and occassionally a little shoddy, but isn’t that what’s been missing from the Sundance factory these last few years? A little bit of imperfection in the craftsmanship goes a long way. Skip Hamlet 2 (a wildly unfunny suckfest on an epic scale), and go for the little guy.
One could surmise the mediocrity of Diminished Capacity from reading the synopsis alone: Cooper (Matthew Broderick), a small-town-boy-made-good in the big city but lately suffering from the lasting effects of a serious concussion, heads back home to visit his fading Uncle Rollie (Alan Alda). As Cooper’s mother explains of the latter’s condition in a letter, “Dr. Hoyt calls it ‘diminished capacity’; that’s the legal term for a man who thinks that fish are typing poetry out on the end of his pier.” Got that last bit? To clarify: Rollie connects fishing lines to each letter on his typewriter, the nibbling of which results in a jumble of words (Rollie edits).
That this precious and strangely empty conceit plays a structuring role in the narrative (inspiring the opening and closing images) is symptomatic of the movie’s oblivious blandness; that a central character’s dementia is used as an excuse for added quirk is just bad taste. As directed by actor Terry Kinney (of the Steppenwolf Theatre) and written by Sherwood Kiraly (based on his novel), Diminished Capacity suffers from a generalized aimlessness which might seem fitting given the subject matter except that it never takes purposeful shape.
Over the years, it’s been both disconcerting and somehow satisfying to watch Matthew Broderick gradually morph from a lithe, cocky teen heartthrob to a pudgy, middle-aged sad sack. The puppy-dog eyes have sunken deeper into down-turned crevices of disappointment, and he seems lost in his burly torso, often vacuum-packed into tucked shirts and constricting ties. Broderick’s onscreen persona has come to embody early forties despair, when fading youth has given way to ambivalence about the future; this seems to have been a long, slow journey, which began somewhere around Alexander Payne’s superlative Election.
In that endlessly rewatchable satire, Broderick was something of a revelation, maintaining his air of superiority, but this time it was cloaked behind layers of self-deception, neuroses, and suburban despondency. Payne brought out an exacting, painfully observed performance from the actor, and ever since it seems like Broderick’s been doing milquetoast variations on it, with ever diminishing returns, from his likeable doofus boss in You Can Count on Me to his nebbishy nothings in The Stepford Wives and The Producers.
Now, as Taylor Peters, an atrociously named TV comedy writer with a crippling gambling problem, in Peter Tolan’s Finding Amanda, Broderick puts on his best deluded-dork outfit and wanders precariously close to Chevy Chase territory. This time however, he doesn’t have Reese Witherspoon as a formidable opponent, and he’s stuck playing opposite a plucky but uncharitably used Brittany Snow as his wife’s troubled niece, Amanda, who he’s supposed to track down in Las Vegas and save from a life of prostitution and drugs.
“The Cool School” is one of a subset of documentary biographies that might best be called “Scenes of Yesteryear.” Like the recent “Weather Underground,” “Commune,” and “American Hardcore”—whose respective subjects include radical terrorists, hippie collectives, and indigenous, anticommercial punk rock—“The Cool School” weaves testimony from participants of a faded fringe movement with footage from its heyday to take stock of the legacy of the marginal subculture in question. These are nostalgic, sometimes commemorative films employing a similar functional style to deliver content as practically as possible, and they’re so close to each other in quality that a misfire (“American Hardcore”‘s harried mess) usually isn’t all that far from a triumph (“Weather Underground”‘s precise portrait of revolutionary fanaticism).
As a result it’s hard to avoid faint praise even when recommending Morgan Neville’s “The Cool School,” which recounts Los Angeles’ frequently overshadowed 1950s and 1960s art scene. As “Scenes of Yesteryear” documentaries go it does right by its subject, providing an illuminating primer on a lesser-known strand of America’s eruptive postwar art movement, even as it doesn’t do much aesthetically to distinguish itself from the pack.
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