Love! Valour! Compassion!

National Review, June 30, 1997 by John Simon

THIS will be the real test. Hitherto homosexuals in mainstream movies were marginal characters, or unequivocally comic or tragic figures. Now comes Ter- rence McNally's screen adaptation of his play Love! Valour! Compassion! and all is changed. This is the story of three country weekends involving eight undefused homosexuals. They love and hate, play and wrangle, kiss and carry on, are connubially devoted or brazenly promiscuous. Theirs is an enclosed, self-sufficient world, with no soft-pedaling of sexual appetites and activities, and no concessions, let alone apologies, to heterosexual sensibilities.

How will American audiences react? Joe Mantello, who directed the play off and on Broadway, also directed the movie. He is quoted as hoping that "audiences will see the eight characters as one particular group of individuals, and not a representative cross-section of gay men." This strikes me as disingenuous.

Gregory Mitchell, in whose cozy Victorian country house the action takes place over three summer-holiday weekends, is a dancer turned choreographer and, at the onset of middle age, anxious about his body's aging. He lives with Bobby Brahms, a much younger pretty-boy type, who is blind. The idea, I suppose, is to show that afflictions exist in the homosexual world too: thus Gregory stut- ters when excited. Two of the houseguests are a professional couple, Arthur Pape and Perry Sellars, an accountant and a lawyer, who have been living con- jugally for 14 years. Arthur is earnest and very proper, clearly the husband in the relationship; Perry is flighty, funny, a bit bitchy -- the wife.

John Jeckyll -- British, mean, and woundingly sarcastic -- is a com- poser-pianist. Ramon Fornos, his lover of three weeks, is a thuggishly hand- some young dancer, cocky, ignorant, and unstable. As a tip about their relationship, we see John packing handcuffs for the first weekend. For the second weekend, they are joined by James, John's twin brother: a swishy but extremely good-natured queen, dying of AIDS. John and James are played by the same actor, which made for onstage bravura but is not well exploited on film.

There is also a single, Buzz Hauser, from the fringes of show business, who knows every musical by heart and is a compendium of show-biz trivia. Fat, homely, and HIV positive, he has a hard time finding lovers, but compensates by being the life of the party. Wonderfully incarnated on stage by Nathan Lane, he is diminished in every way but girth by the one newcomer to the cast, Seinfeld's Jason Alexander. These are the characters disporting themselves over a year's Memorial, Independence, and Labor Day weekends in Gregory's secluded lakeside Xanadu.

That they are types is suggested by their very Restoration-comedy-style names. Buzz (gossipy) Hauser is the perennial houseguest. Pape connotes papa, a good, fatherly sort. Perry Sellars evokes Peter Sellars, the campy stage director. Fornos is, of course, a Hispanic furnace of hot sex. Bobby is Brahms, I suspect, because of that composer's pleasantly anodyne music. Gregory Mitchell suggests a clean-cut WASP, which must be how McNally likes to be perceived.

The movie somewhat softens the play's language, I think, but has plenty of sexual situations and frontal nudity, and the closeups may make it more sug- gestive than the play. When the boys, for a forthcoming AIDS benefit, rehearse the here somewhat augmented cygnet pas de quatre from Swan Lake in full costume, a culmination is reached, especially as during it, in voiceover, each character summarizes the rest of his life and his mode of dying.

But unable to leave well enough alone, McNally has things drag on in order to climax in a nocturnal skinny-dipping scene. Though John, characteristically, abstains, this is a comparatively happy ending, more or less effacing the memory of the upheavals preceding it. Except for Alexander's, the performances are effective, and Mantello has done well enough for a first-time movie direc- tor. The music by Harold Wheeler, better known as an orchestrator, is sac- charine; not so Alik Sakharov's cinematography. Now let that polling booth known as the box office decide.

Little as I care to review the excruciatingly monotonous Children of the Revolution from Australia, I do so lest interested readers mistake it for a valid political comedy. It concerns Joan, a grimly tunnel-visioned Australian Communist, who writes mash notes to Stalin and ends up spending a night with him in the Kremlin, where she seemingly gets impregnated, while he, from the strain of sexual exertions, dies in the act.

I said "seemingly" because another claimant to this paternity is the spy known as Nine, a double agent for Australia and the Soviets. Back home, Joan lives in a kind of menage a trois with him and Welch, her adoring suitor -- a Com- munist just for her sake -- whom she lovelessly marries. Her son, Joe, is brought up a good Communist by his humorless, unreconstructed mother, but turns into a curiously kinky dictator, who relishes being jailed. This is partly because he enjoys being handcuffed by Anna, the pretty arresting officer, with whom he has fallen in love.