This was not a good year for LGBT movies, an easy deduction to make when one glances over the list of 2007’s mainstream releases. There was no Brokeback Mountain, Shortbus, Capote or D.E.B.S. Instead, we got I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry and a slew of movies that used gay sexuality as the subtext for their comedy or drama: Blades of Glory, Reno 911: Miami, Evening, Eastern Promises and Sleuth among them. Many of these movies were terrific but didn’t really focus on our lives.
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Pictured: #1 Before I Forget. #2 Paul Dano (left) and Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. #3 Jodie Foster in The Brave One. #4 Thomas Lennon in Reno 911: Miami. (Photo by Glenn Watson) #5 Ellen Page and Michael Cera in Juno. (Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox)
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The Walker—Paul Schrader’s film about a Washington, D.C., gay social bon vivant mixed up in a murder case—did feature Woody Harrelson playing gay in the title role, but the film’s justifiably lukewarm critical reception found it relegated to so few theatres it wasn’t easy to find. (Though it’s not great, it’s worth a look—especially the first half hour.) For overt visibility, we again turned to indie and queer cinema, where the results were often spotty at best. Boy Culture, Cut Sleeve Boys and Gray Matters were just three of the okay-but-not-great highlights of the year in queer cinema, though Color Me Kubrick (with its pixilated lead performance by John Malkovich) and The Bubble (from gay Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox) were definitely a step up.
Musicals—the queer-in-all-but-name genre—did boast three stellar additions to the canon: Dori Berinstein’s informative and entertaining backstage documentary ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway, Hairspray and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street are a trio of must-see movies for any self-respecting show-tune queen. For the adventurous, queer director Todd Haynes returned with his lyrical, contemplative homage to Bob Dylan, I’m Not There, with a gender-bending performance by Cate Blanchett that’s sure to end up in the Oscar circle. I was also a huge fan of the offbeat documentary Zoo, a visually hypnotic film that offered insight into the world of fringe sexual practices, and For the Bible Tells Me So won points for tracing the longstanding abhorrence evangelicals hold for Our People and trying to make sense of it through individual coming-out stories. Turner Classics Movies’ excellent series, Screened Out, presented a month-long film festival during Pride that illuminated much of our gay history on film in a mainstream setting while Queerborn & Perversion, a fascinating documentary by filmmaker Ron Pajak, did the same for Chicago history. The latter was the highlight of this year’s gay and lesbian film fest, Reeling. Other highlights of the festival (perhaps coming to a theatre or to DVD in 2008) also included Itty Bitty Titty Committee, Outing Riley and Starrbooty.
The best LGBT film of 2007 for me was Before I Forget, which played at the Chicago Film Festival. The third in a trilogy, the French film was written by its director, Jacques Nolot, who also stars as Pierre, a 58-year-old ex-hustler entering the autumn of his life with no regrets and not a trace of sentimentality. The movie beautifully illuminates the ‘gay lifestyle’ and issues specific to our community as Pierre goes about his everyday life in Paris. The film is tough, flinty, emotionally honest and, I think, a masterpiece. My runner-up would be another French film, The Man of My Life (which you can still catch at the Siskel Film Center through Jan. 3). The elliptical film centers on the life-changing events that occur when a happily married French couple make a casual acquaintance with their gay neighbor and the husband finds himself subconsciously attracted to the man. I would also like to point readers toward yet a third French film: The Page Turner, a thrilling yet extremely subtle movie in which a complex revenge plan is enacted by a young woman whose artistic ambitions had been thwarted as a child by a celebrated classical pianist. A heavy lesbian undertone is present in the relationship between the young woman and her intended victim, the now-anxiety-ridden pianist.
While not a good year for LGBT-themed movies, the same can’t be said for the year as a whole. It’s been a month and a half of one terrific movie-going experience after another and the new year begins with one more. Boogie Nights-Magnolia writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has now written and directed There Will Be Blood, based on the Upton Sinclair novel Oil. It’s the story of Daniel Plainview, a fictitious oil wildcatter who is portrayed by a sensational Daniel Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis’ performance as Plainview—who is at once seductive, charming, mesmerizing and supremely evil—is surely one of the greatest ever captured on film.
Day-Lewis channels the voice and mannerisms John Huston brought to his portrait of supreme evil as Noah Cross in Chinatown and develops them even further. There Will Be Blood follows the character from prospector to magnate—who, in all that time, seems only to love oil itself. Nothing else—money, sex, power, or any kind of human interaction—truly seems to interest Plainview or distract him in his quest to draw more and more oil from the earth. Certainly not Paul Dano, as a religious zealot, who it appears might be Plainview’s one true nemesis. Anderson’s canvas—the sweep of the harsh western plains (with Ireland filling in for the frontier) —is as large as that captured by Terrence Malick in Days of Heaven. But in Anderson’s movie, the vast panorama doesn’t dwarf Plainview or deter him for a second. It’s a thrilling, entertaining movie aided greatly by Jonny Greenwood’s dissonant, symphonic score (also the year’s best), which underscores the contrast between the surface beauty of the characters and the land with the ugliness and rot ready to bubble up just underneath.
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