Jaime Patterson | Tucked / 2018

carrying on the party

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jamie Patterson (screenwriter and director) Tucked / 2018

 

What do you do with a veteran drag queen whose jokes are as old as World War I music hall routines (“What’s the difference between your wife and your job? After five years, your job will still suck.”), and who just discovered that he has cancer, with only a few months to live?  Moreover, instead being a loveable old faggot who inevitably has discovered the party’s over, that “it’s time to take of his mask and call it a day,” Jackie/Jack (Derren Nesbitt) is an alcoholic, often mean-spirited straight man whose daughter won’t speak to him after his refusal to attend her mother’s and his beloved wife’s funeral. Although he argues, seemingly justifiably, that his ex, having discovered his penchant for cross-dressing, didn’t want him there, his daughter Lily (April Pearson), also justifiably insists that he didn’t even bother to consider her needs, that she would have liked him to be there, either in a nice pressed suit or, if necessary, a dress.

     You have to credit British director Patterson for not approaching the subject the way most LGBTQ film aficionados have come expect. Representing their voices, Time Out scolded in their 2018 review that it was “disappointing in a movie ripe for a proper investigation of the lives of British queer people,” to present Jackie as a straight man. Yet, in fact, there have been even fewer films that actually tackle the truth that a large proportion of cross-dresses are, in fact, straight. For decades individuals such as Ed Wood, Dame Edna’s alter-ego Barry Humphries, and even Uncle Miltie Berle have been trying to tell us something to which we refuse to listen: straight men can also be queer in their obsessions with the female image and dress that compels them to explore again and again a gender different from own through the transformations of their own bodies. And, as in Jackie’s case, it can become a habit that is so overwhelming that it gradually becomes difficult to tell the difference between the actor and the performer, not only for the audience but for the man himself.

     What you do with such a figure? Just as Tim Burton did his character in the film Ed Wood, Petterson surrounds him with other outsiders and queer folk that help us to realize that sex is not always at the heart of queer behavior.

      Asked by his Bristol club manager to look after the new drag queen, the genuinely transvestite and gender confused Faith (Jordan Stephens), Jackie at first insists he’s not a school-teacher and not interested in this point in his life in new students.

      After a few jabs at the newcomer and fight with another drag queen and the new Faith over the use of wigs, Jackie eventually discovers that Faith is homeless and invited his into his own humble digs to sleep on the couch or, perhaps, even in the same bed.

      The inevitable happens all to quickly in this often moving but equally predictable little soap-opera. Hearing about the situation between Jackie and his daughter, Faith helps his new housemate to get on the internet and discern her whereabouts. Faith even manages to meet up with Lily ahead of time to explain just how kind and loving her father truly is.

      And the two meet up in the dressing room of the club, Jackie as the disadvantage in full drag sans wig, while the angry Lily thoroughly dresses him down for not thinking of anyone but himself and not being there for her—although the film never explains how she herself has gotten over the shock of her own Dad being a drag queen. One suspects that most young children might prefer such queer-like fathers not to show up in public with unforgiving relatives dripping with tears of sorrow and indignation.

      But the two eventually make up their differences, Faith helps Jackie with his “bucket list,” paying for a lap-dance with him and a 20-some year-old women in a strip joint who admits that she’s really into girls, providing him with a tattoo, and making a visit with Jackie to a sleazy drug dealer (Steve Oram) who finds the pair just too sexually confusing for his bourgeois sense of values. In short, Faith has sustained the party of Jackie’s life just a little longer that he might have imagined possible.

      Despite an evident lack of talent Faith wins over a new audience at the Bristol club, and eventually Jackie dies happily with the knowledge that he’s left behind two daughters, one cis-gender the other gradually coming to terms with his/her desired sex. And, as Stephen Farber writing in The Hollywood Reporter summarizes, if, “The movie’s ending isn’t hard to predict…we’ve become so drawn to the characters that the reconciliations still manage to be satisfying.”

 

Los Angeles, December 8, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).