P. J. Palmer | North Star / 2022

sorrowful goodbyes

by Douglas Messerli

 

P. J. Palmer (screenwriter and director) North Star / 2022 [30 minutes]

 

Gay actors Colman Domingo as James and Malcolm Gets as his husband Craig star in what was certainly one of the best short films of 2022, US director P. J. Palmer’s North Star.

      The men live together on isolated ranch in upstate California, a spot so beautiful that you want to cry out with joy upon just seeing the fields and woods (the movie was filmed at Eagle Creek Ranch, in Trinity County, California). But Craig is dying of a degenerative disease and can no longer care for himself. The pills, even purchased in Canada at a cheaper price than they might cost in the US, run for each batch to $900, and James has already sold off all of the livestock and animals except his two dogs and his favorite horse, North Star, a beautiful animal who the actor works with so marvelously, as one critic noted, that you might imagine the horse (actually named Butterscotch) to be his own.

      On the particular day in which the film takes place, we see James rise early before the sun is up to feed the dogs and the horse and return to clean and bathe his diapered lover before frying up some eggs which he carefully tries to spoon-feed him, Craig hardly being, at this point, to any longer swallow.

       What we also soon perceive is that on this day James is selling North Star, his last mare, with the hopes that, despite the ranch’s foreclosure notice that they can survive for just a little while longer. The love between this interracial couple is clearly deep and long-lasting, James speaking to his basically unresponsive companion in a manner that, as critic Jennie Kermode writes in Eye for Film, which shows him “that he still recognises the intelligence and personality within his wasted body.”

       Into this quiet place of worry and yet some contentment comes a force of well-meaning care but also a closed and bigoted mind, Craig’s sister Erin (Audrey Wasilewski), who comes loaded with pills and food and the willingness to do the laundry and clean up their house, but who also treats her brother like a child, speaking to him in a kind of loving baby talk. She turns on the evangelical TV station where the on-line minister, Dr. Owen Broderick (in a surprise portrayal by actor Kevin Bacon) who damns homosexuality while she makes long distance telephone calls sharing her frustration with friends and family that James won’t allow Craig to be taken from the ranch to their home so that she might look after him.

 

      She is fully loving, the only way she knows how to be, but totally cruel and insensitive to his actual existence and the man she claims to love and forgive for his sinful ways. Without being able to speak a word, Gets shows his recognition of her love, while still portraying his sorrow and frustration for her treatment of him.

        As Kermode nicely summarizes the situation:

 

“She has not forsaken Craig. She even tries to love Jimmy. It’s their sin, she tells him, that she hates. She comes to help, and when somebody needs full time care, it’s very hard to do without such assistance. She runs errands for them, obtains medication, possibly illegally. When Jimmy is out, she switches the television set, at which Craig is pointed, over to a religious channel full of homophobic rhetoric. There’s an implicit suggestion that he’s to blame for his suffering because his love for Jimmy has cut him off from God. To add to his discomfort, she talks to him as if he were an infant, talks about him on the phone with her friends, expressing her disgust at the way he lives. But he loves his sister; he knows that she’s agonised by the thought of him going to Hell, and he shows us something that we rarely get to see from disabled characters in cinema: pity for somebody else.”

 

        Meanwhile, the auction firm willing to buy the horse arrives with a truck, and James is busy trying to carefully lead his animal into the horse truck and to say goodbye to his beloved North Star. At this same moment Erin finds the foreclosure notice in a drawer and goes into a kind of fury, interrupting James’ negotiations with Mike (Chris Sheffield), who is purchasing the horse, with a demand that Craig move in with them—without his sinful presence of course. Without comprehending their own feelings and love, she attacks them openly for the life style and the failure of the ranch because of her brother’s illness. Throughout, James attempts to keep his balance, refusing to do battle with her but firmly assuring her that her brother’s decision has been to remain on the ranch with him.

       She returns inside, disturbingly crying over her brother in a strange mix of sorrow for his condition, worry about his future, and hate for his sinful behavior all these years. Gets shows the mixed emotions that such a reaction might require, a love for his sister, but also fear that she might win out, and an anger for her narrow-minded views of life.

 

      Erin speeds off in her car as James gives a gentle goodbye hug to his horse and returns inside to comfort his pained and dying partner. His words to his now crying lover, “I got you. You got me,” say it all. No matter what happens and despite the family and cultural prejudices, they will remain together until the end.

      All the actors in this film are truly excellent, and all are presented as fairly complex, each with differing emotional beliefs, needs, and desires. Domingo is so wonderful that he should have been nominated for major awards for this short role even before his brilliant acting in Rustin the following year.

 

Los Angeles, March 1, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).