Jonathan M. Guttman | Miles Apart / 2002

the days of wine and daisies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Keith Humphrey (screenplay), Jonathan M. Guttman (director) Miles Apart / 2002 [19 minutes]

 

Miles (Brad Schmidt) agrees to return home with his lover Jeffrey (Craig Burke) for Jeffrey’s sister’s wedding. But he clearly does so with deep feelings of trepidation given his past encounters with Jeffrey’s waspy bitch of a mom, Darleen (Kathleen O’Neel Toleedo)

     As they are met at the station, he hands Darleen a small bunch of white daises he has brought her, recalling that daisies are her favorite. She dismisses them—it is only yellow daises she likes—and utterly ignores his presence, focusing all of her attention on her beloved son, while leaving the luggage to Miles as if he were some sort of servant.

     In her son’s room they will sleep in bunk beds in a room she has conveniently made so unbearably hot that they will have to sleep with the door open.

     Basically, she goes out of her way to ignore her son’s companion, the two in a relationship, it appears, of several years.

     The dinner was to have included Jeffrey’s sister Kathleen (Megan Hamaker) and her fiancée Steve, who not only finds a way to escape that dinner, but actually never appears in the movie, even at his own wedding—which I presume is an exaggerated in-joke about just how much he has needed to escape the presence of his mother-in-law.

      Before Darleen joins them, Jeffrey and his sister chat, she admitting that in some remarkable manner she has managed to escape revealing the fact that she and her future husband have been living together for years. Fortunately, Miles and Jeffrey concur, they are lucky to live in another state.

      Dinner being served, Darleen suggests that the atheist Miles say the evening prayer. He readily agrees to do so, thanking God not only for the blessing of Jeffrey’s family and the upcoming wedding of Kathleen and Steve whose love is as pure as Jeffrey’s and his own—immediately and rudely interrupted by the mother who declares an end to all such conversations, even if heaven-sent. “This is not the time and place to bring your life-style to the dinner table.”

     For the first time Jeffrey reacts, leaving the table with Miles, and later even rejecting his mother’s statement that she will forgive her son for his behavior. Jeffrey argues it is she who needs to ask for forgiveness. And soon after, through the necessary open door, Darleen hears the conversation between her son and his lover, as Jeffrey finally opens up about his years of resentment for his mother’s inability to accept him and the man he loves.

     Miles wisely explains that it is not he who she is rejecting as much as it is the truth of her son being gay. People are expendable for her, but deviations in her wasp notion of reality are absolutely intolerable, so the film suggests.

     A few glasses of wine later and a stroll through memory lane through a childhood scrapbook seems to set Darleen straight—or perhaps we should say, leads down a different curving road.

   At the wedding, we see Jeffrey dancing with his mother, still unable to forgive her continued dismissal of the man he loves, and Miles—the man, as always, forced to be remain apart from Jeffrey in his mother’s presence—dances with the bride, who admits that her mother is a genius at pushing all the right buttons to make everyone hate her.

      But suddenly Darleen asks if she might cut in. We wonder whether, if she dances off with Miles, she might be plotting another series of rude rejections, but it is her daughter with she dances, leaving Jeffrey to dance with Miles in their first real moments together since their visit to hell. We notice that the yellow daises have been filled in now with a few white daisies. Suddenly we see Darleen, all in smiles, with a white daisy in her hair and she compliments her son on making a “smart move.”

     If this little film of the horrors about conservative values posing as the dismissive affectations of class-structure lacks all credibility by its “feel-good” ending, we can’t help but liking it nonetheless for purportedly teaching the society bitch how to become a real human being by accepting her son’s sexual identity. It’s remarkable what a few glasses of wine can do after a long-deserved upbraiding by your beloved son you’ve accidentally overheard describing your dreadful behavior.

 

Los Angeles, October 31, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).