Herbert Ross | Boys on the Side / 1995

you got it!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Don Roos (screenplay), Herbert Ross (director) Boys on the Side / 1995

 

Last evening, after watching for the first time Herbert Ross’ 1995 film Boys on the Side, I was pondering just why I so enjoyed this film. This was Ross’ last film in a career that certainly did not distinguish him as a major director, and I actively disliked his films California Suite, Nijinksy, and Funny Lady; and even though I found his Funny Girl, The Goodbye Girl, Pennies from Heaven, and Steel Magnolias pleasant viewing, it was mostly the acting that had made those films memorable. That might have been case with this road film, given that unlike Thelma and Louise, with which this work has many links and even obliquely refers to, it has none of cinematic zest of Ridley Scott’s work and is satisfied with representing the vast American landscape—which might have been used as an important statement about the values of the culture at large as opposed to those of its characters—with brightly lit signs of Shakey’s, Wendy’s, Dunkin Donuts, and other popular chains along with a few glimpses of bleak-and-blink wintery towns en route to Tucson, where they eventually wind up.

 

    Ross, moreover, has a manner of rendering each of his scenes as if it were part of a stage play, bringing out the actors who engage in a heated dialogue before slowly closing everything down to a resolve and blackout. Sometimes it works, but mostly it barricades the overall action of cinematic narrative, forcing us to start all over again.

     And even though I’d argue that Whoopi Goldberg as the film’s central figure, Jane DeLuca, is a magnificent actor, terribly underrated in the several films in which she’s performed, her role here, as almost always, is that of the loving cynic which for most American audiences doesn’t make her terribly likeable—but of course it is the very reason that those of us who her admire her feel she’s a necessary tonic to people like this film’s White Anglo Protestant admirer of the musical group The Carpenters, Robin Nickerson (Mary-Louis Parker) who hasn’t yet found a word as an adult woman dying of AIDS to describe her vagina. Drew Barrymore represents her character Holly Pulchik mostly as a giggling, daffy, and not very bright nymphomaniac who is brought under control only through the law-abiding romantic attentions of the policeman Abe Lincoln (Matthew McConaughey), he perhaps the truly most interesting figure in the entire film (but I’ll come back to that latter.) So one can’t even argue, sanely, that it’s Ross’ brilliant actors who save the day.

       In the end, I guess I’d have say what made to me so love this little film was the way writer Dan Roos represented moral values, in a manner that strangely reminds me how John Waters captured a true vision of a caring and loving family in his absolutely irreligious, sexually twisted tale Pecker (1998). In fact Roos takes his film from three years earlier into even more seemingly perverted territory, asking how might a forlorn lesbian who’s just lost her lover and job, a lost and confused nice girl who has discovered that her bartender lover has quite literally “left” her with AIDS, and a young ditz involved in an abusive relationship with a drug dealer who, mostly to protect herself, she plunks with a baseball bat which kills him, all come together, on the run, to represent what true love and family are all about. They are surely better than any family ever concocted in some contorted picture created and promoted to rhyme with the American Dream, apple pie, and the average Joe by those folks so many Americans hold so dear, Norman Rockwell, John Wayne, or Walt Disney.

      But I well know that all of us who share such odd views realize having such opinions will not make us popular in this ole USA today. I’d never visited nor even known of the Christian film site Movieguide, but strangely ran upon it this morning while researching reviews of this movie. It described it actually quite accurately, while obviously drawing quite opposing conclusions:

 

 “Manipulation abounds in Boys on the Side, which director Herbert Ross calls ‘a film about the creation, evolution and resolution of a family unit.’ On the contrary, this movie is nothing more than an audacious attempt at redefining the traditional family. The script even goes so far as to define one’s family as whomever one ends up with in life, regardless of race, creed, sexual preference, personal taste, or criminal record — sort of a ‘last man standing’ approach. Reasonably well acted (with the exception of Drew Barrymore) but filled with blistering obscenities and sexual immorality, Boys on the Side strongly supports homosexuality as a viable lifestyle, viewed as negative only by unreasonably biased and bigoted homophobes. The movie offers no hope for redemption and only brief solace in crisis, substituting politically correct precepts on social behavior in the place of true ‘family’ values.”

 

      And indeed, this film is very much about manipulation, although I am not sure to what or to whom the Christian critic meant that word to refer. The film does represent a great many forms of manipulation. Holly’s drug-dealing lover goes so far as to beat her up in order to keep her serving him by his side.

      It’s likely that Robin’s bartender lover was playing the field, maybe even bisexually, in not telling her the truth about his health. The film makes no reference to this, but it’s clear through the woman’s fear of the male species, exemplified by her attraction to and yet repulsion of a later admirer, Alex (James Remar)—incidentally, also a bartender—as well as her growing curiosity about the lesbian life that Jane leads, that she has been hurt not just by the disease that her bartender has passed on to her, but his utter betrayal of her sexual trust.

     Jane, in turn, herself has apparently been manipulated by her lesbian ex-lover into believing that their relationship was a thing of permanence. And the entire system in which she works and lives, from the small bars in which she performs her music to the larger American heterosexually normative environment that surrounds, works to make her as a gay black woman feel as an outsider, unworthy of even being heard let alone being believed, realties that are later played out in the courtroom scenes regarding Holly’s unintentional murder of her abusive mate, which uses even Jane’s friendship with Holly as further evidence of Holly’s unconditionally evil behavior and guilt.

      When we finally meet Robin’s mother—although we gradually grow to like her and realize that she too has been changed as a result of how society has treated women—we also recognize that as a mother of the young Robin she has been a manipulator as well.

      Even Jane, in telling Alex about Robin’s AIDS, both to encourage him to attend to her and to warn him of the dangers, is guilty of attempting to manipulate her friend’s situation, which explains and justifies Robin’s temporary breaking away from their relationship.

    But I have the feeling that our Christian commentator was not interested in those sorts of manipulations, but more in the writer’s and director’s so-called manipulation of traditional Christian visions of reality. Certainly, we must admit that Ross’ and Roos’ storytelling is manipulative. They are clearly making a case for a vision that lies outside of the traditional American story, and Ross uses his theatrical skills to make us perceive just how truly likeable, despite outward appearances, these women are. That’s the job of a good director and an intelligent storyteller. But our commentator, I suspect, sees that as being part of what he describes earlier as its “politically correct propaganda,” although I know of no political party in 1995 that might have stood behind any of the values that this movie advocates, and cannot even imagine that most university faculties of the day (or even now) might voice full support of such ideas that the film embraces. In fact, it is the values of the commentator, I might argue, that have become far more “politically correct,” at least a certain party that seeks to reduce the possibility that we might share varying views.

       But he is also right it citing that the film displays a great deal of obscenity, particularly in the way Holly’s boyfriend Nick (Billy Wirth) treats “his” woman, and obviously in the way the judicial system in this work devalues individuals like Holly and Jane. Or even in how Robin’s mother first reacts when she discovers that Jane is lesbian and has been living in the same house with her daughter. A society that permitted presidents such as Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush to describe AIDS as a gay disease and accordingly refuse to properly fund research to seek a cure was truly obscene and even criminal, causing the unnecessary deaths of many thousands. A world in which someone like Jane could never marry her lover should is recognized as being obscene. And all of that has led Jane to fully express her anger through her vocabulary, although the language of this film does not seem to me particularly filled with obscenities except perhaps for the scene in which Jane simply attempts to help her friend find a word to describe her vagina. But once more, I presume our Christian monitor was offended by just that and Jane’s righteous cussing.

      I must disagree, however, with our believer’s insistence that his film necessarily argues or even fully embraces homosexuality. Indeed among the three leads, only Jane is gay, and Holly—who has evidently sexually experimented with Jane in the past—warns Robin away from Jane and suggests Jane stay away from Robin. Robin is thoroughly straight, even if she gradually comes to perceive why a woman might be sexually attracted to another woman. She remains a straight woman who in contracting the dreaded AIDS gives evidence of the truth that it is not a homosexual disease. And the film’s only homosexual, at film’s end, remains the only one throughout the film without a sexual companion. Holly, Robin, and Robin’s mother all seem uncomfortable, at least at first, with Jane’s sexuality. Accordingly, I hardly would describe this film as “supporting” homosexuality, although as loving and kind individuals, they all do grow to accept Jane for who she is. But there is certainly no advocation of the gay cause nor are they or anyone else described as homophobes (even if some viewers, including me, may see them that way) by the film itself. Jane is a viable (someone capable of working successful), feasibly living human being, if that’s what our Christian means, and accordingly her sexuality is equally “viable.” I presume he and his viewers would prefer to see her to be presented as incompetent and unable even to survive, the way the court would like to portray her. But such a portrait would not be truthful to the world in which most of us live.

      But again, our nameless cinematic judge (calling himself “Frodo & Harry”) is quite correct when he or she argues that the film is “an audacious attempt at redefining the traditional family.” For the family they together create with others of their community is certainly far superior to any family life that the characters might encounter in the traditional notions of that word. We do not even know what kind of family life Jane and Holly lived before they reached adulthood, but we can imagine, given their behavior and current reactions, that it is anything but loving and caring. Gay people, often abused and totally unaccepted by their birth parents, necessarily seek family in communal forms and successfully live their quite “viable” lives in that manner. And certainly if Holly’s previous relationship might be described as “traditional” it was also destructive and ultimately deadly.

      In fact, Abe Lincoln, the policeman, although a true believer in honesty, law, and order (all purportedly strong Christian values) comes to love Holly so much that he is willing to marry her, despite the time he forces her to serve in jail for having committed “aggravated assault,” and willingly adopts her child, which turns out not even to have been Nick’s baby, but obviously a black or Hispanic man with whom she slept. Abe, it turns out, is the most loving and traditionally Christian being in the entire work, and yet he fully accepts the family community which the women have created.

     I might add, finally, that Robin’s own mother also becomes part of that wonderful familial community. So Boys on the Side has indeed presented an alternative to the traditional family that seems to me to represent everything that the traditional family seldom does: acceptance of its members, love and caring for their well-being, and, as Jane sings to Robin in the closing song of the film, several beings who are unconditionally committed to offering their loved ones what Ray Orbison promised:

 

Anything you want, you got it

Anything you need, you got it

Anything at all, you got it, baby

 

     I would suggest that we all desire just such a family, whether or not the one in this film is truly possible or simply something fondly to be desired.

 

Los Angeles, March 30, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).