Gwen Wynne | Wild About Harry (aka American Primitive) / 2009

the unspoken truth

by Douglas Messerli   

 

Mary Beth Fielder and Gwen Wynne (screenplay), Gwen Wynne (director) Wild About Harry (aka American Primitive) / 2009

 

Early in this movie Harry Goodhart (Tate Donovan) tells his daughter Madeline (Danielle Sayre) to keep to her dead mother’s ideals, “Stand up for who you are and what you believe in.” It takes an entire movie for this coddled Cape Codder to even comprehend the message her father is sending her. All right, it’s 1973 and gay rights, despite the Stonewall Inn battles, were only just trickling out to the suburbs. But really Howard and I easily had come out to all of our friends three years previous to this cinematic feature as a couple on the University of Wisconsin—Madison campus. I admit that it was a very liberal world, and we were blessed with open-minded friends, but even the reviews seem to accept the idea that 1973 was still a closed-off world in which no gay need even imagine peer acceptance.

     This is yet another hysterical gay movie, that may have been based on true experiences, but only reveals, once more, the continued terror of the gay experience that seemed to cluster around films in what one might have imagined was a far more open-minded era of the new century, 2009.

     If his groovy, slightly hippie-dressed daughters don’t quite immediately fit into the more Cape Codder’s conservative decorum, they nonetheless soon make friends, and a handsome new man on the island delights the neighborhood ladies, married and widowed.

     At least his younger daughter, Daisy (Skye McCole Bartusiak) is a blessed with a much wilder imagination, constantly interrupting her elder sister’s attempts at accommodation. But, of course,

she doesn’t quite succeed, particularly when Maddy meets the lovely school jock Sam (Corey Sevier), with whom she almost immediately falls in love and impresses with her tennis skills. Enter clumsily, stage left, Josh Peck (Spoke White), a scruffy boy who truly falls in love with Maddy at first sight.

     Madeline becomes a full star tennis player, and Sam Brown’s mother almost admits to Daisy that she’s fallen in love with her father on first sight, in his bathrobe in his front-yard antics of

trying to deliver breakfast to his two bus-bound daughters. Sam’s mother eagerly engages the two daughters, by driving them home so, of course, she can further meet their attractive father. But at that very moment, Harry has posted a new sign, which gives alert to his real “interests,” and most particularly to his new partner, Gibbs & Goodhart, and their new business relationship of which his daughters had absolutely no warning, another eligible bachelor as Mrs. Brown (Anne Tamsay) perceives him to be, a perfect reason to stop by and see their “American Primitives.”  

    Suddenly his daughters are introduced to Mr. Gibbs, Theo (Adam Pascal), as even Martha describes him “the other half.” What none of them seem to be able to perceive is that he is in fact Harry’s lover, who even entertains, since he is a lovely piano player, the entire community with the song “I’m Just Wild About Harry” which is not simply played out in the song’s lyrics but his actual love of Harry Goodhart, Maddy’s father.

    Soon, tagging along with the “in” crowd, Maddy joins her friends at a local Provincetown bar, where she proclaims in the obnoxious youthful innocent of her prejudice that “I’ve never seen a real queer before!” only to discover her father and Theo dancing together at the same bar.

     So begins a spin into an hysterical homophobic world that changes all their lives.

     Maddy, believing it’s just a deviation of his true existence, works hard to throw her dad into the arms of the local women, including Mrs. Brown, meanwhile imagining that she has a real relationship with her son Sam, to whom she confides her fears. But Sam is not at all trustworthy, and word soon spreads throughout the community, with homophobic taunts, and, even worse, the arrival of the highly conservative parents of Harry’s ex-wife, determined to rescue their granddaughters from the life of the debauched gay couple.

    Finally, Maddy is left alone, without seemingly anyone to even take her to the homecoming dance until the loner Josh returns into her life, admitting that he has known about her father from the first moment, and finally making it clear to her that all her desperate troubles, her true hysteria, doesn’t at all matter. He wants to take her out, and that is what matters more than anything in her delimited imagination.

    Finally even the in-laws perceive that Harry and Theo are raising up the girls quite wonderfully. Case closed.

    No, Theo realizes that perhaps they should not be living together, after all it is 1973, and things can still happen, just at the moment when the in-laws reappear and find Harry and Theo engaged in a deep kiss. The in-laws are determined that Madeline and Daisy will now live with them. “The Lord does not allow homosexuals to raise children,” proclaims the father-in-law, reiterating every stupid Christian moralist on the planet. Martha and he are about to take the daughters away from the healthy relationship Harry and Theo have created for their children for absolutely no reason other than they are a homosexual couple.

     Harry brings his daughters together for their sudden exit from their lives, “You’ll spend a few nights with your grandparents, and we’ll work something out.”

      Jason knocks on the door; it is the night of the homecoming party, but, of course, Madeline is not able to make it, as Harry announces. Everything has changed—this being a hysterical movie that cannot possibly imagine that even in 1973 things had altered in another way than the direction this film seems to be heading. You truly want, at this point, to enter the film, and like Cher in Moonstruck (1987) slap their faces and demand they wake up. The passivity of gay men suddenly becomes transparent. They are giving up their entire reality to bigots.

      I wonder, given our own rather wonderful experiences at the same moment whether this was what reality was all about. I cry imagining that it probably was for older gay men in the real world from which Howard and I were so immune. The door closes on Jason, the gentle man who might have been the perfect mate for the confused Madeline. Everything seems to have fallen apart.

     The girls are told that neither of them are to go to their father’s house unless accompanied by their grandparents, and their whispers make clear they are going to file for custody.

     The girls are trying to figure out the conundrum of their father’s sexual shift. Was he always that way, even with their mom? What happened to him to make him so different? But within their proper Cape Cod dinner experience, Maddy again encounters Jason, this time as a restaurant busboy, the young man who brings in the clams for their dinner delight, explaining that “I came to take you out, at your house but you weren’t there,” she admitting that her grandparents took her away from her father.

       Jason tells of his own dilemma, when his brother Paul, constantly in fight with his father, joined the marines, his father describing him as “a selfish jerk.” That was the last time he saw him, the brother having died a couple of years later in Viet Nam. He regrets that he could not comprehend his own brother as family, a fact he only realized in his own elder brother’s death.

      Family, I would argue is a dangerous and tribalistic force, but in this case it helps. “Your family is your family, no matter what. Your dad’s a part of your deal.” Bluntly he explains why she shouldn’t have abandoned what was truly a fully-working family, even if it didn’t fit normative expectations. This rough young man wants to be a part of her “deal” also, expressing a love so much deeper than any young Sam Brown might have ever imagined what love is about.

     Madeline almost immediately after pulls her sister away from the table where her grandparents sit and rejoins their father, this time as a force against any further ado. “We want to stay with you and Mr. Gibbs,” she proclaims. It’s not quite that simple, answers their delighted but confused father. Harry describes his true love of Madeline’s mother, Daisy entering, the poet to say, “Two eternal flames burn in his heart at the same time,” finally relieving her sister’s impossible comprehension of how two very different loves might be possible.

     But the delightful Mr. Gibbs is now moving out, the girls disconsolate for his decision. After all, he was an excellent cook, a loving force, himself a good father to them. He admits he’s trying to find a way for Daisy and Madeline to stay with their father. But Madeline finally admits that he shouldn’t go, that he is very important to her father. “You’re part of the deal,” she quotes Jason’s comments, and in so doing ending the hysteria transforming it into a family situational comedy.

     They unload his baggage, and bring him back into the new family they have now discovered.

     The grandparents return, of course, to reclaim their luggage. They insist that Madeline and Daisy must come with them, but this time, finally, Harry speaks out: “I hate to contradict you, but I’m afraid they don’t” They like Mr. Gibbs. But the traditional heteronormative grandparents finally put it out on the table, “It’s a question of decency, it’s a question of morality.” Suddenly Madeline reveals that when her mother was in the hospital, she asked her “Never let her father grow old alone. And I never knew what she meant. But now I do.”

     That complete transformation of comprehension makes it clear that suddenly this young, quite confused girl, has grown up into a mature woman of utter comprehension overnight. Her grandparents have lost their conservative power. They no longer have a role in either of the granddaughters’ lives. There is nothing more to be said. They too are now wild about Harry—and Theo.

 

Los Angeles, March 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).