gay
domesticity
by Douglas Messerli
David Stevens
(screenplay, based on his play), Geoff Burton and Kevin Dowling (directors) The
Sum of Us / 1994
Australian directors
Geoff Burton and Kevin Dowling’s 1994 feature film, The Sum of Us,
represents a new wave of LGBTQ films that occurred in the early 1990s, mostly
from Canada, Britain, Australia, and continental Europe—although in the year
just prior a major studio had released, finally, the first widely distributed
film on AIDS—almost a decade after the far superior works by Arthur J. Bressan,
Jr., John Erman, and Bill Sherwood—Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia, and a
larger independent studio, Strand Releasing, had introduced US audiences to the
new gay wave director Gregroy Araki.
Yet it is precisely the conventionality,
the domesticity, and utter normalcy of The Sum of Us, that is crucial to
this work. Steven’s gay story was not at all about gay rebels, perverted
murderers, or Genet-like obsessives, but an everyday working Aussie plumber,
Jeff Mitchell (Russell Crowe) living with his absolutely “normal” heterosexual
father Harry (Jack Thompson) both struggling and stumbling about in their
attempts to find love in their lives.
What is utterly different in this film is
that the plumber is gay, the fact of which the father is completely comfortable
about, even encouraging his reticent son to go in search of the wonder of love
that he had found his wife.
At the time of this film’s release what
might have surprised and even shocked some of its viewers is just how accepting
Harry is about his son’s sexuality and how surprisingly chummy he is with the
handsome boy, Greg (John Poson) whom Jeffrey brings home. Greg is himself
somewhat taken aback by a father who, unlike his own (Bob Baines), does not go
into a homophobic rant or, as he later does when he observes his son on the
local TV broadcast of a Gay Parade celebration, a mad denunciation and denial
of his offspring. The fact that the two of them piss together on Harry’s prize
tomatoes, share open conversations about safe sex, peek at the images of a gay
magazine Harry has brought home for his son’s wanking pleasures almost “freaks
out” Greg on his first visit to Jeffrey, quickly short-ending what might have
been enjoyable sexual romp in bed. Greg admits that he finds the whole
situation just too “domestic,” and hints that he,
His own son, when he appears to be
rejected by Greg, has no energy for imagination, and sits out his funk by
drinking and smoking joints.
Meanwhile Harry is himself busy with a
new woman, Joyce Johnson (Deborah Kennedy) who he’s hooked up through a dating
service. Both widowers very much enjoy one another’s company and are looking
forward to perhaps making it permanent. For Harry it all depends, given his
deep love and devotion to his boy, on how she gets on with Jeff. And it would
seem, since Jeff—despite his tendency to take any temporary hesitancy of a
potential sexual partner as a statement against about his entire existence—is
otherwise a kind soul and a handsome “bloke,” as father describes him.
Unnecessarily, Stevens has also adds
another layer of incredulity to his plot by making Harry’s mother and Jeff’s
beloved grandmother (Mitch Mathews) a woman who late in her life established a
lesbian relationship with a friend Mary (Julie Herbert) which surely helped to
make Harry such an open-minded person when it comes to LGBTQ sex, and provided
Jeff with a sense of sexual alternatives as he was growing up to realize his
“differences.”
Certainly, they are a complete oddity to
the otherwise perfectly nice Joyce, who, when she encounters a copy of a gay
porn magazine in the Mitchells’ house and is told by Harry that he bought it
for his son. suddenly turns into a flustered Christian rightest, who is shocked
that her lovely boyfriend does not stand in opposition to his son’s behavior
instead of encouraging it. She storms out of the house even faster than Greg
has escaped its “unnatural” naturalness.
Harry, without even words to describe
such irrational behavior reacts, too predictably I argue, by having a stroke,
turning him into a wheelchair-bound paraplegic, unable to even talk, a burden
for a son still on the prowl for love.
On both of the outings we observe, Jeff
once again encounters the gentle gardener Greg who we know would be the perfect
mate to him if he’d only allow things to go where Greg might now like to take
them. Obviously, having lost his family entirely, Greg has now perceived the
necessity for the domesticity he once disdained.
When Jeff encounters Greg in his own
territory, so to speak, planting flowers in the public park, he finally gets up
the nerve to leave his father alone for few moments in his chair and chat with
his would-be lover. The two are so nervous meeting up again that we’re fearful
that they’ll simply stutter themselves into another separation, but they do
finally manage to make a date for the very next night, Greg promising to bring
his toothbrush.
Harry meets Jeff’s news with such
relief and excitement, that like his son, he is almost unable to express his
feelings as he rings out too many electronic bells and, his eyes welling up
with tears, he begins to weep with joy. Jeff doesn’t know what to make of his
father’s reaction to the possibility that their private domesticity might be
shared with another. Wiping away his father’s tears, he calms him, asking him
to return to the simpler pattern of one for “yes,” two for “no.” The ayes have
it, and both push off into a purple sunset with their hearts once more aflutter
for the possibilities of love.
It’s a sentimental film, but its message
is so very straight-forward and loving for a community that seldom gets that
kind of unadulterated respect and affirmation that one can’t help but be moved.
And after having witnessed literally thousands of heterosexual films end
similarly I felt a special fondness for the queer Sum of Us.
In a time when the LGBTQ community was
searching for more radical solutions to centuries of homophobia and for the general
ignorance of their existence, and were testing crueler and perhaps more honest
evaluations of what all those years in the closet had meant to the minds and
souls of queer folk, along came an Aussie comedy that painted a picture of
family life not so very radically different from that depicted by American
simpleton mythmakers like Robert Frost, Frank Capra, and Norman Rockwell. Your
grandmother could like this movie—even if she wasn’t a dyke.
Los Angeles, October 2, 2021
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (October 2021).