Alexander Mackendrick | A High Wind in Jamaica / 1965

horrible knowledge

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stanley Mann, Ronald Harwood, and Denis Cannan (screenplay, based on the novel by Richard Hughes), Alexander Mackendrick (director) A High Wind in Jamaica / 1965

 

Filmmaker Alexander Mackendrick’s 1965 film A High Wind in Jamaica is a truly remarkable blend of terror, humor, and tenderness that is also revolutionary in its questioning of the Victorian-based concept of childhood innocence.

    The several little monsters of the Thornton and Fernandez families are all being sent away from their Jamaican home after a hurricane has destroyed the Thornton’s island home. But what we also discover in the first scene is that these children, particularly young Emily (Deborah Baxter), have grown up on the island as nearly feral beings, who, having associated with natives and their children, know near as much about Jamaican superstitions as they do about their parents’ Christian religion, in particular the belief in the return of the dead as duppy (described, inexplicably as “stuppy” in his film), often with his face turned in the wrong direction. *

     Even during the destruction of their own home, which ends in the death of the elderly black who has worked with the family, the children seen inattentive to parental restrictions, afterward citing rhymes to protect them from the dead.

   Is it any wonder that their parents and neighbors ship their kids off to England for a more conventional education? The ship that is to take them there, however, is captained by a vainglorious puff of a man, Captain Marpole (Kenneth J. Warren) who is too busy dining in his quarters to even notice that his men have been tricked into permitting a dozen or more pirates to board, who have taken over the vessel before he can even bring himself above deck.

    Less frightened than curious, the children treat the ridiculous pirates—who throughout this film behave more childish than the children—with open-eyed wonderment, riding the lift from the cargo hold to the pirate ship as intruders take away their haul of the stolen wares and goods. The pirate captain Chavez (Anthony Quinn) and his associate Zac (James Coburn) try to determine from the absurdly incompetent Marpole whether there is any money aboard, threatening at one moment to shoot the children dead. When freed, the children sneak off to the pirate ship, bolding exploring its hold.

    Finally, as Chavez and Zac create a mock pyre on which they intend to burn Maypole, he breaks down and tells them where he has hidden 900 pounds. Even as the pirate’s leave, he exaggerates to his own men how many pirates there have been and seems more worried about his explanation of the children’s disappearance or even worry over the loss of the children.

     It is only as the pirates sail off that they discover they have hauled off the children as well. And once the children have been released from the hold, they quite literally overrun the ship, climbing the sails and sliding down the deck even during a heavy rainstorm. The boys usurp Chavez’ Napoleonic-like captain’s hat, while Emily shows up time and again even in Chavez’ quarters. In short, the pirates cannot control these young hellions any better than could their parents.

     After a late night drinking and a dancing spree the drunken adults slip into the hold where the children, including the young teenage sister, are sleeping—obviously with the intent of sexually molesting them, boys and girl both. But the complete startlement of the seeming innocents, and Emily’s stated recognition that they are drunk, after which she bites Chavez’ finger, stops them in their tracks, as they retreat in abashment.

     Indeed, as time passes, the children become more and more difficult to control, as they begin to play dangerous games on a shop of such superstitious adults. At one point, as the pirates are facing off with the specter of a British warship, a boy accidentally releases the anchor, which breaks off from its chains in the quick descent. At another point, the terrified sailors discover their shiphead woman’s figure has been turned around to represent a “stuppy.”

     Increasingly, the grown men begin to see the children as emblems of their growing bad luck.

   Stopping at the wild trading and whoring center of Tampico, the pirate’s intend to drop off the children and run. The local brothel owner, Rosa (Lila Kedrova) tells them of the outrageous reports of Captain Marpole, including his testimony that Chavez and his men have murdered all the children. Nonetheless, she is willing to put up the children until they can be rescued. But before she can even agree to the pact, Emily’s brother, staring from a window of Rosa’s bedroom, falls to the concrete courtyard below and is killed. Rosa, now faced with the death of a child in her personal realm, declares that Chavez, his crew, and the children must leave immediately.

     Back on ship, Chavez attempts, ineffectually, to explain to the children that they brother has had an accident—but the children seem already to sense the truth. Their lack of fear of sorrow over the event reminds one of the early scene in the film, and calls up the kind of childish obliviousness to the meaning of death that William Golding put forward in The Lord of the Flies or Danish directors Ernst Johansen and Lasse Nielsen hinted at in their 1975 film La’ os være (Leave Us Alone).

    Both Richard Hughes’ 1921 novel and the film upon which it was based, cast the “innocents’ as a kind of curse upon the adults, a bit like British novelist’s Ivy Compton-Burnett, in her use of children who are for more knowing and dangerous than their surrounding grownups are. These children have a horrible knowledge—based on their witnessing of the strange behaviors and inexplicable activities and deaths of the adults around them—that only attests to the hypocrisies of

the world spinning around them. If they have no name for their activities, they nonetheless recognize them as alluring and sexually based. If nothing sexual happens in this terrible voyage, every act regarding the young boys and girl in their literal hold is sexual, exciting, thrilling, and something inexpressible. Death, strangely enough, has no meaning.

    The superstitious sailors begin to plot mutiny, particularly after, when the children are ordered back into the “hold,” a heavy piece of metal falls upon Emily, whose obviously broken leg begins to become infected. Chavez takes her, once more, into his own room, mildly drugging her to allow her to sleep, and even holding her when she becomes frightened—grotesquely fathering her at the very moment when he cannot even control his own men.

     The sight of an approaching Dutch ship—another perfect target for the pirate’s plunder—calms down the rebellion; but when Chavez orders that there will be no plundering, but simply the turnover of the children into the Dutch captain’s hands, his companions because even more determined to challenge him. In order to save his friend, Zac orders Chavez to be chained, and the guns to be released.

     The Dutch captain, upon being bound, somehow escapes to the pirate boat, encountering the slightly drugged and feverish girl in Chavez’s room; grabbing up a knife while attempting to explain that he intends to cut her bonds. Mistaking his sudden approach as a terrifying hostile act, she takes up a knife and stabs him to death.

    As the pirates begin to empty the Dutch ship of its valuables, a British warship appears on the horizon and captures the pirate rig, discovering aboard not only the children but the dead Dutchman.

     In the final scenes, the children, having been reunited in England with their parents, are being questioned about their adventures aboard the pirate ship. Because of their young, they are not fully able to answer the sometimes subtle and vague accusations of the British lawyer, hoping to build a case against the accused.

     Emily is forced to appear in court, but despite her “horrible knowledge,” of events, she is unable to properly focus on the meaning of what she is asked, speaking instead of Chavez’ mention of her “drawers”—which he warns her earlier on that, if she rips them, he will be unable to mend—and, she is unable to appropriately describe her semi-conscious condition during which she, not the accused Chavez, stabbed the Dutch captain.

    Observing her distressed confusion, her father refuses to allow her any more testimony, in the process assuring the conviction and hanging of all the pirate crew. The audience alone realizes the injustice of this decision and perceives that despite their unlawful behavior, they are not guilty of what they have been charged. Only the children and we, the mute observers of history, know the truth, but the children—now being perceived as perfect Victorian innocents—cannot tell of their own secret knowledge.

     Who these monstrous innocents might become as adults is an open question: perhaps they will simply turn out to be the blind and incapable fools who their father and mother, the court, and the society as a whole represent.

       If nothing else, Mackendrick, in this film further reveals his significant talent as a director. If only he could have chopped the de rigueur Hollywood-inspired theme song composed by Larry Adler and sung by Mike LeRoy!

 

*A duppy is a spectral, often malevolent spirit in Jamaican and Caribbean folklore, originating from African (Ashanti/Ga) traditions, representing the restless dead or a haunting earthly soul. Believed to inhabit trees (especially cotton trees) or travel at night, duppies can cause mischief, inflict harm, or appear as animals and human shadows.

 

Los Angeles, February 26, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2016).

 

Cláudio Márcio | Panteras Pink (Pink Panthers) / 2024, general release 2025

a new alternative to the gay blues

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cláudio Márcio and Wagner Cafe (screenplay), Cláudio Márcio (director) Panteras Pink (Pink Panthers) / 2024, general release 2025 [25 minutes]

 

The Brazilian short film Pink Panthers is the kind of feel-good movie that the LGBTQ+ community has now been producing at a brisk rate. There is certainly nothing objectionable about showing how to defeat bulling and abuse, as this film purports to do; but the solution it proposes is about as meaningless and ineffective as suggesting that all a young gay man needs to do is find some sport in which he excels, get together a team, and publicly announce his sexuality and everything will turn out all right.

    The abused boy, in this case, is Edinho (Thales Barbosa), who is not only regularly beaten up my local peers not only for being obviously gay, but for being, in a still quite racist Brazil, black, of mixed Spanish and black heritage, the black mother Carmen (Meibe Rodrigues) having long ago abandoned the father who also regularly abused his gay son.

    She is a loving and protecting mother, but also dreadfully worried about her son’s state of mind as he increasingly comes home after having been beaten by other straight boys with whom, along with his friend Jackson (Tiago Agar) and his female friend Luana (Nayra de Paula), he tries to engage in dodgeball games. The three of them are champions at this particular sport; yet every win ends in another black eye for our unhappy friend.

     Despondent, Edinho scrolls down his cellphone on a site where he is told that hundreds of his fellow Brazilian queers are killed every year, and that the average life expectancy in Brazil for a gay boy is only 35.

    It’s enough to make any gay boy cry, which Edinho does quite regularly in this film. That is, until he discovers the “gaymada” groups, gay organized tournaments of dodgeball and other sports. He gets the wonderful idea of creating his own league, and with his friends he creates posters he plasters throughout his small town, despite even an encounter with his still angry father who furiously confronts his son for advertising his sexuality.

     For the first time in his life Edinho stands up to the man who had regularly beaten him as a child, denying having any relationship with or need to listen to the man who delivered up so much pain and sorrow to him and his mother.

     One of the first people to visit Edinho about the new team is Cassio (Paulo Victor) who has been among the boys who most recently beat him. He apologizes, expressing the fact that he has not come out as gay and hopes to work out with Edinho to join his gay team. Before long we witness the two making out, a new bond having been formed, obviously one of the benefits of Edinho finally having found a positive way to express his sexuality.

    On the day of the match, the three teammates show up in the court to find no one else there, and for a moment feel like their attempts at finding a new community have failed; but soon after Cassio appears, along with several others. The game is on. And even Carmen shows up with a new ball for her son and his friends to play with; is there some significance in the fact that it is baby blue in color?

      It doesn’t matter, of course, who wins, all are winners as they hug one another in joy for having now created a new outlet for their attempts to communicate with a larger world.

      This is what you can only describe as a very nice film, without much real logic or reality behind it. If only gay men and women could find such an easy solution to their sorrows. You might say that this film, at best, is a bit delusional. But then perhaps I have read too many films of gay difficulties around the world and have become far more cynical than I want to be.

 

Los Angeles, April 30, 2026

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (April 2026).

 

Cosmo Salovaara | Enviar y Recibir / 2021

slipping

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cosmo Salovaara (screenwriter and director) Enviar y Recibir / 2021 [9 minutes]

 

     The US film in Spanish Enviar y Recibir, which I’m going to translate as “Sent and Received,” is a slip of a story about a pink slip, in fact, sent with a carton of such garments received into a warehouse shipping facility overseen by worker Alex Cacho, who when his supervisor, Javier Ronceros, comes to him to reprimand him for not wearing his protective helmet, notices that one such item has slipped out of the bottom of the boxes Alex is taping up. He writes down the problem and tells the worker to toss the piece in the trash.

    We know nothing at all about the warehouse worker, and are rather surprised by the fact that he seems more than a little interested in this sexy garment which seems to call up him a song from his past, although we can’t truly be certain it’s the character’s memories or ones with which the filmmaker wishes to engage his audience.

    In any event, Alex carefully wraps it up as a present for what we imagine to be his girlfriend, although again we can’t be certain in this film of anything since the camera is the focus of narrative, not the dialogue.

     He cooks a pizza which he seems to burn, serving it up nonetheless to his table companion (Steph Fernandez Sanchez), who seems an unlikely partner to Alex. She is younger, obviously a student, is terribly plain-faced with acne still marking her face and with short hair that has never apparently been styled. To put it nicely, she is no beauty and looks a bit like a boy, which is only interesting given the events of this tale. She could even be his daughter.

      Even Alex is wary of presenting her with the gift, unsure whether it’s something which she might like or hate. And when she finally opens it, it is immediately clear it is not to her liking as she pushes it back across the table to him. He appears to take no offense.

      Indeed, soon after, we see him approach a neighbor, Gerardo de Pablos with the pink slip, explaining the circumstances of how it has come into his possession and wondering whether he might not like it for his daughter. Gerardo takes a quick look at the garment and immediately states it is not something he would allow his daughter to wear.    

      In the next scene, Alex, working at home as he washes the dishes, vacuums the floor, and places the garment upon an ironing board to gently iron it, singing the vintage song “All by Myself,” returning, apparently, to events from his own past. What is now clear is that it has almost become an obsession for Alex, something of greater worth than anyone else seems to comprehend. Was such a slip something like what his mother once wore, a sister, a lover? Perhaps something he saw as a child and wanted to himself to wear, but which he had put out of his mind as he grew into adulthood.

       But clearly it is now too late, for in the very next scene at the warehouse we see him bending over a box of another shipment, taking a careful look at the items within. When he foreman comes forward for a check, Alex quickly stuffs the clothing that he has been checking out back into the box and begins to seal the entire package in plastic. But we, as well as the foreman, cannot help but notice that under his open shirt we spot the pink slip which he is unabashedly wearing.

      The foreman wonders if everything is all right with him, and Alex assures him it is. And we believe him, for apparently he found something in the damaged garment that provides him with a sense of joy and satisfaction.

        We cannot be sure if Alex is simply a fetishist attracted to female undergarments or perhaps a long ago crossdresser for whom the pink slip has suddenly rekindled something from his memory. Does it matter? In the context of his world, Alex is most definitely queer. And something is most definitely queer about his life.

 

Los Angeles, March 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).

Luca Bertossi | Bittersweet Rainbow – Homecoming / 2021

return to truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luca Bertossi (screenplay, with revisions by Lorenzo Di Lello, supervised by Emiliano Grisostolo) Luca Bertossi (director) Bittersweet Rainbow – Homecoming / 2021 [24 minutes]

 

At the beginning of Italian director Luca Bertossi’s short film Bittersweet Rainbow Claudio (Leonardo de Simone) returns at age 24 to his small Italian village after 7 years absence with the realization that everything changes, particularly people.

     Actually, he is talking more about himself than the others he finds still living in his isolated homeland, his mother (Sara Alzetta)—who has recently suffered her husband’s death—and his friend Sara (Elisbetta Cancelli), who bemoans the fact that nearly all of her own friends have left and never returned even for a visit.

     She asks Claudio why he left, but he doesn’t openly respond, simply saying “I forget.”

     But as he re-wanders the lanes and streets of his childhood, we soon learn of his sexual relations with Nicolò (Michele Masci), a truly beautiful young man who is desperately in love with Claudio and wants to share the fact with the world. The only problem, the major problem, is that Claudio is terrified of people, particularly, his mother discovering the fact that he is gay, and refuses to even discuss the inevitable, which Nicolò describes, “It cannot stay a secret forever. Sooner or later, someone will discover it.”

 

     Yet we quickly realize, Claudio is a coward and refuses to even seriously discuss coming out. The two argue on a drive back from a party during a rainy night, ending in an automobile accident which kills Nicolò. His guilt and his continued cowardice has clearly driven Claudio off.

      But now, back to face the memories, he spends a tear-filled night recalling the events, returning in the morning to tell his mother the truth, to finally admit his hidden sexuality after all these years.

      This might almost appear to be an inane story, but Bertossi’s beautifully shot scenes, his evocation of the farmland and home in which Claudio grew up, and the simply beauty of the two central actors of this film turn it into something very special. Little things in this film come to be

of great significance: his mother getting up early to make his waffles which as a child he loved, but which he now no longer eats; a quiet moment after he and has mother have reunited in which she suddenly breaks down in tears both for the joy of his return and the remembrance of his having left without explanation. It is indeed “sentimental,” but in a manner that is so honest and tender that one doesn’t mind having one’s heart tugged, realizing once more the dilemmas of so many young men and women who find it difficult to deal with the reality of their differences, often ending, unfortunately, in tragic results.

 

Los Angeles, February 1, 2023 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023). 

Lin-Manuel Miranda | Tick, Tick... Boom! / 2021

pavane for a dead musical

by Douglas Messerli

 

Steven Levenson (screenplay, based on Tick, Tick... Boom! by Jonathan Larson), Lin-Manuel Miranda (director) Tick, Tick... Boom! / 2021

 

I put off seeing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first film, Tick, Tick... Boom! until the day before the Academy Awards ceremony for which actor Andrew Garfield was nominated as an actor for his role as the composer / lyricist Jonathan Larson.

      Of course, I’d been working on the larger project of My Queer Cinema series, focusing on the early years, which easily explains my delay in watching Miranda’s movie; but I must admit that also I just couldn’t get up the energy to see another Larson-based work since I find the whole issue of this obviously talented but highly flawed Broadway figure problematic.

      To my surprise, I was quite charmed by the film, a retelling with a scaffolding shell of historical context of his unproduced autobiographical musical, Tick, Tick... Boom! And I now realize what my difficulties have been in discussing Larson’s substantial contribution to Broadway theater history through his 1996 musical Rent, which alas he did not even get the full opportunity to see, dying of an aortic aneurysm the day before previews were to begin.

      This fact and that much of Larson’s work and life was concerned precisely with the difficulties of realizing a “new” kind of rock musical theater worked together with the appealing quality of the work itself—Rent based loosely on Puccini’s La Bohème—helped to turn the Larson work into a phenomenal hit both on stage and on screen. And the fact that now Miranda, having himself created a new kind of Broadway musical Hamilton, was directing a musical about the difficulties of making a musical, the subject matter of Tick, Tick being the attempts of Larson to bring together a production of his first musical, Superbia, all seemed to come together in a confluence of shared interests that seemed destined to become something of interest and importance.

     And I can report that indeed this film is precisely that, of deep interest and importance. Anyone who loves Broadway musicals, as do I who grew up intimately knowing their history (even though I lived far away from Broadway in a small town in Iowa), will be fascinated with and even emotionally moved by the Miranda-Larson cinema.

     Garfield’s absolutely spell-binding cyclone of a performance, moreover, will surely effect any viewer who has even imagined what it must have been like to be Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Ira and George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Frank Loesser, E. Y. Harburg and Burton Lane, John Kander and Fred Ebb, Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, Jule Style, Adolph Green and Betty Comden, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, Jerry Herman, Meredith Willson, and, Larson’s own mentor and quiet supporter, Stephen Sondheim in trying to bring a very personal vision into reality by working with hundreds of directors, actors, dancers, designers, choreographers, musicians, light and set designers, and numerous others to give delight to their audiences. Perhaps, as in my case, even a few tears might flow when this herculean task is played out against the personal life of the composer/lyricist as it is in this movie.

     There have been lots of movies made about Broadway composers, directors, and audiences, but few have presented it from such a personal viewpoint.

    Before I describe that world, I should perhaps mention my own very small part of Larson’s history by simply mentioning that in 1995, a year before Rent, my own Sun & Moon Press published Jeffrey M. Jones’ book with music by Larson, J. P. Morgan Saves the Nation, first produced by En Garde Arts by Anne Hamburger that same year, which may have helped to momentarily sustain this poverty-stricken artist and may even paid him a few dollars.

      Clearly poverty, as it was in Rent, is very much at the center of Tick, Tick. Throughout the work Jonathan receives numerous bills for electricity and other costs which he simply cannot pay on his small salary as a waiter in the Moondance Diner, where much of the action of the work occurs, and some of his closest friends are employed. Money unfortunately is very much at the heart of both this work and Rent, and Larson and his Bohemian friends struggle just to get through each day, living at times on top of one another in a shared mess of an apartment. How do you write in such circumstances?

      His best friend and former roommate, Michael (Robin de Jesús), a gay man, has finally called it quits with theater, moving to a prestigious advertising firm which allows him to live without financial worries and allows him a new car and a glorious new apartment, the subject of one of the musical’s songs, “No More,” where the two friends, visiting Michael’s apartment, dance a lovely duet in the empty room with a spectacular view. Michael is constantly tempting Jonathan to join him in a world in which he will not have to live as a destitute man, repeating over and over again, as Jonathan sings in another the musical’s songs, the painful process of “trying it get it right.”

      At one point, to help buy him some musicians for the workshop performance of his musical, Jonathan even joins others in an advertising focus group, wonderfully putting his creative mind to work until he’s told of the terrible side-effects of the product they are trying to sell, at which point he disrupts the group’s activities and his chances at any further extra money. Broadway musical star Laura Benanti plays one of his fellow advertising focus group members.

      His inability to pay the electric bill results in a complete blackout on the last night he has left to write the musical’s important missing Act II song, whose process of creating becomes one of the work’s central themes, particularly since it comes between everyone who loves him, including Michael, Jonathan’s girlfriend Susan Wilson (Alexandra Shipp), and his inattentive agent Rosa Stevens (Judith Light), the latter of whom shows no signs of love except to advise him later, when the entire musical seems as if it will never possibly be made, to write another one, and another, and another until something “sticks”—a formidable and almost impossible challenge that ultimately with be Larson’s fate.

       The second major force in Larson’s work is time. It is time, he bemoans, that is helping to cause all of his angst, as in a few days, on February 4th, 1990, the date repeated again and again through this work, is Jonathan’s 30th birthday, a date he is obsessed with since by that time Sondheim had already written a musical, and he has still done nothing.

       And, of course, it is time, the impossible pressure of time, that is behind the “tick...tick” of the bomb that keeps promising to explode in his face throughout this musical production. Jonathan has only a few days to finish his song before the Wednesday Playwrights Horizons workshop performance and, just as important, to make a decision whether or not to join his girlfriend Susan in her movie to Jacob’s Pillow in the Berkshire’s where she has been offered a position with the dance troupe as a teacher/creator.

       There is no question that such a figure as Jonathan with Broadway theater in his blood, can never move out of Manhattan, but he cannot bring himself to tell the woman he loves that truth and cannot explain his decision to her without the fear of losing her forever; she equally wants to pursue her career but also would love to have him come to the decision that he does not want her to leave. The dilemma sits in suspense through much of the work, issues represented in the song “Johnny Can’t Decide” until resolved comically in the musical’s duet, “Therapy,” a duet sung by the fictional couple at the same moment Jonathan and Susan battle it out in real time not so very successfully.

       In 1990 also the life-and-death concerns that gay and sympathetic filmmakers were expressing since the mid-1980s also came into crisis in the plague of AIDS. When Jonathan’s diner co-worker Freddy is hospitalized with another fever attack, not only do his fellow workers realize that his time to live is shortening, but they bemoan their own lack of time, since they are forced to serve up the Sunday brunch with only the two of them, doctors not even allowing them to visit him to demonstrate their support and love.

      Being about theater, Larson’s musical is filled with musical references and his work is often imitative as is the wonderful song “Sunday” that is sung in counterpose to their harried waiting duties, which openly imitates scenes from Sunday in the Park with George as the servers attempt to establish their own grace, balance, calm with a chorus of cameo diners that includes Hamilton stars Reneé Elise Goldsberry, Rent stars Adam Pascal, Daphne Rubin Vega, MJ Rodriguez, and William Jermaine Heredia, and Broadway legends Bebe Neuwirth, Brian Stokes Mitchell, André de Shields, Chita Rivera, Joel Gray, Bernadette Peters (who was also the star of Sunday in the Park), Chuck Cooper (A Life, Chicago, Passion, and other musicals), and Howard McGillan (The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Phantom of the Opera). With its multiple interstices of references this number is memorable to anyone who loves musical theater.

      If time haunts our hero, however, it even more fully haunts his best friend Michael, who when Jonathan dismisses his desires to take part in the good life, accusing him of not making time for the things that truly matter, finally admits that he too is HIV-positive. In both this work and in Rent the misnomer of the “gay disease” is killing off many of the most talented individuals of the age.  

    Some gay commentators have accused Larson, who was not gay, as being insincere in even incorporating this subject into his work, but I find such observations ridiculous; anyone who observes the people around dying of that disease can be just as thoroughly involved and concerned as gay men. If AIDS is not a gay disease, then it cannot be simply a homosexual issue. And Larson’s gay figures, who are very much at the center of his work, are for the most part sympathetically portrayed.

      Finally, of course, it is an issue of love. How does one with the ego it takes to creates a community to perform a musical opera, show love to those around him. Focused throughout on creating a beautiful song to express his love of Susan, “Come to Your Senses,” he apparently has no time to act on that love. And the woman who sings it is the actor Karessa Johnson (Vanessa Hudgens), not Susan herself—a situation resolved in the film by having Jonathan imagine it as being sung by his lover at the same time it’s sung, often in duet form, with Johnson. And it is not until he has nearly lost all of his best friends, including Michael, that Jonathan discovers in the song “Why” just how important love is in keeping it all together. He races to Michael’s apartment to offer to be there for him at all times.

      It’s a moving story about the impossible pushes and pulls of musical theater life, with the rewards, in this case, of only a few encouraging words by the real-life Stephen Sondheim (played here by Bradley Whitford; although some of Sondheim’s real voice is used the telephone message recording). But, strangely, Tick...Tick also represents another kind of bomb, the one going off in the real world of musical theater as it slowly crawls into its own coffin.

      Instead of the personal, musicals have increasingly sought out the generic, the kind of Disneyfied worlds of not only the Disney productions, but musicals such as Cats, Phantom of the Opera, and even the Baum Wizard of Oz classics that retell classic tales in a safe, operatic manner that make them Hallmark Card-friendly.

      The kind of theater that Larson, and perhaps Miranda, advocates for is highly personal, coming from the deep soul of the creator, but is quickly being replaced (and, in fact, had been replaced, other than the work of Sondheim and a few others) by 1990. It is that true original passion that surely Sondheim perceived in Larson’s early works. The trouble, however, is that often Larson’s lyrics, as original and clever as they often are, remain so very personal that they sometimes strain to appeal for anything beyond the moment, as “Green Green Dress,” a fact of which Larson even slightly mocks in his quick rendition of “Sugar.” Often the lyrics don’t even take the narrative from one song to another, and, although wittily written, don’t chime with any but the most momentary of situations. Hence, the cabaret style theater in which Miranda has structured this work (not incidentally so very different from the manner in which Irwin Winkler structured his tribute to Cole Porter in De-Lovely, a movie I thought terribly underrated). I have no problem with the cabaret style, after all, Kander and Ebb have structured some of their best works very similarly, but since Larson’s focus is the highly subjective present, instead of the past as in the works of Winkler, Kander, and Ebb, it somehow displaces the immediacy of his situations, particularly when the narrator is embedded within yet another narration outside of Larson’s world, as it is in this movie.

     But even in Rent the story seems to keep shifting from its emblematic tale of the Bohemian past to the immediacy of the current issues of 1995 concerning AIDS, homelessness, and homophobia that literally “rents” or “tears” the work at its seams.

       For all the passion and personalization of Larson’s concerns, moreover, in the end they are rather banal and unoriginal. Dramatists and filmmakers such as Mac Wellman and Canadian filmmaker John Greyson were combining music and contemporary concerns in far more radical ways in the same period—but admittedly they not reach the vast audiences of Larson’s Rent or Miranda’s Hamilton.

      Finally, creating a rock musical, surely as Larson realized, was not a new concept. And ultimately—although he doesn’t compose in the 2-3 note range with 1-4 harmonic phrases that I have noted in many popular theater musicals since 1970—his compositions do not represent a wide range of the musical spectrum. Larson is simply not a great composer. And most of his songs are not something anyone might go home humming. Finally, of course, I must admit I am not of the audience either he or, by extension, Miranda is most seeking, the MTV generation in Larson’s case and the rap music lovers of Miranda’s experiment. These forms, given my classical music background, truly seem simplistic and delimited given the range of the musical spectrum to which my ears are attuned.

    Nonetheless, this film made me want to view Rent once more, and this time, of course, I will review it.

 

Los Angeles, March 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).