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).
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