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.
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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.
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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).
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