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COUNTERCULTURE
NEW LINE CINEMA
Harvey Berstein's Torch Song Trilogy
has been made into a film, significantly
altered from the nearly four hour play, and it
disappoints.
First, a word about the story. Fierstein
plays a female impersonator named Arnold
who is looking for love, reason and a place
in the world. The film concentrates on his
significant relationships, including his
liaison with a bisexual schoolteacher named
Ed (Brian Kerwin, acting rather juvenile),
who eventually leaves him for a woman,
and his six-year relationship with a model
named Alan (Matthew Broderick, subtle and
believable), who is killed by a gang of
homophobes shortly before the couple are to
adopt a gay son. And then there's Arnold's
stormy relationship with his "Ma" (Anne
Bancroft), who finally reaches some small,
hard won understanding and
accommodation of her son.
A chief strength of Fierstein’s play was
that it ignored a tendency among artists
working in minority subjects: to seize the
rare opportunity of financial backing, and
attempt to set down in a single work the
complete statement of what it means to be
gay in this country at this moment.
Fierstein focuses on one sector of gay
experience - the gay female impersonator.
He gambles that he can successfully
dramatize Arnold's life, lifting the figurative
veil away in order to reveal beneath the
differences a shared, common humanity.
The film, unfortunately, is another
matter. Fierstein has attempted to "open-
Alan (Matthew Broderick) and Arnold (Harvey Fierstein) plan their adoption of a son who "knows how to dust"
up" his play, to make it more cinematic.
But he's also shortened the material at the
same time he's added to it. The flaws of the
play - its sentimentality, its cliches and
melodrama - are all magnified in the film.
Arnold orders his adoptive son around
their apartment like a stereotypical nagging
Jewish mother, his moments of self-pity and
the conversations spoken in Neil Simonese
are badly magnified on screen, as if gag
writers were prompting from the wings.
As Arnold, Harvey Fierstein is excellent
at expressing wit or anger. But he's
laughably bad when he wants us to
recognize Arnold's vulnerabilities. He
milks the audience, playing for sympathy by
uttering a piece of dialogue and then gazing
downward very humbly, like Jennifer Jones
in The Song of Bernadette when she's being
misunderstood. He practically reaches down
from the screen to distribute hankys.
Anne Bancroft as "Ma", a part
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significantly enlarged for the film, is, as
always, utterly dependent on cliches of
phrasing, inflection, choice of facial and
body movement Therefore she is certain to
receive an Oscar nomination.
The film was shot on a shoestring, but
that doesn't excuse the lack of visual
consistency between scenes or the enfeebled
imaginative level of Paul Bogart's mediocre
direction. Only one example: the film opens
with the one-billionth shot of the New York
skyline, by now as original as a car chase.
Perhaps, after all these years, Fierstein
should have turned over his material to
someone sympathetic but more objective
than he. It might have softened the film's
ruinous mixture of sentimentality and self
pity.
It's a bad combination, like a drunk and
sad music.
- Terry Francis
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