I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written mostly for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here.
This is Beastly Reviews, where I write about films that made me feel something.
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Julianne Moore and Ellen Page are great actresses, and I believe they took their roles in Peter Sollett's new film Freeheld seriously. They portrayed real-life lesbian couple Laurel Hester, a New Jersey police lieutenant, and her partner, Stacie Andree, with stillness, heart, and dignity. It's a shame the film did not match their efforts.
They get a nice intro at the film’s beginning, then become background colour in their own story. The last quarter of the film unfolds like a silly, made-for-TV courtroom drama rather than an emotionally charged love story between two people whose marriage is cut short by cancer, which is what the movie should have been.
In a rather cringey way, the film’s second half devolves into sassy gay caricatures, completely inappropriate comedy, and punchlines. What?
Hester is a tough, grizzled, closeted detective who has worked with the Ocean County Police Department for 23 years. She carries a gun everywhere and is working on becoming a lieutenant, which means keeping her sexuality on the DL from her coworkers. Then one day she meets the plaid-shirted, out-and-proud, wise-beyond-her-years Stacie Andree, who is 19 years her junior.
It's great to see Page, who came out last year at the "Time to THRIVE" conference, take on the role of an out lesbian. Page and Moore's fully committed performances give their characters genuine onscreen chemistry. After dating for a year, they become domestic partners and move into a cute, cosy house in the suburbs—my props to the set designer for creating believable, lived-in sets.
Their happy life is cut short. Checking on a pain in her chest, Hester discovers she has stage-four lung cancer. Hardscrabble, no-nonsense Hester faces facts: she's going to die, and Stacie will be left behind. She immediately requests that her pension benefits be transferred to her partner upon her death so that Stacie can keep the house.
But the freeholders, a cast of bumbling white guys who seem just really proud of their traditions, deny Laurel’s request several times, unaware that the case will turn into a media frenzy and a crucial point in America’s LGBT rights crusade.
The film does a disservice to its own cause by painting its villains with a superficial veneer. They are strawmen caricatures of antigay lawmakers everywhere, not real people with deeply held beliefs. We never really get to know any of them. They appear only in a group, like a chattering, monolithic horde. If the whole movie were a puppet show, they would be played by one character—a block of shaking, frowning, white male heads in black suits that drift onstage, mutter a bit, then drift off.
Because of this, the film fails to go into any real emotional depth. And it gives its heroes the same treatment. Along comes flamboyant, played-for-laughs gay activist Steven Goldstein—portrayed, tellingly, by the heterosexual comedian Steve Carell—who becomes a fussy, hand-waving counter to those mean ol’ freeholders. At this point, the whole film feels vapid and empty, and the emotional crux of the love story is forgotten.
The freeholders squabble over what to do when a massive tidal wave of protest and media attention is launched against them. Steven Goldstein is the founder of Garden State Equality, a New Jersey activist group that campaigns for LGBT rights.
Goldstein reaches out to Hester, asking to take her case and amplify it as the next battle in the fight for same-sex marriage, which, of course, it becomes. But Hester herself is not an activist—she even refuses to say "same-sex marriage." But she realises Goldstein's campaign may be her only chance to help her partner.
Goldstein's flamboyance wouldn't be minded if it weren't so clearly positioned as comic relief in an otherwise heavy film. And the casting of a straight actor whose career is filled with comedy makes it clear we should all laugh at the faggot.
Hester withers away, and the camera barely notices. Instead, we're made to focus on Goldstein and the freeholders and even the strong-chinned Dane, Hester's partner on the force (Michael Shannon). Alarmingly, everyone who takes over the film's second half is male—a strange feature of what was set up to be a love story between two women. Even as Hester loses her hair and becomes wheelchair-bound, the film seems to forget she's there until the end, when it overcompensates for its neglect with a speech from Stacie that is moving but still a last-minute effort to refocus.
I'm not a lesbian, but if I were, I can't say I would love this film. And as a gay man, I'm honestly a little offended by Goldstein's character and the casting of Steve Carrel to honour him.
Because it all feels too much like a bit. The lesbians are obvious dykes, the fag is obviously just so gay and fussy, and perhaps, the filmmakers reasoned, it’s easier for mostly-straight audiences to be given easy social cues for what they’re looking at and who these people are—to be fed stereotypes rather than truth—rather than being tasked to really get into the grit and comlexity of queer life, like Hester’s reluctance and closetedness. Real queer life is, if anything, about nuance and complexity, power and restraint: the film, in the end, is disappointingly devoid of both.
Love, Beastly