During a recent talk show appearance, Boys Don't Cry director Kimberly Peirce expressed outrage towards the impending execution of John Lotter, a co-conspirator of Teena Brandon's murder. Her televised defense of the killer ("He's still a human being") struck me as slightly hypocritical, since her film, a low-budget biopic of the late transsexual Casanova Brandon, all but lethally injects Lotter and Thomas Nissen, his pyromaniac crony.
Peirce uses the two characters to indict rural America for its homophobic tendencies; her desire to change attitudes leads to button-pushing scenes of intense physical abuse. To deny that Boys Don't Cry is sensationalistic on the grounds that it doesn't portray Brandon as a walking sideshow (true) is to dismiss the picture's third act, which plays us like a harp.
Hilary Swank's Teena Brandon abandons her girlhood for cowboy duds and macho posturing. Essentially bullied from her homeland of Lincoln, Nebraska, she inverts her name to Brandon Teena and heads for the sleepier town of Falls City. There he (I will refer to Brandon as a guy from this point on) makes the acquaintance of Candace ("Roseanne"'s Alicia Goranson) and her close-knit circle of friends, including Lana (Chloe Sevigny), a karaoke singer with whom he falls madly in love at first sight.
Somewhat gallingly, the film's unsettling, protracted climax seems to come at the expense of Brandon's back-story, as if the drifter's untimely death, and not the life before it, is what attracted Peirce to the project. We do learn that his (unseen) mother thinks Brandon ought to be institutionalized, and that Brandon, in the guise of a man, has successfully seduced dozens of women (established in an unlikely sequence that finds the disgruntled brothers and/or ex-boyfriends of these girlfriends banding together and pursuing Brandon on foot all over Lincoln).
Yet even that second morsel of information conflicts with the movie's depiction of Brandon as Lana Tisdel's eternally devoted lover. The filmmakers want to martyr Brandon, and are too afraid of undermining his innocence; in the name of tragic romance, Brandon's tempestuous past is glossed over--I wonder why they alluded to it all. Also dismissed is the real Brandon's penchant for petty crime.
Given the Rashomon nature of all that's been spoken about Brandon Teena by the people who knew him, the task of reenacting his interrupted existence with total accuracy is an impossible one. But certain facts would have added untold layers to Peirce's fictionalization, such as Brandon's well-documented idolization of Cher, a gay community icon who no doubt further confused Brandon's sexual identity. The film lacks texture.
Brandon Teena may not have considered himself a complex human being, but his gender morph made him so and warrants an interpretation with greater, better-defined motives--only the pathology of the trailer trash villains registers with any clarity here. Peirce updates Rebel Without a Cause as a cautionary tale unique to our current political environment (she's obviously enamoured of Brandon as a James Dean figure), an intriguing but only marginally prosperous approach.
All that said, a pair of excellent performances grace Boys Don't Cry and are enough to recommend it--highly. The androgynous Hilary Swank deservedly picked up the Best Actress statuette a month ago for her wholly convincing star turn as a woman repelled by her own femininity (Swank memorably sells a take in which she can barely stand to confront her own body during menstruation), while Sevigny, the film's emotional centre, effectively caulks Pierce and Andy Bienen's script whenever she's on screen.
Aside from a light coating of grain, Fox's widescreen (1.85:1), 16x9-enhanced DVD transfer of Boy's Don't Cry is visually flawless. The high level of shadow detail stuns. Aurally, the Dolby Digital 5.1 track is more vivid than I had anticipated, though some hushed passages of dialogue necessitated an increase in volume past reference level.
Kimberly Peirce contributes a feature-length audio commentary that emphasizes the frustrations involved in independent moviemaking (such as not being able to afford the rights to popular songs), and in those instances she sparkles, but as the discussion veers towards the psychological underpinnings of Boys Don't Cry, we begin to realize that a stronger film exists inside her head. A surprisingly substantial featurette, three TV spots, and nearly identical teaser and theatrical trailers round out the package.
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