Cinema
Smaller than life
Mark Steyn
Somewhere between stage and screen, the penises seem to have shrunk. Three years ago, when Terrence McNally's gays- in-the-country romp Love! Valour! Com- passion! played the Manhattan Theatre Club, audiences left marvelling at the size of the cast's members. To judge from the impact on poor, dissatisfied female theatre- goers, the company appeared to have been selected principally as an exercise in gay triumphalism: one New York producer of my acquaintance took his girlfriend, who turned to him at the end and demanded, `Why can't you have one like that?' (Possi- bly she meant an Off-Broadway hit.) It was, admittedly, a competitive season for male nudity — Sean Matthias's production of Les Parents Terribles began the second act with a character emerging from the bathtub and leisurely towelling off for what seemed longer than the title song of Hello, Dolly! so clearly the competition for Best Part In A Play was going to be intense.
Now, on the big screen, with seven- eighths of the original cast and plenty of close-ups, everything seems somehow smaller than life. Perhaps it's the way movie audiences routinely assume every- thing's a computer-enhanced animatronic. Or perhaps it's a reminder of how much easier it is to make a splash on stage than on film. Of McNally's octet of gays, two are twins — a vicious British composer and his genial, Aids-riddled queeny brother. On stage, the same actor played both in a dis- play of old-time theatrical bravura; on film, it seems merely a feeble stunt.
The play is set at a lakeside country house in Dutchess County, New York, over three long weekends — Memorial, Inde- pendence and Labor Days — culminating in a rehearsal of their Swan Lake number for an Aids benefit. The characters have jokey names suggestive of types: the oppo- site twins are Mr Jekyll and his brother; the gossipy house guest is Buzz Hauser; the Hispanic dancer, a veritable furnace of for- nication, is called Fornos, etc. As directed by Joe Mantello, the tone seems intended to be Chekhovian.
Unfortunately, McNally is a writer increasingly uninterested in anything other than his own narrow precincts: on stage, the biggest laugh went to the line about a nightmare revival of The King and I starring Tommy Tune and Elaine Stritch. A divine show-queen gag, to be sure, but it's the sound of a theatre talking to itself. You can just about get away with that on stage, but not on film.
There are gays in Spike Lee's Get on the Bus, too: 'A gay black Republican? Now I seen everything,' as someone says. Actual- ly, the guy's a gay black Republican Gulf war veteran. Most of the characters are similarly constructed — the gang killer turned social worker, the biracial son of a black cop killed by another black — but Lee and screenwriter Reggie Rock Blythe- wood have bundled them up and put them on the bus from Los Angeles to the 1995 Million Man March in Washington.
There's certainly a good movie to be wrung out of the march: Louis Farrakhan and his Fruit of Islam are cheerfully anti- Semitic and homophobic; on the weekend before the march, one of his supporters dismissed the Twelve Apostles as 'a lot of white faggot boys'. Once a month, appar- ently, Farrakhan himself takes a trip in a flying saucer to commune with the spirits of great African-Americans of the past. He's also into numerology: 'When you have a nine,' he told the somewhat-short-of-a- Million Men, 'you have a womb that is pregnant, and, when you have a one stand- ing by the nine, it means that there's some- thing secret that has to be unfolded.' He drew attention to the height of the Wash- ington Monument — 555 feet — he explained that this was significant because, if you added a one, you got 1555 'which was the year our first fathers landed on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, as slaves'. (Actually, Jamestown was settled in 1607, the first slaves arriving in 1619.) The mainstream media ventured disquiet about the anti-Semitism but were curiously timid about drawing attention to the nutti- ness, fretful that querying the sanity of a .fellow who can draw hundreds of thou- sands of mostly middle-class black men might be construed as racist. What's sur- prising is that Spike Lee should also tiptoe round the subject. In his previous examina- tions of black sexuality (She's Gotta Have It), politics (Malcolm X) and miscegenation (Jungle Fever), even Lee's equivocations have felt fearless. This is the first picture he's made that smells fake.
Instead, the men on the bus spend a leisurely couple of hours bonding and singing. For once, Lee's ability to draw unobtrusively persuasive performances from his cast fails him, and he seems reluc- tant to confront Farrakhan's principal theme: the idea of black male atonement. This, incidentally, is one area where the whacko has more credibility than so-called `moderate' black leaders: Congressman Kweisi Mfume, head of the NACCP, for example, fathered five children by four women in the space of 21 months. Lee, though, opts for a specious black unity that seems unwarranted both by the facts and by his own previous work.
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