The cast of Roland Emmerich's 'Stonewall'
For those of us that were kids in the era of the
Afterschool Special and sitcoms that would go serious for a
very special episode, they're a relic of a time when serious social issues were approached in well-intentioned, but incredibly naive and horribly condescending ways. Looking back at those particular films and episodes of TV can be interesting, since they present reflections of the culture for the times in which they were created. The stories usually hinge on a generically straight-laced white character coming to the realization that death, drug abuse, alcoholism, divorce, homosexuality, HIV/AIDS, suicide, eating disorders, prejudice or any other topic people don't really like talking about actually exists in the world. While the films and programs are to be commended for putting those issues on the table to be discussed, especially to young kids and teens, some of those films have the implicit notion that these type of things don't happen to "normal" (white) people.
With the limited release of Stonewall, directed by Roland Emmerich and written by Jon Robin Baitz, it plays like an Afterschool Special made by people who went with the worst creative decisions at every step in the process. The film inserts fictionalized characters around the 1969 Stonewall Inn Riots, a seminal moment for the LGBTQ movement. Since the first trailer for the movie appeared online, Stonewall has been controversial for inserting a white protagonist, Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine), as a central figure in the event, instead of a character based on the real-life transgender women, lesbians, and drag queens of color that were present during the riots at significant moments. Emmerich didn't help things by stating that this was an intentional decision in order to have a character that straight audiences can sympathize with and root for. This has led to calls to boycott the movie on the grounds it's "whitewashed propaganda."
Since Emmerich is known for disaster movies like Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012, this is a change of pace from his usual fare. Stonewall is a passion project for the director, who is a gay man and invested millions of his own money to make Stonewall after no studio would take it on. However, the result is a film that's a boring mess which bombed hard at the box office over the weekend and has been critically drubbed. Stonewall is awfully written, with a cast that feels like they walked off the set of Glee, and is so wrong-headed in its take on the subject matter that it quite literally makes the same mistakes as another movie about an important event in American history made by a director of movies where things blow up.
Continue below the fold for more.
With any work of art that's attempting to be socially conscious, especially with an issue that's somewhat taboo but important, there's an inclination within the affected audience to want to like the material. It's an opportunity to see people in their community in the mainstream media, and to say something about issues they deem important. And even if it's bad, there's a tendency to give the movie or TV show the benefit of the doubt and say: "Hey, at least we're being seen and talked about."
However, Stonewall seems to rub everyone the wrong way, especially those it's claiming to represent. It's not that a good movie about the Stonewall Riots can't be made, or that a fictionalized depiction can't be done. Nigel Finch's film of the same name did both of those things back in 1995. But, for future reference, using the backdrop of the Stonewall Riots for telling the story of a bland white guy moving to Greenwich Village is not the way to go.
From Shannon Keating at
Buzzfeed:
The trailer doesn’t mischaracterize Emmerich’s film: Danny is the centerpiece of Stonewall, a decision Emmerich made, in part, in an effort to attract a wider audience who could connect with him. “You have to understand one thing: I didn’t make this movie only for gay people, I made it also for straight people,” he said. “I kind of found out, in the testing process, that actually, for straight people, [Danny] is a very easy in. Danny’s very straight-acting. He gets mistreated because of that. [Straight audiences] can feel for him.”
The plot for
Stonewall is modeled to a degree on
The Wizard of Oz, and it's also a reference to the
myth that Judy Garland's death was the impetus for the Stonewall Riots. The focus of the film is Danny, a closeted Indiana teen who plans on attending Columbia University. Almost everything about his home life collapses after he's caught performing oral sex on the high school quarterback. So he leaves his Norman Rockwell Americana existence early and ventures off to the strange land of New York City. After arriving, Danny falls in with Ray/Ramona (Jonny Beauchamp) and Cong (Vladimir Alexis), two street hustlers that teach him how to survive in the new world of Christopher Street. Ray/Ramona begins having feelings for Danny that go unrequited, while Danny begins a relationship with political organizer Trevor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). The West Village neighborhood is defined by sex trafficking and mob ties, with Ed Murphy (Ron Perlman) being the manager of the Mafia-owned Stonewall Inn.
All of this leads to a movie that doesn't really know what it's about and is predicated on a collection of writing cliches from soap operas. Is it a coming-of-age film about a young Indiana boy growing into a man and realizing who he is? Is it a movie about the relationship between Danny and Ray/Ramona? Is it a cautionary tale about the social pressures on gay men and the horrors of the big city (i.e., prostitution)? Is it a movie about police brutality against a subjugated minority that reaches a breaking point? I don't think the script really knows, and it makes the eventual uprising an afterthought in the grand scheme of the film. If one didn't know why the riots occurred in the first place, the movie sure as hell isn't going to give the viewer the fundamental reasons why.
Stonewall is over two hours long, and the narrative hobbles to the protests and riots, which only get maybe 10 minutes of screen time. But what bothers many is that it's Danny who throws the brick that launches the riots, and Danny who screams "Gay Power!" to lead the crowd, where the historical truth is a little different. And what rankles many is that the movie treats Danny like a white savior/noble savage helping the other "savages" with their plight, while reducing a famous event to a formative moment in the main character's bullshit relationship problems.
From Will Leitch at
The Concourse:
Stonewall misses the point of the Stonewall riots in almost the exact same way that Pearl Harbor missed the point of Pearl Harbor. That’s not a comparison I make lightly. Pearl Harbor turned one of the most seminal moments in American history into the pretext for a lame story about two white schmucks fighting over a girl. (The best part was that the second half of Michael Bay’s 2001 disaster is essentially the two guys and their friends getting revenge. Take that, Japan! That’ll teach you to begin a global conflict that will change the course of humankind. Josh Hartnett is pissed!) Stonewall has the opportunity to tell the story of a profound, pivotal moment in the history of gay rights in this country, and it not only fumbles it, it trips over it, then falls off a cliff, then sets itself on fire. It is a movie so baffling and wrong-headed and absurd that I honestly can’t believe it exists. I can’t fathom what anyone involved could have possibly been thinking.
Beyond just the aspects of whether the movie is whitewashing history and the stated reasons for the whitewash, there have been
arguments over what the film is supposed to be saying about gay culture. The fact the movie makers felt the need to purposely have a white protagonist says a lot about the mentality of the industry, and (if you buy into their reading of the situation) the larger society as a whole. But another reading of the movie is that the controversy surrounding it is also an example of "
entrenched structural conflict" in the LGBTQ community between those that want to be seen and accepted as "normal" by straight society and assimilated into the larger part of American culture, and those that feel they don't need to make themselves presentable in order to be worthy of dignity and respect.
But while the movie touches on that division, it can't really finesse the subject into being an interesting part of the story, since it's bogged down in the concerns of a main characters whose story is largely tangential to the bigger issue of gay rights. And like Dorothy's journey in The Wizard of Oz, the side characters are merely broken things searching for wholeness while helping Danny down the yellow brick road to a way back home. My suspicion is that if this was a better movie, if it knew what it was trying to say, and if could find and stick with a consistent tone, the backlash from the casting decision wouldn't be as nearly as big. And I'm sure there was a way to make an enjoyable, thoughtful movie that incorporated the life of a white character into the events of the Stonewall Riots. However, there is something just a tad galling about a film with a tagline that states "Where Pride Began" going this route.