Chasing Amy. - movie reviews
Mark J. HuismanWe all know the movie
tradition about
hetero-homo love.
When a gay character
falls for someone of the
opposite sexual orientation, the gay lover gets the
short end of the stick. That's what's so fresh about
Chasing Amy, the third film (following Clerks and
Mallrats) in the New Jersey trilogy by director
Kevin Smith. Here a straight man falls in love with
a lesbian, and wherever he winds up, it's not on
top. Although its execution is flawed, Smith's story
is unique. With some wonderful jabs at gender and
racial stereotypes, Chasing Amy eschews political
correctness to explore sexual identify with
more thoughtfulness than we've
seen before, at least from a
filmmaker who happens to be a
26-year-old straight guy.
Chasing Amy tells the
story of het
buddiescum-roommates
Holden (Ben Affleck) and
Banky (Jason Lee), coauthors of the
successful cult comic book series
Bluntman and Chronic. Holden falls in
love with a fellow comic-book author,
Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams),
who, according to the film's coy production notes,
"has set her romantic sights elsewhere." In other
words, she's a big dyke. As the curious triangle
between Holden, Banky, and Alyssa twists and
sums, the film weaves between comic and heartfelt
moments.
Although Smith's dialogue tends to be cardboard
and mechanical, Chasing Amy evidences a
maturation in his writing. There are terrific
exchanges between the provincial but
determined-to-be-hip Holden and the subtly
self-loathing Banky, who is
privately battling demons of his
own. Best of all is the friendship
of Holden and the flamboyantly
gay Hooper (Dwight Ewell.
from Stone wall and Flirt),
an African-American
comic-book author
masquerading for his public as a
latter-day Black Panther. Although
Holden and Hooper are opposites in
many ways, Smith gives them a bond
that's both joyous and moving.
Smith underscores his themes with
just the right tinge of desperation, the
kind everyone (gay or straight, male or
female) feels over finding true love and,
sometimes, losing it. Affleck and Lee turn
in well-rounded, gently nuanced
performances that are terrific to watch,
and Ewell's work is fabulously dead-on.
But the fact that some things are so
good only makes the bad all the more
obvious and painful. The introduction of
Alyssa's lesbianism is a hackneyed,
amateurish moment, played for laughs at
the woman's expense. Smith may want to
be fair about all this lesbian stuff, but
that doesn't mean he understands it well
enough to present it convincingly.
Adams, to whom the hardest task
admittedly falls, turns in a performance
so consistently and voluminously shrill,
it's as though she went over the top and
right on down the cliff. The character of
Alyssa begs for restraint; there's too little
of it here. And the film's epilogue ending
is a truly disappointing film-school
device: Holden, Banky, and Alyssa each
get "I'm moving on" moments that,
instead of conveying the intended
triumph, land with a thud.
On the whole the idea of this film is
more successful than the film itself. While
at some level Chasing Amy is really about
a man successfully pursuing a woman,
there's something thoroughly enjoyable
about seeing male virility challenged so
roundly, especially by some very
heterosexual characters. And it's terrific
to see straight characters grappling in a
realistic way with what it means to be a
gay person in contemporary America.
This is not a film filled with rampant
political correctness or sympathetic
liberal archetypes. Chasing Amy leads
gay viewers to examine ourselves: If we
don't mind when straight people fall for
gay people (and who can blame them?),
what makes us so hostile when someone
who's gay sleeps with someone of the
opposite sex? How ironic that a straight
director should make a movie that
reminds gays and lesbians of what we've
been saying all along: Rules are meant
to be broken.
COPYRIGHT 1997 Liberation Publications, Inc.
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