to
wong foo,
thanks for everything,
julie newmar |
director
Beeban Kidron
screenwriter
Douglas Carter Beane
producer
G. Mac Brown
cinematographer
Steve Mason
music
Rachel Portman
editor
Andrew Mondshein
cast
Wesley Snipes (Miss Noxeema Jackson)
Patrick Swayze (Miss Vida Boheme)
John Leguizamo (Miss Chi-Chi Rodriguez)
Stockard Channing (Carol Ann)
Blythe Danner (Beatrice)
Arliss Howard (Virgil)
Jason London (Bobby Ray)
Chris Penn (Sheriff Dollard)
Melinda Dillon (Merna)
Beth Grant (Loretta)
RuPaul (Miss Rachel Tensions)
Julie Newmar (Herself)
Quentin Crisp (NY Pageant Judge)
Robin Williams (John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 109m
u.s.
release: September
1995
video
availability: VHS
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I'm not sure what to make of
the recent mainstreaming of gay culture (as Bob Dole might put
it) -- whether it's due to genuine acceptance or, as I suspect,
because it's chic and profitable. I'm all for wiping out prejudice
and hatred, but when I see a movie like Philadelphia,
which tells us to mourn a dying gay man because he's practically
hetero, I wonder if some of the new gay-themed films aren't playing
by homophobic rules. "Accept us," the movies seem to
say, "because inside we're just like you." It's embarrassing
to have to point this out in 1995, but gays are not just
like hets inside; aside from the same-sex attraction, there's
usually the lifetime of accumulated hurts and scars which such
an identity brings to most gays, and which most heteros can't
begin to understand. Might we not profit more from respecting
our differences -- between gays and heteros, men and women, blacks
and whites -- than from insisting on a wishy-washy common ground?
Which brings me to, deep breath,
To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (whew).
Yes, it's a primer on tolerance, a story about cute 'n' harmless
drag queens. Yes, in structure it's kissing cousin to The
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (must all these
gender-bending movies have such jawbreaking titles?), last year's
campy celebration of ABBA and outlandish frocks. Yes, the three
stars (Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, and John Leguizamo) are
well-known breeders: There's no way Universal is going to gamble
on three actors in drag whose offscreen sexuality is in dispute.
Yes, it's a swish-out-of-water comedy: The trio of divas, en
route from New York to L.A. in a '67 Caddy, break down in a rural
backwater and impart lessons of fashion and individuality to
the locals. And yes, the movie's conception of these flamboyantly
gay men* is bizarrely asexual: Snipes and Swayze
are too busy bickering like old maids to get laid, and Leguizamo's
flirtation with a gentle local boy (who assumes Leguizamo is
genetically female) is derailed when a local girl falls for the
boy. The film is everything that will make half the gay audience
grit its teeth (while the other half may be grateful that a $30
million pro-gay Hollywood movie exists in the first place).
The main reason I enjoyed To
Wong Foo (if you think I'm typing out that whole title again,
you're tripping) is probably pretty basic. For openers, the stars
are funny. Not funny as in "Ha ha, look at the men in dresses."
But when you're watching Wesley (Drop Zone) Snipes, Patrick
(Point Break) Swayze, and John (Carlito's Way)
Leguizamo acting all womanly and frilly, the joke is less that
they're men in drag than that these particular actors,
so aggressively alpha-male in other roles, are in drag -- and
they're gorgeous to boot. Very quickly, they settle into their
characters. Snipes is snippy, Swayze is maternal, and Leguizamo
is a hot-blooded Latina eager to prove herself as a "drag
princess." Though Snipes and Swayze have rather unwomanly
musculature, all three actors have the physical grace to nail
the metamorphosis: Snipes has studied martial arts, Swayze is
a lifelong dancer, and Leguizamo has been doing drag for years
in his stage shows. And they don't camp it up -- well, yes, they
do; it kind of comes with the territory -- but they don't wink
at us, letting us know they're really hetero, or really brave
for doing this movie. Leguizamo in particular would've fooled
me if I hadn't seen him before; he moves and sounds exactly like
a pouty young Latina.
It must be said, though, that
To Wong Foo paints an extremely sanitized portrait of
drag queens, especially given that these girls come from New
York; these are drag queens even Bob Dole could like. (For a
spikier and, one assumes, more accurate record, we look to Jennie
Livingston's flavorful 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning.)
They don't curse, do drugs, drink (aside from a bottle of wine
while commiserating with the small-town ladies over the perfidies
of men) -- they don't even smoke, which must be a first for a
drag-queen movie. And, as noted above, they're very abstractly
gay. With its gaudy costumes and lack of sexual tension, To
Wong Foo sometimes plays like a '50s sci-fi flick. One could
argue that, stuck in the boonies, the queens wouldn't have much
luck finding playmates; but in Priscilla, the Terence
Stamp character (a post-op transsexual) found love with a burly
biker guy. Someone is still afraid to show us two men kissing
in a major motion picture. Except for Leguizamo's crush, which
of course must defer to the heterosexual girl's crush, the only
love here is sisterly bonding between women and men who look
like women. The movie turns into Fried Queen Tomatoes.
Another interesting thing Priscilla
did that this movie doesn't was to give us some sense of what
drag queens are like when they're not "on." In Priscilla,
the queen played by Hugo Weaving was rather reserved and quiet
in his civvies, as if saving the full force of his personality
for the stage, where he let loose. The queens of To Wong Foo
stay en femme all the time, and I thought it might have
been funny to see Swayze and Snipes out of drag, perhaps reverting
to their previous manly screen personae to fake out a bigoted
cop (Chris Penn) who pulls them over. Instead, we get an ugly
scene in which Penn, taking Swayze for an uppity "career
girl," feels Swayze up and gets knocked on his ass. After
that, the tiresome cop spends every waking moment hunting the
"homos," and the movie keeps cutting back to him sitting
in bars and venting his homophobic disgust; I got the creepy
feeling that many in the audience were not laughing at
him as intended, but with him.
Movies like this and Philadelphia
stroke middle-class liberal sensibilities and teach us what we
should already know. That there's still a need for candy-movies
like To Wong Foo isn't really the movie's fault. It seeks
only to entertain, and tangentially to enlighten. For years,
blacks had to evolve from servants to noble friends-of-the-hero
to complex human beings in the Hollywood movies that showed their
faces. Similarly, movie gays have gone from mincing hairdressing
fags to (usually) tragic figures beleaguered by homophobia or
scarred by AIDS (and of course there's always the Friendly Gay
Neighbor). Major-studio films that can tell gay stories without
making a big sociological deal of it may not be too far in the
future, which is why this mainstreaming of gay culture is a good
thing. Until then, To Wong Foo is fun enough. It's a glitzy
comedy of kindness, which, Bob Dole or no Bob Dole, our wounded
pop culture could use a lot more of. But at heart it's about
as queer as a one-dollar bill. For a truly gay mega-budget
Hollywood movie, I'm afraid you're going to have to sit through
Batman
Forever again.
* Most male crossdressers (a category
apart from drag queens) are heterosexual, and not all
drag queens are gay (though many are). Still, the queens in this
movie are very definitely not presented as having wives
or girlfriends waiting for them back in New York, let's put it
that way.
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