Frick or Frack?

Armond White — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 21:36:31 +0000

VAN SANT AND DAMON’S PROMISED PROPAGANDA

Gus Van Sant must really be out of imagination (or horniness) to make the drab, politically slanted Promised Land. That’s two phony films in a row for Gus, following the 2010 Restless. Promised Land takes on the fracking controversy about drilling for gas in underground shale deposits, using Gus’ Good Will Hunting star Matt Damon as a gas company stooge trying to trick Pennsylvania farmers into leasing their land. As an exposé of the fashionable dilemma, the film is unconvincing politically and fraudulently sentimental about the average American’s skeptical response to technological progress.

When Damon, as corporate shill Steve Butler, tries hoodwinking rural folk (“‘Fuck you money’ is the ultimate liberator” he tells a landowner), his dishonesty recalls George Clooney’s self-pity in Up in the Air. Damon’s a shrewder actor, so he eschews Clooney’s false empathy and portrays a man who corrupts the American Dream while refusing to lose the American rat race. This frick-or-frack quandary turns Promised Land into a reverse-Capra movie in which the little people convert the bad protagonist—reviving his buried good instincts.

But Steve’s transformation is half-ass; his heart isn’t in the job anyway, only his contempt—the phony common-folk stance the Environmental Left prefers. In Promised Land, the anti-fracking controversy seems to be about class superiority as much as about the environment.

Van Sant, Damon and co-screenwriter, co-producer and co-star John Krasinski (portraying Dustin Noble, an antagonistic environmentalist) pretend that political position is more important than complicated truth. Using pretzeled logic, these filmmakers twist their story into unbelievable shapes to make the self-righteous point that Americans’ greed outweighs their truest values. Easy for millionaire filmmakers to say.

The love triangle between Steve, Dustin and local schoolteacher Alice (Rosemarie Dewitt) lacks the gay sexual tension typical of Van Sant; this is just a propagandistic gimmick relying on the sentimentality of white-picket-fence heterosexual normalcy. (You can hear sheep bleating behind Steve’s confidence game, and an American flag is used as backdrop.) Van Sant, Damon and Krasinski present what amounts to anti-fracking propaganda without deciding which side they are on. It’s as if the industrial revolution—and unbiased cinema—never happened.

Armond White: How The Skinny Humanizes Gay Cinema

Armond White — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 20:24:46 +0000

The title of The Skinny refers to gossip–the low-down between friends–but read another way (in the credit sequence’s colorful graphics) it also refers to sexual opportunities in New York City. Writer-director Patrik-Ian Polk is interested in the erotic possibilities found by five young black gays, recent Brown University graduates, who reunite during New York’s Pride Week celebrations. Gorgeous, young, educated black gays like these don’t appear in movies by Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes nor in mainstream Hollywood films. They hail from a society that only Polk puts on screen–a world recognizably his own vision like Wes Anderson’s and equally as affecting.

By placing them in New York, Polk gives his characters a cultural coming-out (in the debutante sense) which also means advancing upon the bourgeois mainstream already so well represented by media-empowered white gays that these characters seem new–in fact, almost alien to the New York Times whose dismissive review linked Polk‘s characters to “an invisible demographic.” Nothing could be more clueless–or so tragically revealing of mainstream media’s self-important blindness.

Fact is, as Polk casts and photographs his characters, they are visualized quite handsomely. Joey‘s joking lament “Who knew an Ivy League degree in semiotics would be so useful!” turns out to perfectly define the film’s success. These good-looking black folk are living signs–of black, gay social progress and arrival–although the mainstream media might label them “minorities”.

Magnus (Jussie Smollett, a Prince-look-alike but with dimples) breaks up with his thug-hot boyfriend Ryan (Dustin Ross), while virginal Sebastian (Blake Young-Fountain) hankers after his studly best friend Kyle (Anthony Burrell). Beautiful British dyke Langston (Shanika Warren-Markland) and the elegantly masculine Southern queen Joey (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) watch from the sides, nervous about making their own hook-ups. This group resembles the ensemble of Polk’s trailblazing LOGO-TV series Noah’s Arc, but he’s refined the stereotypes into more subtly-performed archetypes. These actors represent the range of urban black males less realistically than were the women in Pariah but more idealistically, like the co-eds in Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress. Their rom-com search for love is also a quest for self-acceptance (infatuated Magnus opens the film kissing and grinning with emotional satisfaction) despite New York pressures of class, disease and insecurity that keep them from being carefree.

Yet, Polk’s characters seem charmingly carefree the same way as Anderson’s. Polk finds comedy and drama in Magnus & friends’ state of untested innocence. He has discovered a knack for personal identification and audience assent that sets him apart from more celebrated black or gay cineastes. This makes Polk not merely a queer filmmaker but part of the current brotherhood of genuine American Eccentrics.

Would Gus Van Sant or Todd Haynes have the affectionate wit to lovingly stage a discussion about sexual hygiene? The Times’ nonplussed reviewer could only belittle the moment as a PSA rather than a disclosure of brotherly intimacy (made so by Bowyer-Chapman’s winning sense of concern and confession). Aspects of The Skinny indeed have a gossipy style of instruction–it’s part of unfortunate p.c. habits Polk picked up from television. His style could be subtler (the images could use some concentration) still it’s imminently watchable. And populist in ways most gay-identified filmmakers never achieve having worked themselves into the specialized ghetto reserved for detached artistes like Van Sant and Haynes. Only John Cameron Mitchell and Ira Sachs are trying to work themselves out of that rut.

To read the full review at City Arts click here.

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Frick or Frack?

Armond White: How The Skinny Humanizes Gay Cinema