ON SCREEN: Stonewall
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eye WEEKLY July 25, 1996
Toronto's arts newspaper .....free every Thursday
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ON SCREEN ON SCREEN
STONEWALL
Starring Guillermo Diaz and Frederick Weller. Screenplay by Rikki
Beadle Blair based on the book Stonewall by Martin Duberman. Directed
by Nigel Finch. (AA) Opens July 26.
(ee of 5 eyes)
by
Gemma Files
On paper at least, the first and last feature film from acclaimed
British TV director Nigel Finch (The Lost Language Of Cranes), who
died of AIDS complications during post-production, looks sorta square.
But it also looks kinda neat, like a series of interesting choices
mixed with some well-taken risks, all of it smacking equally of
newfangled politics and old-fashioned romance.
Put into practice, however, Stonewall's seams soon begin to show. Set
against the backdrop of the 1969 riot at New York's gay-friendly
Stonewall Inn -- an incident widely credited as the first public
birth-pang of today's gay rights movement -- Finch tries to show what
it was like back when all gay men knew that every time they tried to
have a good time in public, they were automatically laid open to
harassment by the cops who had a legal right to insult and arrest them
at will.
Into this situation stumbles Matty Dean (Frederick Weller), a freshly
self-outed young hick from Kansas, who is immediately torn between a
"straight-acting" life of covert big city sexual freedom and his
attraction to the flashy, mouthy, Puerto Rican drag queen La Miranda
(Guillermo Diaz).
Friends steer Matty toward the politically active Mattachine Society,
where he becomes involved with an earnest but dull society member
named Ethan (Brendan Corbalis).
But on the night of Judy Garland's burial, when cops raid the
Stonewall, Matty is forced to choose between fitting in and standing
out, with explosive, if predictably resolved, results.
Stonewall's general level of character development matches that of any
given Broadway musical, a fact Finch appears to have realized since he
chose to play it up by punctuating the action with a Greek chorus of
three lip-synching drag queens. But thematic historical relevance and
extreme thinness of plot make for uneasy bedfellows.
Which means that -- good intentions aside -- Stonewall remains an
exuberant but emotionally hollow spectacle, a kind of after-school
special in heavy lip-gloss.
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