Screened Out – Stonewall

[one-star-rating]Jeremy Irvine, Jonny Beauchamp, Jonathan Rhys Meyer, Ron Perlman, Otoja Obit, Ron Perlman[/one-star-rating]

The Stonewall Riots of 1969 are such a seminal moment in LGBT rights. So, it’s frustrating – and even insulting – to see the center of this film be compromised with dull, melodramatic fictions.

The phrase “melodramatic fictions” is the key to everything wrong with Stonewall. The events were only 46 years ago – people who were there are still alive and able to tell their stories. Yet, this main plot here is artificial, inaccurate, shallow, drippy, meandering, and histrionic. I am flummoxed as to why the filmmakers couldn’t have interviewed a few people – or picked up a book – to introduce a real story!

I hated this on so many levels, and I wanted to support it – or any film that takes on our struggles for equal rights. After seeing this flick, I believe people who know the history will find Stonewall offensive and disturbing. Audiences who don’t know about that New York City summer won’t find the movie’s overly dramatic characters at all intriguing, engaging, or sympathetic. Until the actual riots in the last part, the film is boring.

Irvine (War Horse) portrays Danny, a lily-white young man kicked out of his rural Indiana family for being gay. Since he is already accepted to Columbia University, he runs away to New York City a few months early. He finds himself on Christopher Street near Sheridan Square just as things blow up.

Gay director/producer Roland Emmerich has already been catching flak – even when the trailer came out – for whitewashing history with the invented story of Caucasian, male Danny. Black drag queens, lesbians, and Hispanic street hustlers started the actual riots. Yet the core of this movie is a fictional, well scrubbed white boy fresh off the farm. Stonewall even shows him throwing the first brick. Historical accuracy, be damned!

Sure, Stonewall does include some minority prostitutes, queens, and drug-addicted homeless boys. They’re secondary to Danny, though. Hispanic Ray (Beauchamp) takes in Danny and falls in love with him. Ray also introduced Danny to a life where young runaways get sexually abused and beaten by pimps, johns, and each other. But Ray’s character is more a stereotype than flesh-and-blood, as is everyone else in this film chock full of fake, uninteresting people.

This is frustrating, because there are still many live people whose fascinating stories remain untold. Black transgender Marsha P. Johnson (Obit) is credited with starting the night’s protests. Bar owner Ed Murphy (Perlman) was a mob contact – and possible pimp – who later became a gay rights legend. These and other fascinating characters hang around the fringe of this movie.

If I had to say something nice, I would mention that it’s beautifully shot, and – when it avoids historical inaccuracies – art direction and costumes are lovely. Also, even though they are cliché, scenes between Danny and his sister (King of TV’s Fargo) are quite nice, primarily because she is such a lovely young actress.

The rest is so much worse than we feared! The biggest problem is the messy, lifeless, dishonest script by gay TV scribe Jon Robin Baitz (The Slap, Brothers and Sisters). Baitz tries to squeeze in the mob angle, police corruption, and the Mattachine Society. Little tags at the end of the film might make the uneducated think the whole thing is based on truth. These small forays into actual fact are just interesting clutter in a story with no depth, no drive, and no heart. Not to mention its dishonesty.

[rating-key]

Even as a gay man, Emmerich is the wrong person for this project. (I kept wondering what Gus Van Sant or Bryan Singer could do with this.) Emmerich again steps waaay outside his comfort zones – which are disaster films like Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012. The other time he tried to get artsy, serious, and dramatic, it was 2011’s inaccurate Shakespeare conspiracy Anonymous. Both Anonymous and Stonewall show that Emmerich doesn’t inspire actors to be sensitive or subtle. Both films lack momentum. As a final note, I’d mention that Emmerich has a serious issue with the truth.