Review: A Home at the End of the World
By William Sternman
-------------------------------------
A
Home at the End of the World
Starring Colin Farrell, Dallas Roberts, Sissy Spacek, and Robin Wright
Penn
Directed by Michael Mayer, Screenplay by Michael Cunningham
Stage
director Michael Mayer’s first movie is not about what happens next,
but what has been happening all along. It’s not about plot but people,
how the way they change changes their relationships, and how the way their
relationships change changes them in turn.
Two boyhood buddies (Colin Farrell and Dallas Roberts) meet again as young adults in New York City in 1982 and become involved in a delicately balanced (and unbalanced) ménage à trois with a kooky overaged punker, Clare (Robin Wright Penn). This ménage, however, is more like a Calder mobile, delicately shifting positions without being touched.
Although there is some suspense concerning who will end up with whom and who will be left out in the cold, the final disposition of the characters comes as a complete surprise for several reasons: a second female is added to the ménage (don’t jump to the obvious conclusion) and one of the characters changes completely, while another doesn’t change at all.
This is Michael Cunningham’s first screenplay, adapted from his own novel (He also wrote the book on which The Hours was based). In it, he does something extraordinary for an American movie: he portrays adolescent homosexuality as though it were a perfectly natural coming-of-age rite of passage, which, of course, it often is. (Can you imagine that red-blooded all-American boy Andy Hardy having sex with another red-blooded all-American boy, or even with himself? Talk about the love that dare not speak its name). In America, red-blooded all-American men can’t conceive of touching other red-blooded all-American men except on the football field. On the rare occasions when they hug, they always pat each other on the back, as though to reassure the world (and themselves) that these are buddy hugs, not body hugs. Watch two men sit down at a table for four; instead of sitting directly across from each other, they sit catty-corner, as though to put as much physical distance between themselves as possible. On a bus or train, they sit one behind the other or across the aisle from each other for the same reason.
There was, I understand, some hand wringing about whether Colin Farrell should be shown in full frontal nudity. As reported by the Winnipeg Sun, Farrell explained that the reason the peek-a-boo scene wound up on the cutting-room floor “had nothing to do with size, which is something the media was reporting.” I think Farrell’s ding-dong would have struck a decidedly sour note whatever its size. After all, this movie is about people, not body parts (If, at this point, you’re beginning to feel like Steve Martin in the “two pillows” scene in Planes, Trains & Automobiles, please feel free to scroll past the following paragraph).
But it brings up a fascinating puzzle: why is it okay to show a woman completely naked from any angle but not a man? I have a feeling that some American men are secretly afraid that the sight of another man’s penis might trigger an unwanted sexual reaction. Better to keep it covered, the way some other cultures keep a woman’s face and body covered to keep poor, weak men from being unwittingly aroused. Ah, the perpetual adolescent! He can control the world but not his own precious bodily fluids.
However you size him up, Farrell is particularly affecting, playing against the tough-guy type, as a man who never stopped being a boy, with all the innocent sweetness of childhood intact.
This is a hard movie to review because it isn’t about anything in the conventional sense. It’s not about being or not being gay. It’s not about psychological triangles that can’t be psychologically triangulated. It’s not even about being a man in America (Don’t eat quiche. Don’t be sensitive. Don’t admit a mistake. Never ask for directions).
In The Night of the Iguana, Tennessee Williams writes, “Nothing human disgusts me…unless it's unkind or violent."
That’s what this movie is about.
-------------------------------------
William Sternman's short stories have been published in England, Hungary, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, as well as the U.S. His book and movie reviews have appeared in Audience, Films in Review, Bestsellers, The Drummer, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Houston Chronicle, The Boston Herald, The St. Petersburg Times and www.movie-vault.com. He has been a volunteer tutor at the Center for Literacy since 1998. He received a fellowship grant in literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
©
2004 Me Three