‘Boys in the Band’ illuminates gay life in the not-so-good old days
Parsons speaks in the highpitched singsong-y voice of Sheldon Cooper, an odd choice assuming he’d be eager to have the audience see him in a new way in this role.
An anachronism, a major social artifact, a throwback, a landmark, this new film adaptation of “The Boys in the Band” is based on the Broadway revival of two years ago. Both efforts are preceded by the groundbreaking 1970 film directed by William Friedkin, a few years before he made “The Exorcist.” That film was based on the 1968 off-Broadway play by Mart Crowley. This new film version features the cast from the 2018 revival and boasts several openly gay actors in its cast.
Jim Parsons of TV’s “The Big Bang Theory” leads the assemblage as Michael, an intermittently celebratory and self-loathing homosexual in New York City’s late 1960s West Village, preparing his surprisingly lavish duplex flat with a terrace for a birthday party for his similarly conflicted friend Harold (Zachary Quinto), a late arrival. To the tune of Sam & Dave’s “Hold On, I’m, Comin’,” Michael, a Catholic, adjusts his hairline.
Parsons speaks in the high-pitched sing-song-y voice of Sheldon Cooper, an odd choice assuming he’d be eager to have the audience see him in a new way in this role.
Michael’s fellow celebrants are Donald (a poignant Matt Bomer), whose beauty sets him apart; Emory (Robin de Jesus), the token flamboyant gay man; Emory’s friend and the only African-American in the group, Bernard (Michael Benjamin Washington); the fighting couple Hank (Tuc Watkins), who is married with children, and Larry (Andrew Rannells, “Girls”) who is good-looking and promiscuous. Also on hand is the fiercely closeted Alan (Brian Hutchison), who is married, in town on business and whom Michael knew in college at Georgetown University, and Cowboy (Charlie Carver), a professional boytoy, who is a surprise “gift” for Harold.
As the drinking and weed-smoking ensue, things get more lively and raucous. A lot of the jokes are as tired as the homophobic gay epithets that pepper the dialogue. Who is going to get the Maria Montez reference, grandpa? Remember rotary dials? The gym talk suggests playwright Crowley didn’t know a push-up from a Pushkin. There is too much forced laughter. Confessions and revelations strike a few tentative notes and then pop like leering jack-in-the-boxes.
Michael admits “going to the baths,” and describes himself as a “was I drunk” sort of homosexual. He turns his rancor on his friends, lashing them on, finally turning the entire party into a variation of Truth or Dare. Quinto makes a marvelous entrance as the film’s cripplingly self-conscious, serpent-tongued birthday boy. He could be the gay — “Give me Librium or give me meth” — devil himself, and Quinto is searing. Tony Award-nominated director Joe Mantello (“Wicked”) does a fine job of choreographing it all, including a delightfully adept “Heat Wave” chorus line.
The Stonewall Riots of 1969, followed by the first Gay Pride marches in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, were seismic turning points for gay men and women in the United States. This was, of course, before AIDS and before Tony Kushner’s 1993 gay historical-cultural milestone “Angels in America.” “The Boys in the Band” already seemed a thing of gay-life past when the 1970 film was released. But the big screen drama was a harbinger and is an important reflection of the attitudes that prevailed before the revolution changed, if not the minds of the haters, at least the minds of the gay men and women themselves and perhaps their friends and families.
(“The Boys in the Band” contains profanity, sexually suggestive language, drug use and nudity.)