Until a better movie is made, this will do
Someday someone might very well make a movie masterpiece out of the Stonewall riots, which kicked off the gay rights movement in 1969, but “Stonewall” isn’t it. Though the film has already been criticized for historical inaccuracy, its biggest problems are artistic, a certain squandering of focus, a certain misplaced attention on the unimportant at the expense of the real story.
But “Stonewall” is far from a disaster. There are more than a few moving moments, one or two notable performances, and lots of interesting information about Greenwich Village and gay life in the 1960s. The movie may have all the subtlety of a piano crashing into the sidewalk — it was directed by Roland Emmerich, who specializes in action films — but Emmerich gets his main point across, that as late as 1969 homosexuals were oppressed. He’s reminding audiences that the gay rights movement needed to happen.
That’s something to think about in assessing this film. It’s possible that we’re all very sophisticated now and that “Stonewall” has nothing to teach anybody, but believing that would probably be naive. The film awakens audiences to a time in which gays weren’t allowed to hold government jobs and gay nightclubs couldn’t operate legally. Even the most dispassionate viewer of “Stonewall” will feel a sense of injustice at what the people on screen are experiencing. For the audiences that need this movie most, their own empathy will be a revelation.
The Stonewall of the title was a gay bar, but an illegal one, run by the mob and kept open through police payoffs. Perfunctory raids and roundups of select customers — usually either lesbians or drag queens — were common. As depicted in “Stonewall,” it was a dreary hole of a place, where people had to worry about getting hepatitis from dirty drinking glasses or bashed in the head by the cops. When the explosion finally came, it was of people who’d had their fill of abuse and would not take any more.
But at the start of the film, we don’t know anything about the bar, because we’re meeting Danny (Jeremy Irvine), an 18-year-old kid from Indiana who has been thrown out of his house for being gay. He arrives in New York and immediately falls in with a group of street hustlers, whose bravado is in direct proportion to their marginalization. Finding shelter is a challenge, and Danny soon finds himself sleeping on a floor with six other people.
Written by playwright Jon Robin Baitz (“Other Desert Cities”), “Stonewall” uses the fictional Danny and as entryway into the West Village gay scene, and for a while, Danny serves as an effective device. Some of the movie’s best scenes involve Danny’s friendship with the equally fictitious Ray, a sensitive drag queen played with daring flamboyance and aching sensitivity by Jonny Beauchamp. And while the thought of watching flashbacks to Danny’s life in Indiana might sound unwelcome, those Indiana scenes are wrenching and bring audiences into the era in a direct and painful way.
But ultimately, Baitz and Emmerich put too much stock in fiction. Danny is there to open the door to history, but at a certain point, history needs to take over. It never quite does. Yes, we get the Stonewall riots, in between scenes of Danny’s clashing with his lover (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and getting kidnapped by pimps. At one point, Danny announces that he is getting really, really angry — this is to prepare us for his role in the riots — and once on the frontlines it is apparently Danny who originates the phrase “Gay Power.” Good for him.
It’s at that point that “Stonewall” snaps and begins to seem like a joke, but it would be wrong to consider the whole movie a joke. Say what you will about the film, it is not a cynical enterprise, and just as the perfect needn’t be the enemy of the good, the perfect doesn’t always have to be hostile to the almost good.
Consider “Stonewall” a place holder until a better movie arrives.