Cinema Stanley Peskin
WHEN, in 1977, Herbert Ross made The Turning Point, it was possible in a mainstream film to deal explicitly with women’s rights, but it was certainly not commercially advisable to explore with any sympathy gender issues and gay liberation. That film was soap-ballet, self-conscious and maudlin. In 1995, Boys on the Side attempts to do a good deal more and, although it is often flabby and sentimental, it is also tough and funny.
Men are marginalised in the film: they are the “other”. They are of two kinds: either bastards or angels (one, a cop, is actually called Abe Lincoln), and this in itself is a refreshing variation on the treatment in most Hollywood films of women as either whores or angels.
Three women (not “girls”) are at the centre of Boys on the Side. Jane (Whoopi Goldberg) is a black lesbian on the rebound. The wheelchair that would make her the ideal victim figure is reserved for Robin (Mary-Louise Parker) who has tested HIV positive. The third is Holly (Drew Barrymore), who uninhibitedly loves men and sex. Each for a private reasson wants to leave the east coast (New York and Pittsburg) and set out for Los Angeles. As they travel across America, not only are they reminiscent of Thelma and Louise, but each is seen as a rebel with a cause. And their very mobility is opposed to the stereotypical idea of female rootedness.
At first, the three women would seem to be ill-assorted, but in the face of adversity and in the context of their own personal problems, they become a gathering of fugitives and assert their values to themselves and to each other.
Jane, who describes Robin as the “whitest woman on the face of the earth, singing Carpenters songs”, discovers that her companion’s middle-class values are only superficially felt and that they are indeed sisters under the skin, a truth that Holly, who is less prickly and less mistrustful, immediately recognises.
>From each other, the women learn the value of trust and friendship, the need to express openly one’s sexual identity, whatever form it takes and wherever it is necessary to do so. They learn how to function as whole emotional and sexual beings in society, independently of men.
Ken Adams, who designed Dr Strangelove and some of the James Bond films in the early 1960s, has, with cinematographer Donald E Thorin, given the first half of the film a squalid look. The urban world and the highways on which the women travel are filled with neon lights and billboards. Only Tucson, Arizona, where the women for a while form a close community (together with Mexicans and gay men who are observed only in passing), offers some relief from the prevailing squalor and gloom.
Another source of relief is fine songs and these, whether backgrounded on the soundtrack or movingly performed by Goldberg herself, enter into the fabric of the story.
The chief problem with Boys on the Side is that social prejudices fall away too easily and that conflicts are too glibly resolved. And although the scatological dialogue is often witty, it is also too self-consciously raunchy. Yet despite these failings, the film tackles the thorny issues it raises head on and says things about sexual liberation that need to be said and, more importantly, need to be heard.