October 22, 1999

A torn, but stunning Valentine

Filmmakers and cast deserve awards

for story of slain transgender teen

Boys Don't Cry

Directed by Kimberly Peirce Fox Searchlight Pictures

Reviewed by Mark J. Huisman

Kimberly Peirce's astounding debut feature is a ragged love letter, a torn Valentine to a slain queer, Brandon Teena.

Brandon Teena was the Nebraska teen who led her life as a man, in the process fooling his friends, two of which, on New Year's Eve 1993, became his killers.

Boys Don't Cry brilliantly re-imagines Teena's last weeks by combining narrative modes from Greek tragedy and American melodrama to tabloid gossip and traditional fairy tale, minus the "happily ever after."

In Lincoln, Nebraska, tomboyish Teena Brandon dresses up as handsome Brandon Teena (Hillary Swank) for the first time, wows the girls, and ducks the law.

Forced to relocate-Brandon is depicted throughout as an eager, if inept, criminal— he falls in with a pack of aimless young folk in Falls City, Nebraska including Kate (Alison Folland), Candace (Alicia Goranson), Tom (Brendan Sexton III), John (Peter Sarsgaard) and the eye-catching Lana (Chloe Sevigny). Although Lana is clearly spoken for, Brandon falls for her the moment she serenades him at a karaoke honky tonk, crooning, "I'm looking at the bluest eyes in Texas."

At first, Brandon is accepted as the most debonair addition to the boys' club.

He's cheered when riding a pickup tailgate and teased when stealing a shy glance toward the increasingly smitten Lana. One of the film's subtextual strengths is the repeated suggestion that Lana actually knows Brandon is a girl. This is especially played up in a scene where she casually bails him out of the women's section of the local jail.

But when Brandon and Lana's clandestine affair finally surfaces, John and Tom begin to harbor heavy suspicions about the newcomer. Brandon quickly finds his entire world hanging by the thinnest thread. Peirce re-imagines the last days of Brandon's life as an utterly chilling mix of tragedy and drama, rather like what Sophocles or Truman Capote might have written had they been alive to chronicle this tale.

I grew up in South Dakota, a state sandwiched between Wyoming on the west and

Nebraska on the south. Few recent films, especially teen angst flicks, have captured the drama and desolation of being young today with such visceral aplomb, or depicted the iconography of the American midwest so effectively.

From barren field and darkly lit highway to comic book-colored roller rink and neon drive-in, the physical landscape is both colorful and desolate, just like the people who inhabit it.

If the women are defined by workraising babies by day, working factory shifts by night-the men are defined by not doing either. Unemployment and uncertain futures are but two of the many things wreaking psychological havoc on men like Tom and John, who cares so little about parenting skills that he actually feeds an infant from a beer bottle.

Men like Tom and John-even Brandon get their sense of self primarily from other men. This swaggering camaraderie, sometimes derived from ridiculing women, at other times by goading each other into unbelievably juvenile behavior, not only binds them into a cohesive group but also leads to their brutal behavior when they "discover" an "imposter" -a woman named Teena no less has infiltrated their inner sanctum.

"You know you brought this upon yourself," John says to Brandon just prior to the beating that begets a chain reaction of violence.

But even for a self-described dramatic retelling, Boys Don't Cry does play dangerously with some important events, like the murder itself.

In the film, Lana is placed directly at the scene of the crime the moment it happened, something never even suggested in real life.

A private screening in Los Angeles for the real Lana Tisdale several weeks ago upset her so much that she filed a lawsuit against the filmmakers and distributor Fox Searchlight, charging unlawful use of her life story.

And since Brandon's mother filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Falls City sheriff for not arresting her attackers sooner, this is not only the first real-life queer murder story to make it to the big screen, but also the first to line the pockets of lawyers across the country. But Boys Don't Cry is so spot-on about almost everything else, you won't be much bothered by such dramatic license,

LEE SALEM

Director Kimberly Peirce

even if so wildly spun, in no small part because of a cast that, while astonishingly young, is uniformly dynamite.

Swank and Sevigny will take your breath away as Brandon and Lana, two kindred spirits whose fantasies of escape, even stardom, bind them even more tightly than their present sense of entrapment.

A riverbank love scene is among the most tender and erotic ever put to film between two women. Due to some very visibly erect nipples, it's also among the scenes that Peirce would have had to savage had she not stood her ground against the MPAA, who initially wanted to give the film an NC-17 rating.

Sarsgaard and Sexton deserve to see their careers hit the stratosphere, if simply for the 'many moments the terror they impart that fairly leaps off the screen. And the filmmakers themselves-Peirce and producers Jeffrey Sharp, John Hart, Eva Kolodner and Christine Vachon, a dedicated, skilled team who guided this film through six years of land mine-filled bumps and bruises-they all richly deserve the year-end recognition so routinely denied queer filmmakers: Academy Award nominations for best picture.

Boys Don't Cry opens at the Cedar Lee Theatre in Cleveland Heights on October 22. It will open at the Drexel East Theatre in Columbus and the Esquire Theatre in Cincinnati on November 5, and the New Neon Movies in Dayton on November 19.

Lana Tisdel (Chloe Sevigny) looks at a photo taken of her by Brandon Teena (Hillary Swank).

BILL MATLOCK

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 15