Sometimes a director becomes so closely associated with a certain
style of film that everything he does bears certain trademarks. Roland Emmerich
is by most accounts a director who specializes in disaster movies. If something
needs to get blowed up real good, like the White House or the entire damn
planet, then he's your guy. Emmerich has dabbled outside of that comfort zone
exactly once with the conspiracy-laden Shakespeare film Anonymous, which might
as well have handed out tinfoil hats to the audience. It was just bad enough to
have you clamoring for him to make a 2012 sequel or something, but that was
nothing compared to the gay rights drama, Stonewall,
which lends all new meaning to the phrase "Roland Emmerich disaster
movie".
Sometimes a movie is so utterly terrible
that it's physically and emotionally daunting, not just to sit through, but to
know you can't just forget about it. Stonewall is one of those movies. It gets so
much wrong that there has to have been some kind of concerted effort for it to
be that way. Maybe this is an Emmerich plot to make us miss his blockbuster
films just a little bit more? That's a conspiracy only Emmerich himself could
appreciate. The openly gay Emmerich reimagines the Stonewall riots, the
lit fuse of the modern gay rights movement, as just another story of a naive Midwestern
white kid looking to fit in with an unfamiliar culture. So this isn't really
even a story about Stonewall or the people who fought and bled there, or its
impact on the fight for gay rights today.
It's no wonder gay rights activists have
been ripping the film up and down, as it ignores the reality in favor of a
fiction conjured up in screenwriter Jon Robin Baitz's brain. The always-bland
Jeremy Irvine blends into the scenery as Danny Winters (even his name is milky
white), a good ol' boy from a small football lovin' churchgoin' town, the kind
of place that looks at gays as unnatural. They even show classes about it in
school. When Danny is caught in a compromising position with the star
quarterback, already a freaking cliché, he leaves home for New York, Greenwich
Village to be precise. There the clean-cut kid falls in with a multi-cultural
band of gay prostitutes and drag queens, struggling to survive on the streets
in the only way they can. It's a tough reality that Baitz and Emmerich embrace
only far enough to give the story a gritty Rent-style
quality. The denizens of Christopher Street turn out to be far more interesting
than Danny, but that's not saying much. They at least have some personality to
speak of, especially the feisty and vulnerable Ray (Jonny Beauchamp) the
group's de facto leader and someone who falls in love with Danny early on. But
Danny is being pulled into the arms of Trevor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), an activist
promoting social change through non-violent means.
That Danny is so vanilla only makes
Stonewall more of an insult, because the story is mostly focused on his coming
to grips with who he is. A clunker of a screenplay makes this personal journey
as formulaic as possible, with every turn telegraphed so far in advance they
should have blinkers on. For too long the idea of fighting back against the
system is casually mentioned but never once do we feel these people are truly
invested in creating change. That makes their sudden fervor when the riots
erupt a little tough to swallow, and the atrocious screenplay full of clunky
proclamations doesn't do anyone any favors.
In between fist pumps, shouts of "gay
power!!", and Danny's groan-worthy remark that he's "too angry to
love anyone right now”, Stonewall makes it clear that the real life
story isn't that interesting. Or at least it's not interesting enough to make a
movie unless it has someone like Danny at the center, literally throwing the
first brick through the Stonewall Inn's window. Somehow his journey of personal
discovery is more important than one of the seminal moments in gay rights
history. Somehow his story is made to seem more relevant than the few actual
figures the story includes, such as shady Stonewall Inn manager Ed Murphy (Ron
Perlman), who was paid by wealthy clientele to pimp out the gay street kids. Or
drag queen Marsha P. Johnson (Otoja Abit), one of the riot's true leaders
and a continued force in the fight. These characters appear but have little
impact overall even though their stories are far more interesting, and
obviously more genuine, than Danny's.
How can a movie this tone deaf arrive at a
time when movies about the LGBT community are better than they have ever been? Stonewall marks a disturbing step backwards
and don't be surprised if there are riots to destroy every single copy of it.
Rating: 1 out of 5
