Jeffrey, adapted from the off-Broadway play written by Paul Rudnick, DC '77, is the fifth movie this summer that has approached gay life with an eye for laughs. The idea of a gay comedy, particularly one that focuses on AIDS, may have been refreshing when Jeffrey made its stage debut years ago. But in the interim, movie-goers have been treated to well-crafted comedies that don't have to justify their gay sensibilities - movies like Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, Unzipped, and even this summer's mass-market hit, Clueless. In comparison, Jeffrey feels dated. When two men kiss at the start of the movie, the camera cuts to a "Middle-America" movie theater, to gauge audience reaction. While the men gag on their popcorn, the women sigh sympathetically. It's funny in theory - but, like the entire movie, it comes off as contrived and self-conscious. Jeffrey is a movie straining to sell an unrealistic story to an audience that has either already heard it, or doesn't want to.
The premise of the movie is that Jeffrey, a gay, 30-something New Yorker, has decided to give up sex. It's not an outrageous reaction. The opening montage of the movie shows just how absurd safe sex has become: one of Jeffrey's bedfellows comes swathed in Saran Wrap and surgical masks, another demands the results of Jeffrey's last three HIV tests. It's a difficult sacrifice for Jeffrey to make ("I love sex. It's just one of the truly great ideas," he confesses), but confronted with a life of latex, Jeffrey chooses abstinence over anxiety.
The next question is, how will Jeffrey divert himself from the temptations of the flesh? By joining a gym, naturally, and surrounding himself with hoards of sweating, muscle-bound gay men. And wouldn't you know it, the Cro-Magnon bodybuilder that Jeffrey asks to spot him on the bench-press just happens to be the man of his dreams. Jeffrey and his gym-buddy are soon locking lips in the middle of the weight-room floor. But Jeffrey, remembering that he has sworn off sex (oops!), panics and flees the gym. Outside, when nearly run over by a car, he is helped to his feet by, of all people, Mother Theresa (whose appearance is a totally inexplicable motif). All this occurs in the first five minutes. If it is sounds farcical, it is.
But not entirely, or at least not intentionally. The problem is that the movie can't decide whether it wants to lampoon gay life or sentimentalize it. Granted, Rudnick does provide moments of brilliant satire. The best is when Jeffrey imagines calling his parents to ask for advise about his stalled sex life ("What about a jerk-off club?" inquires his gray-haired mother as she frosts a cake). But most of these farcical sketches are totally independent of the plot. And though they add humor to an otherwise flat movie, they distract from the story itself, which wants to be taken seriously. It only makes matters worse that the plot itself is more absurd than anything else the movie takes aim at. For example, we're supposed to believe that Jeffrey would spend the entire movie declining a date with the same man that he kissed in the first scene of the movie?
And not only can the movie not decide whether it wants to be serious or funny, a single scene can't even sustain a consistent tone. When Jeffrey is threatened by street thugs in a dark alley (alone, in a dark alley, in New York? Hello?), he replies, "I have weapons too:M-Jirony, adjectives, and eyebrows." After that remark, I wanted to beat him up. But the thugs manage quite well, pounding him to the ground. It's brutal. For the first time in the film, you're really involved in the movie; you feel for Jeffrey. And then he starts singing Gershwin. The camera pans up to an open window above the alley where a random woman leans out her window and starts to sing with him, à la West Side Story. And during all of this, Jeffrey is lying with his head in (I'm not making this up) Mother Theresa's lap. Now, there's good camp, and there's bad camp. And as far as I'm concerned, this camp should head back to Jersey where it belongs.
The movie also suffers from its use of straight actors who play visibly heterosexual characters elsewhere. Jeffrey is played by Steven Weber, the woman-chasing pilot from the TV show Wings. And Star Trek's Captain Picard plays an interior decorator (sorry, "designer"). But more interestingly, Picard's boyfriend, Darius, is played by the same actor who starred as Liberace in one of those trashy TV miniseries-biographies a few years back. (Somehow, it makes sense that Liberace would play a chorus-boy who wears his Cats costume home at night.) The one pleasant surprise of the movie is Michael T. Weiss, who portrays the butch gym-boy Steve, Jeffrey's romantic antagonist. Weiss lends credibility to a role that could have been a mere cipher, though I'm tempted to give partial credit to his fine leather jacket; despite numerous star cameos, the jacket makes the most memorable appearance in the whole movie. And that says enough right there.
Photo courtesy York Square Cinema.
Copyright 1995, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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