A GLBTQ Movie Season

Last updated on: December 5, 2015 at 3:15 pm by Kenneth R. Morefield

A GLBTQ Movie Season 2015-12-05T15:15:53-05:00 Kenneth R. Morefield

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I don’t feel clinically qualified to label it a full-blown sexual panic, but the nomination of Brokeback Mountain for an Academy Award for Best Motion Picture ten years ago appeared to cause some people I knew genuine distress.

A decade later, it is hard to approach a film festival or awards season without seeing at least one high profile GLBTQ film. This year’s Toronto Film Festival featured Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl, Jake Gyllenhaal befriending a not-at-all-confused-about-his-orientation adolescent (“I imagine his d— in my mouth”) in Demolition, an even less confused transgender teen in About Ray, Julianne Moore and Ellen Page as domestic partners in Freeheld, and a high-profile dramatization of the origin of Gay Pride in Stonewall. More artistic, but no less gay, Todd Haynes’s Carol showed at the Virginia Film Festival less than two months later.

Inclusion is a fine metric, but of those films, only Carol has parlayed the fanfare with which it entered the Oscar race into any sort of serious awards consideration…and that for the acting. While we may still think it’s daring for performers to take on gay roles, it doesn’t appear that we’re quite ready to embrace the stories these films tell as transcending their niche audience. We all remember that Brokeback lost, right? To Crash? The inability of these films to garner serious Best Picture consideration may be seen as a sign that the pendulum that marks social acceptance is swinging back the other way.

Or maybe, just maybe, we’re a bit more discriminating in our expectations. Maybe it is no longer enough for a film’s heart–and politics–to be in the right place. Maybe it also has to be, you know, a good movie. The jury is still out on Carol. Early returns are promising, though I’ve never been a huge Haynes fan. (I appreciated Far From Heaven for what it was, but my admiration of his films is always aesthetic. They reach me on an artistic but rarely on a personal level.) Stonewall arrived with all the credibility the auteur of Anonymous could muster and disappeared from theaters practically before anyone could be bothered to be bothered by its presence. Demolition‘s wide release got pushed to 2016 after early reviews from Toronto failed to generate any awards type buzz.

That leaves The Danish Girl as the GLBTQ film most likely to succeed. Going into Toronto, it seemed to have timed the market to perfection. Bruce Jenner’s transition to Caitlyn prompted a broad cultural debate about gender identity, providing a name and a face to a still abstract (to some) debate. Eddie Redmayne’s own award for last year’s The Theory of Everything had not lost it’s luster even in the wake of Jupiter Ascending. His co-star, Alicia Vikander, wowed audiences and SXSW critics at Ex Machina‘s premiere. Tom Hooper had already corralled one golden statue for directing The King’s Speech and helped Anne Hathaway (Les Miserable) and Colin Firth (The King’s Speech) score their own acting Oscars. The Danish Girl seemed to enter the pre-Awards-season as the movie to beat. By the time Toronto was over, it was an afterthought, not only to Spotlight, but to…The Martian!

What happened?

Well, making a movie is a strange thing. All the parts have to not only work but work together. Intentions can be good but execution has to match it. I was–and am–in the camp that thought The Danish Girl was so overawed by its own subject matter that it expended all its energy trying to be respectful and forgot to be gripping. Redmayne plays Einar Wegener, an artist who cross-dresses to pose for his wife’s painting and gradually comes to realize that he identifies as a woman. Vikander plays Gerda, the wife who loves her husband enough to allow/encourage him to be who s/he is. Einar seeks and is eventually accepted for the first ever sexual reassignment surgery.

I can point, more or less, to the exact moment The Danish Girl lost me. Einar explains the life-threatening surgery thus: “God made me a woman. The doctor is curing me of the disease that is my disguise.” That’s a nifty piece of rhetorical gymnastics, one that acknowledges God as benevolent creator and yet still allows for gender reassignment to be conceived as corrective rather than elective surgery. Try to parse it, though, and it makes no biological, sociological, or theological sense. The words are all used emotively but without denotations. Was it C.S. Lewis that once opined that you can’t turn nonsense into sense by inserting the word “God” before it?

I would have liked and esteemed The Danish Girl more had it worried less about pleasing everyone. Even if a film’s answers are not ones I care for, I always respect those that speak their own perceived truths to me more than those that sidestep the questions they anticipate.

Toronto International Film Festival

Virginia Film Festival

Previous Post

December 4, 2015

Janis: Little Girl Blue (Berg, 2015)

Next Post

December 14, 2015 Kingdom of Heaven (Scott, 2005) -- 10 Year Later

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category 10 Years Later 1999 Top 5 2007 Top 10 2008 Favorite Discoveries 2008 Top 10 2009 Favorite Discoveries 2009 Top 10 2010 Favorite Discoveries 2010 Top 10 2011 Top 10 2012 Top Ten 2013 Top Ten 2014 Top Ten Best Picture Winners Christian Spotlight on Entertainment Christianity Today Coming Soon Disclosure Disclosure--AS Disclosure--Book Disclosure--DVDS Disclosure--SEOL Disclosure--Travel Dissenting Opinion Elsewhere Emergenetics Essays Featured Film Fest DC--2014 Film Festivals Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2010 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2011 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2012 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2013 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2014 Headline Interviews Laura on the Oscar Winners Podcasts Quick Impressions Reviews RiverRun Film Festival 2014 Television The Criterion Collection The Thin Place To Stream or Not to Stream? Top 10s and Other Lists Toronto International Film Festival 2009 Toronto International Film Festival 2010 Toronto International Film Festival 2011 Toronto International Film Festival 2012 Toronto International Film Festival 2013 Toronto International Film Festival 2014 Uncategorized Video Virginia Film Festival 2011 Virginia Film Festival 2013 Women's Film Festival 2012

Select a Month February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

True or False: Mordecai refused to bow down to Haman.

Select your answer to see how you score.

FALSE TRUE