BEFORE: I knew I was going to circle back to weddings before the romance chain was over, but obviously this one's a little different. Let's just call the scheduling of THIS film on THIS day a little inside joke just for me. Any convergence with my ex-wife's birthday is purely coincidental. (Yeah, right... shout-out to her and her wife, by the way...)
Speaking of which, tomorrow on the penultimate day of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, after the main topic of "Science Fiction" there's the head-to-head battle for "Favorite Gender Bending Role", then late at night it's "Best Coming of Age". (Geez, you'd think that gender bending would be more appropriate for the overnight, once the kiddies are asleep...)
5:45 am "2010" (1984)
8:00 am "Marooned" (1969)
10:15 am "The Time Machine" (1960)
12:00 pm "Forbidden Planet" (1956)
2:00 pm "Them!" (1954)
3:45 pm "Destination Moon" (1950)
5:30 pm "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977)
8:00 pm "Tootsie" (1982)
10:15 pm "Victor/Victoria" (1982)
12:45 am "The Graduate" (1967)
2:45 am "The Last Picture Show" (1971)
Ah, TCM's really speaking my film language here. I love "2010", even more than I enjoy "2001", and I wish they'd make even more sequels, because Arthur C. Clarke wrote more books about HAL and the monolith and the future of mankind in that universe. I've seen every film on this list EXCEPT for "Marooned" and "Destination Moon", so another 9 out of 11 gets me to 148 seen out of 341, which is 43.4%. One more day left in the countdown, so I should be fine from here.
Grace Gummer carries over from "Frances Ha".
THE PLOT: Jenny Farrell has led an openly gay life - except with her conventional family. When she decides to marry the woman they thought was just her roommate, the small, safe world the Farrells inhabited changes forever.
AFTER: Ah, Cleveland, city of lights, city of magic. That's where my ex-in-laws lived, and I visited there several times during my first marriage, even during the period of unconscious uncoupling, which was let's say a two-year process. So probably after watching this I'm going to get some stress dreams once some memories from 1995 get triggered in my brain. Of course I never saw the end result of my ex coming out to her parents, but why would I? Still, with a stubborn homophobic (and racist) father, I imagine it probably went something like this.
As a man who had a wife come out, as you might imagine, I've got some opinions about gay marriage - but probably not the ones you'd predict. I do support marriage equality and gay rights, I just wasn't crazy about those rights being demanded from the woman I was married to. But during the years (long after that break-up, obviously) leading up to the Supreme Court rulings on marriage equality and legislation passed by various states, when I realized what gay people were fighting for, I wondered, "Why?" I had gay friends and co-workers, too, and I supported their fight to be equal but I wondered, "Why stop there? And why fight to be part of such a limiting system, when they could just go create a new system of their own?" In other words, if marriage is an institution, why struggle so hard to be institutionalized?
Imagine there's an African-American guy who's applying for membership in a golf club, and the club's policy is that no minorities are allowed. The rule is clearly discriminatory, and blatantly illegal and wrong by most accounts of rational people. What I want to know is WHY this guy wants to join the club. I figure that either he really really loves golf, which is possible, or really likes THIS particular club because of its location or some other reason, but most likely is the scenario that he's trying to prove a point. Changing the hearts and minds of bigoted people, yes, it's a noble cause, but does he REALLY want to join this club, or just strike a blow for fairness justice in general? Because if he sues the club and wins, then he gets to go play golf surrounded by a bunch of racist people who are already inclined to dislike him, because after all, they passed that rule to keep him out.
Two years ago I was at a high-school reunion and I was talking with a woman that I didn't know well (or at all) when we attended the same school. And she didn't really remember me either, except she attends the church where my father is a deacon, so she asked if I was related to him. Then it came up in the conversation that she's gay, and I asked her, "Then why do you go to a Catholic church? They never stopped regarding being gay as a sin, they still don't recognize gay marriage, etc. Why belong to a club that doesn't seeem to want you as a member, and treats you as a second-class citizen?" Of course, I'd quit the Catholic church long ago, and the fact that they don't recognize divorced people as good Catholics either gives me no incentive to ever go back.
And that's how I felt about gay marriage in the years before the Marriage Equality Act - if gay people (in general) regarding marriage as such an outdated institution, which they previously didn't seem to want to follow the rules of, why were they struggling so hard to change the rules, only to impose those rules of marriage on themselves? They were free of those rules, they seemed pretty happy to not conform, why take that step backwards and rejoin the outdated system of marriage, under which (at one time) women were treated as little more than property, unable to vote, unable to voice an opinion different from their spouse's, and there are laws against adultery (which, let's face it, both gays and straights are often guilty of, I'm betting at least equal rates). That's all tied to marriage. And then if you have gay marriage, then you have to have gay divorce, it's only fair. Why, as a collective group, would you set yourself up for that, when before somebody just had to pack up their things and move out, end of story, both people move on with their lives, no legal fees that need to be paid?
But I go back to the analogy about the minority trying to join the all-white golf club. Maybe he just really wants to play golf, or maybe this is the most convenient place for him to practice on a driving range. Or maybe he just wants the same rights as others, to change the hearts and minds of other people over time. But maybe he just wants membership in the club because he can't have it, and he wants to prove a point. He wants the RIGHT to play golf there, even though he may never tee up. Me, I think he could do much better, find a more productive way to spend his time, but that's just my opinion, and I don't think this comes from a racist place, I just hate to see people spending a lot of effort on pointless exercises for minimal gains. So gay people want to get married, maybe it's because there's something about the institution they admire (even though it's rejected them in the past) or maybe it's for the insurance benefits or the convenience factor over time. But maybe some people wanted it just because they couldn't have it, and were just trying to prove a point, that's what worried me. They could have aimed higher, and founded a new system, but what does my opinion matter?
Now we're going through the same sort of issues with the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts. For years it was very clear, the girls go over HERE and wear these colors and learn these things, and the boys go over THERE and wear these other colors and learn these other things. Of course that's sexist, and that's no longer cool in today's world, so there were always girls who felt more at home learning about camping and computers and maybe there were boys who felt more at home learning about sewing and selling cookies. (I was never a scout myself, but I speak as someone who did much better in home economics - cooking and sewing - when I was in junior high than I did in wood and metal shop.). So there were court cases over the years about whether girls should be allowed to join the Boy Scouts, and vice versa, whether the Boy Scouts had the right to eject gay scoutmasters, little issues like that. Now that their membership is dwindling further, it seems like the Boy Scouts have re-branded themselves as Scouts USA, and girls are being allowed to join. The Girl Scouts, meanwhile, are apparently upset - well, why can't the Girl Scouts adjust and offer the same merit badges as the Boy Scouts, that would reduce the need for tomboy girls to cross over to the other system. You see where I'm going with this, right? The analogy holds up, I hope - why do people need to get the courts involved, fight to be members of an institution that had marginalized them in the past? Honestly, I just hope that all the kids get to go for the merit badges they want, and maybe change the system they're in from within. Change takes time and effort, getting the courts involved seems like a punk-ass move to me.
That's really what we're talking about at the end of the day, changing hearts and minds on the issues we feel strongly about. Getting back to today's movie, we see the point where Jenny realizes that by lying to her parents about her orientation for so long, she's bound by the limitations of their system, she can't be open about her relationship or life choices, and has to still endure them trying to set her up with her brother's friends or their older friends' sons. It's an abrupt realization, probably too abrupt to seem believable, but at least she realizes that she has to force the issue, and tell her parents the truth and (eventually) get them to come around and celebrate who she is. It's a struggle, and where her father is involved, it takes much longer. But, to be fair, she did lie to them for a long time and that's a hard thing to deal with, even if you take their Midwest homophobia out of the picture.
So, as you might expect, this isn't really a romantic comedy, because I don't think most Americans are ready for a laugh-riot lesbian comedy. It's more of a relationship piece, and even there, it's more about the relationships Jenny has with her family after coming out. The gay relationship and gay wedding is almost an after-thought by comparison.
The foil relationship here is Jenny's younger sister, Anne, who comes off as a brat for the first part of the film, someone who was a real tattletale as a kid and then forgot to stop doing that when she grew up. But when she accidentally sees Jenny browsing for wedding gowns with her partner, then kissing her partner and looking very happy, she's forced to take a look at her own marriage, to a lazy guy who won't even do the one chore around the house that he's asked to do, which is to water the grass. Anne develops a theory that happy people don't mind doing chores, therefore happy people have green grass around their houses, so she decides to water the grass herself, and gradually learn to be happy on her own, without her husband. There's some faulty logic here, like I can certainly imagine people who are both happy AND lazy, content in their relationships but still not wanting to water their lawns (perhaps they favor conserving water, or are forbidden to water their lawns because of local drought restrictions). Anyway, it's a blatant masturbation metaphor as she learns to be happy from "watering her own grass".
Also starring Katherine Heigl (last seen in "The Big Wedding"), Alexis Bledel (last seen in "The Conspirator"), Tom Wilkinson (last seen in "Snowden"), Linda Emond (last seen in "The Big Sick"), Matthew Metzger, Houston Rhines, Cathleen O'Malley, Sam McMurray (last heard in "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1"), Diana Hardcastle (last seen in "The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"), Bill Watterson.
RATING: 4 out of 10 gossiping neighbors
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