With The Kids Are All Right, Black Swan, I Am Love, Chloe, The Runaways and a few others, 2010 was easily the year of the lesbian-themed picture. Moreover, both the critical and box-office success of those movies paved the way for another batch in 2011—with Circumstance, Pariah and Albert Nobbs leading the pack. (The latter two actually open in Chicago in January.) The U.S. remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (reviewed in this issue) also featured a prominent bisexual character in its title. Locally, writer-director Wendy Jo Carlton's romantic lesbian dramedy-musical Jamie and Jessie Are Not Together won critical kudos from Roger Ebert and premiered at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
Other aspects of the LGBT experience were prominent in the movies of 2011 with the gay love story Weekend, the excellent transgender teen drama Gun Hill Road and the searing AIDS documentary We Were Here being just a few examples. We Were Here was one of the centerpiece screenings at Reeling, Chicago's gay and lesbian film festival that celebrated 30 years and continues to present a plethora of LGBT-centric movies that aren't likely to show up anywhere else in town. Filmmaker Stephen Cone's opening-night selection, The Wise Kids, was also rapturously received by both queer and mainstream audiences when it premiered as the Opening Night presentation at the fest (and here's hoping it gets a Chicago theatrical run in 2012). The documentary Making the Boys, which had its local premiere at the Chicago Cultural Center under the behest of the Queer Film Society (of which I'm president) also had the support of an enthusiastic audience, hungry for rarely seen LGBT-themed movies—all of which bodes well for more of the same in 2012. (I'll have a preview of the year ahead in our mid-January movie issue.)
I'd like to point out—as I do every year—that all these "Best of" lists are completely subjective. My list tends to shift around with repeat viewings and reconsiderations. With that, here's my list of the 10 best LGBT movies of 2011 (in preferential order):
1. Weekend: Gay writer-director Andrew Haigh's Weekend is a stunningly simple, nearly perfect example of a romance movie whose burgeoning couple just happens to be gay. It's being tagged "a gay Before Sunrise" but Russell (Tom Cullen) and hook-up Glen (Chris New) are anything but tragic beauties in a world that certainly isn't filled with dappled sunsets and rosy dawns. They're just two regular Joes whose lives unexpectedly intersect and who find themselves hopelessly in love. It's the antithesis of Tom Ford's sleek and startling beautiful A Single Man, but Haigh's movie is just as perfectly controlled and it, too, is a triumphant movie—a gay triumph.
2. Undertow: Two years after making the rounds of film festivals Undertow—the sensual, compelling, romantic 2009 Peruvian film—finally got a theatrical run. The movie, which marks the feature debut of out writer-director Javier Fuentes-Leon (who also produced), is a lyrical old-fashioned weepie that combines the supernatural aspects of dozens of other similarly themed Hollywood dramas with the traditional wife-versus-mistress triangle. It's Back Street with a gay update: The mistress is a man. Fuentes-Leon strips down the familiar template to its emotional core and adds interesting emotional curves throughout and the result, gorgeously filmed, assuredly paced and acted by its fetching cast is nothing less than a Peruvian variation on Brokeback Mountain.
3. Beginners: Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer co-star in this movie based on the real-life experiences of writer-director Mike Mills, whose widowed father came out to him at the age of 75, determined to embrace the "gay lifestyle." This wistful black comedy, delicate and sure of tone, contains some of the year's best performances and Plummer is being touted as a good bet for an Oscar and he deserves it.
4. Albert Nobbs: Glenn Close stars, produced and adapted for the screen this somewhat flawed version of a play that she starred in decades ago. Set in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the Victorian era, she plays a woman impersonating a man, working as a genteel butler in a small residential hotel. Close's tightly confined performance—matching the dreams (not to mention clothes) of the carefully controlled character she's portraying—is far from the big-screen fireworks she's noted for but is a wonder, nevertheless. Although the movie has its missteps, it also has many marvelous performances—including Janet McTeer's, who is wonderful as another lesbian hiding in plain sight. The film opens in Chicago at the end of January and my full review will appear then.
5. We Were Here: It took two viewings for director David Weissman's documentary (which he co-directed with his editor Bill Weber) to break down my resistance to its tough subject matter—the impact of the AIDS epidemic on San Francisco from the beginning of the outbreak at the end of the '70s through the truly terrifying decade that followed. Five individuals who lived to tell the tale and the cumulative power of the stories they relate turns out to be incredibly moving and worth the emotional journey (leavened by moments of lightness, have no fear). It's now available OnDemand.
6. Pariah: Writer-director Dee Rees' fictional feature debut that follows the coming out of a young African-American teenager in urban New York is like the entrance into a secret society. Sultry, powerful and beautifully shot, the film breaks free from the conventional coming-out story with its confident, gutsy approach. The film opens in Chicago Jan. 6 and both my full review and an interview with Rees and Adepero Oyude, the young star of the movie, will be featured in next week's issue of Windy City Times.
7. Circumstance: Bisexual writer-director Maryam Keshavarz's debut, is a moving but familiar coming of age story enlivened by its unusual location: Iran. There, with its draconian rules for women (not to mention its incredibly harsh treatment of gays), the world that the two teenage characters inhabit is filled with danger (and spy cameras), threatening its underground culture with exposure. In choosing to make this bold lesbian love story, Keshavarz (who is Iranian-American) has admitted in several interviews that she will never be able to return to Iran.
8. Gun Hill Road: Esai Morales plays Enrique, an ex-con who returns home to find a wife (the excellent Judy Reyes) who has taken up with another man and a teenage son who is in the process of transitioning to female. You'd better believe all hell breaks loose in writer/director Rashaad Ernesto Green's moving portrait of a fractured family trying to find a way to hang onto their love. Harmony Santana, a transgender actress in her debut as Michael/Vanessa, ably brings off the difficult role.
9. Making the Boys: Author Mart Crowley and a familiar line-up of talking heads (Dan Savage, Tony Kushner, Carson Kressley, et al) add zest to queer documentarian Crayton Robey's entertaining and engrossing overview of the behind-the-scenes machinations of the groundbreaking play and the movie The Boys in the Band, America's first openly gay-themed work for mainstream audiences.
10. Bill Cunningham New York: One of the year's most delightful documentaries from director Richard Press is this portrait of the artistic and energetic New York Times fashion street photographer/society chronicler.
Also worth checking out are L'Amour Fou, Becoming Chaz, Leave It On The Floor and the aforementioned Jamie and Jessie Are Not Together.
Check out my archived reviews of these and other movies at www.windycitytimes.com or www.knightatthemovies.com . Readers can leave feedback at the latter website.
