Stonewall

Roland Emmerich – 2015 – USA

Potentially destined to become a camp classic, Stonewall transports us to a time and place that never existed, where something vague but important transpired at the hands of people no one remembers.  One can’t remember them because actual heroes (and villains) of the Stonewall riots are either reduced to one-dimensional stereotypes or replaced by wholly fictional characters in this extremely artificial rendering by Roland Emmerich, attempting to now do for gay rights what he once did for alien invasions and other apocalyptic cataclysms.  The colorful, edgy and grubby street life of Greenwich Village in the late 60s is transformed by Emmerich’s Stonewall into a Disneyesque street set where almost everything appears to take place in a limited section of the city in front of a diner, a stoop and a conveniently placed park bench.  The backdrop is as phony-looking as those in George Lucas’s Star Wars prequel trilogy, where actors in sparkling clean clothes and flawless, head-shot makeup frolic to and fro in front of video game quality backgrounds transplanted onto green screens.  Square-jawed and boringly pious Jeremy Irvine plays a Midwesterner driven away from home by homophobic prejudice and – like Oliver Twist, presumably – is instantly adopted by a gaggle of street urchins.  Some may be hustlers and some may be junkies, but you’ll never know because all they do is flounce about comically in a way that is ostensibly meant to be endearing.  The strongest stuff – however shamelessly clichéd it is – is the early part of the story of Irvine back home.  Once in New York, though, he seems to have no opinions or thoughts about anything except that – despite being clean, bright, likeable and white – can’t manage to think of any way to earn a living except by letting dirty old men blow him, which he endures with gritted teeth lest his otherwise superhuman righteousness be tarnished.  And as the riots begin to brew, this character, who has had no passions or convictions of note thus far except a desire to express the love that dare not speak its name suddenly transforms into a strident agitator, shrieking “gay power” while hurdling a trash can into a window just like Spike Lee.  It’s embarrassing but it’s also an affront to the real story, which was a little more complicated than the film suggests.  In a cringe-worthy post-script, we’re educated that the Stonewall incident’s legacy concerns little more than the annoying and wasteful street parades that people in major cities have to put up with.  Stonewall is correctly known as a marker for the beginning of the modern gay rights movement, when beleaguered citizens said “enough” to endless abuse and harassment and risked their lives and freedom to actually fight back against armed police.  You’d never know that from watching this film, though, because it appears to be tailor-made to be shown in classrooms as a way for lazy teachers to tell lazy students, in a nutshell, that things used to suck and now they’re great.  Strangely, there was another Stonewall movie made exactly 20 years ago and it wasn’t very good either.  There needs to be more to a work of art than merely a symbolic pat on the back to reassure I-don’t-know-who that goodness always wins.