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 Dorian Blues
Sometimes a movie comes along just when you need it, like
a cup of chicken soup or a glass of cold water thrown in
your face. First time writer-director Tennyson Bardwell's
Dorian Blues is a little bit of both. Whether it's
because the straight Bardwell isn't trying to push
an agenda or simply because he's a naturally warm
and humane storyteller, this refreshing coming-out movie
rocked my jaded little gay boy soul in ways it hasn't
been rocked for years.
Dorian Lagatos (Michael McMillian) is a geeky and awkward
high school senior waiting to go off to NYU. His father
(Charles Fletcher) sits at the dinner table and forces
his family to endure a constant oratory on how great Nixon
was and the value of conservative politics. When Dorian
decides one day to disagree with his father, he gets belittled
and mocked, but also realizes that he is fundamentally
different.
Dorian winds up searching for his identity in an extended
sit-com sequence that threatens to topple the film were
it not for Michael McMillian's open-hearted wit.
Though he's got a silver tongue, there's
not a bad bone in his body. He finally works up the courage
to come out to his all-star jock younger brother, Nicky
(Lea Coco), and this is where the film really takes off.
We don't actually see Dorian tell Nicky; we see
the immediate moment after, and it's one of the
best scenes all year. There are all the usual tears and
accusations and yelling, but just when we think it's
over and Nicky walks out the door, the real moment begins
and it's sublime. Newcomer's Coco and McMillian
are two young stars with talent oozing from their pores
and this scene is worth the price of admission on its own.
The two brothers teach each other how to be men with basement
fights, trips to strip bars and fuchsia T-shirts and they
do become men, in spite of their father, who equates being
a man with stashing away nudie mags and drinking scotch.
The film takes the risk of following the story past Dorian's
graduation and following him to New York for college, essentially
tossing out the plot of the first half of the film. It
works because as we watch Dorian and his brother mature,
we see that "coming out" is no more a finite
process than becoming a man is. In fact, the two are the
same. -- Japhy Grant
 Good Night, And Good Luck
George Clooney's Good Night, And Good Luck takes
its name from Edward R. Murrow's sign-off to the
news program See It Now. Set during Joseph McCarthy's
relentless pursuit to rid the United States of communists,
the film recreates a period in 1954 when Murrow and his
newsroom crew explore the erosion of civil liberties in
the wake of the senator's purge.
The ensemble cast -- featuring Patricia Clarkson, Jeff
Daniels, and Robert Downey Jr. -- is uniformly excellent,
granting authenticity to the CBS newsroom. Ray Wise, as
newscaster Don Hollenbeck, gives an all-too-human face
to the damage caused by McCarthy's accusations.
David Strathairn's work as Murrow is prodigious
in its effortlessness. McCarthy is seen via archival footage.
Clooney's direction couldn't be more different
from his Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. That film borrowed
1970s tropes to create a funky pastiche of game show host/CIA
operative Chuck Barris' fantastical (i.e., unbelievable)
biography. Good Night, And Good Luck has the arid look
and feel of 1950s television dramas. If Clooney has no
auteurial "style" yet, he has something better:
a questioning, adaptable intelligence. There are times
here when he may be too smart for his own good.
The communist witchhunt, and the sheep-like way in which
journalists handled it, certainly has parallels to the
conservative rhetoric of today and the equally conformist
stance of our major newscasters. Good Night, And Good Luck
makes this point, though far too subtly. Engaging as the
film is -- and it is a superior piece of work -- it
could use a shot of vulgar tabloid urgency. It's
as distant as a museum piece, a curio.
Which may be the point. The film doesn't make us
wonder how this ugly part of our history could have happened.
Instead, it wonders: Where are the American journalists
willing to take on the received wisdom of the day?
It's terrifying to think they might also be part
of our past. -- Dan Loughry
 Separate Lies
There is something comforting about the perfect marriage
-- the union that seems to be so much better than yours
-- but also unsettling. Intellectually, you know that
there's no such thing as perfect so, you wonder, what's
bubbling just under the surface of their relationship
that everyone can't see? It might be wise to take a harder
look at relationships you're in if things run too smoothly
-- too pat, too perfect. Tom Wilkinson learns this the
hard, painful way in writer-director Julian Fellowes'
Separate Lies (adapted from Nigel Balchin's novel), when
circumstances around a hit-and-run accident he has nothing
to do with begin to settle way too close to his weekend
home in the country. A snobbish, uppercrust, successful
London barrister who is a slave to the truth and the
train schedule, Wilkinson believes he heads a tidy, orderly
home. His wife, a comely, curvy Emily Watson, dutifully
picks him up at the train station and always has a drink
or dessert handy. But she has to work at it. Wilkinson
doesn't much notice the help she gets from their maid
(Linda Bassett). By nature, Watson is clumsy, forgetful
and a bit of a mess and sometimes she drinks too much.
Rascally rapscallion Rupert Everett, absolutely perfect
as a titled, aloof loaf, doesn't care about all that
fussiness, which is she why Watson sleeps with him. Because
Fellowes' film has a crispy arid emotion, Wilkinson's
weeping over Watson's scarf is all the more devastating.
(It's tasty Oscar-bait material.) The affair could have
ended his marriage if Bassett's husband didn't die in
that accident. Why it doesn't gives this lovely, stirring
film its pulse. Separate Lies tenderly examines the delusions
we live under in the name of unconditional, unexplainable
love. -- Anderson Jones
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