Champagne and Peanuts: Notes from Provincetown

Capping off Gay Pride Month, Stephen Holt attends the Provincetown International Film Festival, and shares his impressions.
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John Hurt as Quentin Crisp, An Englishman in New York

“CHAMPAGNE AND PEANUTS”
Provincetown Film Festival 2009 Wrap-Up by Stephen Holt

I found my first trip to the Provincetown International Film Festival, and also my first trip to Provincetown, Mass. itself, an unparalled delight. I felt like I had died and gone to Gay Heaven. And since writer/director Woody Allen quite plainly proclaims in his new film “Whatever Works”, the Festival Opener, that “God is Gay,” well, that made everything make perfect sense.

It sometimes is impossible to separate the atmosphere of the city or town where a film festival is taking place from the film festival itself, and in intoxicating Provincetown, that is certainly the case. The GLBT community is NOT a minority in this tiny, historic seaport resort town that is on the absolute northern-most tip of Cape Cod. It is a legendary artists’ mecca. A tiny peninsula surrounded on three sides by water, it is the place where the Pilgrims actually landed and where American Theatre can essentially be said to have been born in the Provincetown Playhouse, where Eugene O’Neill’s first plays were performed, often with the ocean itself serving as its’ striking backdrop.

It is where playwright Tennessee Williams famously auditioned Marlon Brando for “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and where he is said to have written most of it. And his gay ghost certainly seems to be haunting the town as he is mentioned, with pride, in nearly every conversation. Provincetown, interestingly, pre-dates Fire Island.

It is the town where Liza Minnelli could certainly run for Mayor – and win. And where ubiquitous queer filmmaker John Waters and out gay lesbian producing legend Christine Vachon of Killer Films are neighbors, right along-side queer film critic B. Ruby Rich. And they all turned out in force, all hosting and participating in major Festival events. Their delight and their audiences’ palpable pleasure in seeing them and hearing what they had to say was overwhelming and joyous. If you ever wondered where all the A-Gays go, it’s here. Especially during Festival Week.

Out-of-towners and Provincetowners alike turned out in force to experience the smartly chosen films from all over the world with true cineastes’ relish. Interestingly many of the films seem to be love stories of one sort or the other. And many of them depicted, yes, (SHOCK!) straight love stories, too. Though the town is gay and the audience is gay, the films themselves depicted diversity of every kind. The Provincetown International Film Festival is not a gay festival; it wants everyone to know, too. All are welcome here.

The PIFF opened with Woody Allen’s “Whatever Works” which I found problematic, (Larry David can’t act) but enjoyed nevertheless due to the marvelous performances of the glorious Evan Rachel Wood, as David’s teenage love interest, and the divine Patricia Clarkson, as her ditz ball, Born-Again mother, Mariette. Clarkson’s turning from super-soused Southern belle into a another shockingly different kind of Bell of the Ball(s) (who revels in ménages a trios!) is an Oscar Nomination Grabber if ever I saw one. And Woody wrote this part especially for her.

To me, it really is Patricia Clarkson’s film, in the end, as she effortlessly zings all the right comedic notes from Mariette’s zany xylophone of a character, and plays her like a cello, too, with an underlying pathos and heartbreak that suddenly makes the film make sense. Clarkson’s journey is, in the end, the audiences’ as they zip through this surprisingly enjoyable, wacky, unpredictable compassionate film. It is also the first film of Allen’s that I can remember representing two gay male characters in any kind of major way. “God is Gay” says one of them as noted earlier.

Besides Patricia Clarkson’s early Oscar buzz (Penelope Cruz won Best Supporting Actress in another of Woody’s Supporting-Actress-Roles-To-Die-for just this past year in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”) there was the towering performance of John Hurt as the late-in-life queer legend Quentin Crisp in “An Englishman in New York.” This film, if it gets distributed theatrically, would almost certainly garner Hurt yet another Oscar nomination as he brilliantly illuminates the last 30 years or so of Crisp’s flamboyantly gay life. He ages from 62 to 92 or thereabouts. Who says gay lives don’t have third acts?

I knew Quentin Crisp. When I saw his life depicted in the TV movie “The Naked Civil Servant”, I moved to England immediately. “The Naked Civil Servant” was based on Crisp’s memoir of his astoundingly open queer youth, where he paraded around in make-up, hair-dye and nail polish in London in the ‘20s, and was beaten up many times for it.

The movie made him famous. Meeting him, I knew how much he genuinely detested the British and the first chance he got, he moved to New York like a shot. There he was a “Resident Alien” on New York’s Lower East Side for the last three decades of his incredible life. Every line in the film is something Crisp actually said, culled from his many essays, film reviews and performances, where basically all he did was talk. And talk he did!

“The dust doesn’t get any thicker after four years,” was the least of his quotes. In this movie when one character asks him if it is true that he had a million dollars in the bank, he says, “Yes. It’s amazing what you can put by, living on only champagne and peanuts.”

Crisp was yet another gay ghost haunting Provincetown this year. And for every year after, if indeed Hurt gets the Oscar (or certainly a Nomination) which he was denied for “The Naked Civil Servant” nearly forty years ago, since it was then a TV movie and therefore not eligible for an Academy Award. It is indeed rare for an actor to be given the chance to play the same part twice, and John Hurt delivers magnificently in “An Englishman in New York.”
Richard Laxton is the director who assembled Crisp’s quips into a masterful warts-and-all story. When AIDS emerges in the early ‘80s, Crisp dismisses it as “a fad” and is dropped by all-and-sundry. His fighting his way back into acceptance, in his ‘90s(!), gives Hurt an opportunity to display Crisp’s obstinence and short-sightedness, as well as his storied wit.

Heterosexuals were represented quite healthily in the wonderful documentary “Herb and Dorothy” about a married couple of limited finances who amass a world-class collection of art on middle-class salaries. It won the HBO audience award for Best Documentary, perhaps setting the stage for more awards to come this year.

The Irish/Swedish film “Kisses” a fiction film about two tween-age runaways, a boy and a girl, who escape from abusive homes in a suburban housing estate on the fringes of Dublin, only to find more trouble than they’ve ever bargained for on Dublin’s mean streets. Of course, there are the stirrings of first love as their tale, directed niftily by Lance Daly, turns ever darker as they are plunged into the underworld of Dublin’s inner city. I liked this film’s kitchen-sink grittiness a lot, recalling mightily the great British Angry Young Man era.

Then there was “Adam” soon to enjoy a Fox Searchlight national release, starring Hugh Dancy, in a superb rendering of the title role, as a love story of two young people, New Yorkers this time, one of whom, Adam, has Asperger’s Syndrome. Dancy, one of the finest up-and-coming actors around, really arrives on the A-List with his outstanding, nuanced job of depicting this illness in all its’ confounding complexity. Rose Bryne is the girl-next-door who tries to help.

Less successful were “Humpday” about two straight guys who are college buddies now in their thirties who are so wrapped up in each other that they think they can make a gay male porn film. They chicken out at the end, deciding rather derisively I felt, that the actual homosexual act itself is repellant. I felt cheated and insulted.

The Festival ended with the also less-than-satisfying “Peter and Vandy” yet ANOTHER RomCom, this coming soon from Strand Releasing, who was being honored at this year’s Festival with a Life-Time Achievement award. Boasting two terrific performances by Jason Ritter and Jess Weixler(“Teeth”), in the end I felt let down by all the Hurculean efforts of the young stars to breathe life into their bland characters, whose love story is told through a series of out-of-sequence editing shifts. It really doesn’t add up to much that we haven’t seen a million times before. Directed by Jay DiPetro from his Drama Desk nominated play(in which he also appeared), “Peter and Vandy” journeying from the stage to the screen, seems to have lost something in translation.

The most transcendently joyous moment for me was of all things the “Mamma Mia” Sing-a-Long in the 70 person seating of their tiny Whalers Wharf Theatre. With the ocean pounding in the background and the fog rolling in, with a chorus of lesbian voices raised in song in perfect pitch with Meryl Streep and ABBA, what could be more celestial? Or more uniquely Provincetown?