The Boys in the Band

◊ ◊ ½

I was actually looking forward to this film. A remake of a seminal gay film, with some of the biggest gay actors in Hollywood, sounded like it might be memorable; instead, it was more meh. The original is a classic example of American theater. In plays like “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” “Night of the Iguana,” and many others, American playwrights have exposed psychological gold by trapping people in a room together and then turning up the heat until they crack and ugliness pours out. This is no different. A bunch of gay men in 1968 attend a birthday party and, as they get drunker, all of their fears and self-hatred come out. The original movie was the first American film to deal so openly with homosexuality and was rejected by many in the Gay Community for how it portrayed gay men. Today, that seems like less of an issue. We have so many varied images of gay people in media, that this one does not seem toxic in the way it did then. That said, I am not sure what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting a word-for-word, scene-for-scene, almost camera-angle-for-camera-angle exact replica of the original movie. If left me wondering, why bother making this one? The acting was fine, and sometimes stellar, though I thought Jim Parsons’s performance was a bit melodramatic; was he intending to play such a swooning queen? In the end, I was surprised to find that I still don’t enjoy it. These men are so unhappy, lonely, empty, self-hating, and corrosive that they aren’t fun to watch, even from an anthropological perspective. A night with them left me wishing I had been drinking as well.