Boys Don't Cry

Spoiler in this review if you watch the news.

The story of Brandon Teena is a sad one and even by the standards of today's media it appears almost too odd to have ever actually happened. To most people it seems to be the sort of thing that is found in the "Funny Stories of Olden Times" section that your local paper runs when it can't get enough ads in that day. Brandon Teena was born Teena Brandon and while everyone thought she was a girl, she thought she was a boy.

Like anyone who is transgendered, Teena Brandon had a great deal of growing up to do as a person and some very hard ideas to come to terms with at a very early age. She had a clear choice between trying to fit in with the "normal" Nebraskan society around her or taking the ideas enshrined in the American Constitution at face value and being the person that she felt herself to be and pursuing happiness in her own way.

Teena Brandon decided like any strong minded transgendered person that living a lie would be more soul destroying than the risk that she was running by being her true self. She was not a lesbian but a man. It wasn't her fault that she had been born into a body that had the wrong sort of genitalia. Teena simply inverted her first and last names and with her breasts strapped down and a folded sock making the right sort of bulge became Brandon Teena, a heterosexual man. In as much as anyone has the talent for it, Brandon was happy and of the opinion that he had made the right choice, and started living his life on his own terms.

He moved 100 klicks down the road to the town of Asshole Nebraska and did his level best to be a normal happy farmboy, going truck surfing, drinking and romancing women he found attractive to him. He was very successful in all these activities and happy, but as any hardened pessimist would expect, the herd soon noticed that Brandon was different and before long, Brandon ended up raped and dead. The two good old boys ended up on death row for their gender policing activities.

From my looking around the net Boys Don't Cry is apparently a difficult film to review. You can either:

- review the film as any "right minded" liberal would, becoming outraged at the horror of blah, blah and blah or fulminate at the violence and horror of how narrow minded and unpleasant people can be; or,

- you can pull the gloves off and write the film off as unpleasant and entirely concerned with the killing of a "mad person" by outraged citizens.

These are two sides of the same coin. If you are white and heterosexual, you won't really understand this film at all. Because, aside from the fact that in this day and age everybody seems to feel oppressed, the sad truth of the matter is that there is a whole world of difference between feeling oppressed and actually being beaten up in the street for being gay or black by some group of intellectual giants in search of a victim simply because you are not "normal." Sorry - you can complain about this review at your next meeting of the Men's Drumming Group or Smash The Glass Ceiling or whatever - but them's the facts. This film is not really easy going and it does not pull its punches about precisely how badly some people are treated in Western society.

Anyone watching Boy's Don't Cry who is different though - a member of one of the "dangerous anti-Christ" minorities - will understand it all too well, but will probably find the truths that it delivers to be pretty much self-evident and unsurprising. They will find that life and freedom is not guaranteed, that every second that you experience the freedom to be yourself is to be treasured and, ultimately, that you die is not as important as whether you remain true to yourself.

Boy's Don't Cry is a very good film. The acting is without exception excellent and the direction and photography are nothing short of beautiful. Kimberly Pierce allows each shot to linger, to allow the actors to act and the audience to think about their reactions to the story that they are seeing unfolding before them. This is a slow film and one which benefits from its sedate pace to the extent where all of the characters are admirably drawn to the point where they start to assume the appearance of real people. Special mention must go to the high speed time lapse shots of Nebraska which are used as emotive poetic underscorings of the way that Brandon's life is lived fast and for the moment.

Example: Brandon camps out with a male friend under an electricity tower. They are two men together and Brandon feels accepted. The stars wheel over the tower; so fast that you cannot be in any doubt that the good times pass too quickly and are too ephemeral to ever really be caught.

I for one liked Boy's Don't Cry very much. Whether you do will depend entirely on how open your mind is.

Ask yourself these questions after you leave the cinema:
- Was Brandon lying to the people around him?
- Were the people around Brandon justified in feeling that they had been lied to?
- Precisely what is it that you are doing when you point out a transvestite passing in the street to your friends? Exactly what is it that is so interesting?

Boy's Don't Cry addresses some very basic ideas about life head-on, but the aspect of it that keeps me musing is this... where is truth, when all you see is another person's face and your own preconceptions.

Rating: 9.5/10

A very seriously good film indeed. I think I may see it again tomorrow.

(C)opyright Alex Rieneck, 2000.