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All Over the Guy (2001)
All Over One Guy, the Rest Not So Much
The embarrassment of riches in low-budget gay movies online - embarrassment, anyway - finds its typically problematic expression in All Over the Guy (2001). If good intentions were the end-all, this one would be stellar - a labour of love you could really love. Simultaneously engaging and plodding, this is a messily balanced one straight couple-one gay couple ensemble that sidesteps its most important asset: Richard Ruccolo's Tom. Tom is intelligent, conflicted, searching, pained - an under-achiever by aggressive choice. It's a justifiable reaction: against parents, against expectations of the world, against intimacy. With Tom, it's not just that still waters run deep. It's that they never stop churning. Ruccolo brings an mesmerizingly unsettled drive to his role: he offers imbues this picture with most of the true emotional motion it desperately needs. I wish the writer, Dan Bucantinsky, who also plays the lead role (Eli), had seen this and given up focussing so much on himself. It's Eli's movie, but it's Tom's world. My heart sank when Bucatinsky and the director, Julie Davis, kept glueing the narrative back onto the predictable path of Tom coming around to Eli. What the writer and director view as "damaged" is constantly undermined, in Ruccolo's performance, by a rational, three-dimensional complexity. The last scene is particularly egregious (spoiler alert). When Eli threatens to walk away one last time, the movie makes Tom leapfrog a huge kiss onto Eli. Watching this unconvincing surrender, we are jarringly reminded of all the other times when Tom has done the same, to disastrous effect. You think that what Tom would do here, for once, is not kiss Eli, but eventually plant his hand on Eli's and not let go, until Eli's hand yields in true understanding of the hard road ahead. It's not Eli who needs to show Tom the way, but the other way around. Being there, hand in hand, is what lovers are for, if our love is to last.
Before the Fall (2016)
Praise, and a Fan Edit The Morning After
Pride is one thing. Then there is serendipity. "Before the Fall" popped up on my Amazon Recommended queue last week, and my first thought was not kind based on the cover art.
"Before the Fall" is so much more - a movie on the nature of moral sentiments. For those who think "Before the Fall" is about a romance or two, I have news - it's equally about goodness. This is deeply humanistic film. If "Before the Fall" has the hots for anything, it is kindness. This is a movie about desire and manners, but which play out as something larger, with Ben Bennett (Ethan Sharrett) as the movie's exemplar. It has a lot of Ben in itself, which is why I wish some things had been framed differently. The review version I posted at Amazon, under Orton Redux, includes a start-to-finish Fan Edit (same review title: "Praise, and a Fan Edit The Morning After").
From the credits, I gather that this production is very much a collective effort. In which case, let's praise everyone, starting with director Byrum Geisler. The filmmakers have created a distinctive world worth visiting more than once. Supported every step of the way by Adi Goldstein's stellar score, and Brandon Garza's expansive cinematography, the mise-en-scene achieves something extraordinary: a narrative that is consistently, pleasurably immersive. The movie's awareness extends to its class consciousness - as the two romances inspired by "Pride and Prejudice" unfold, a widening social milieu opens. Unexpected is what is not said from in scenes short and long: desire mingles with human flaws, injustice with justice, and poverty with outreach emotional and otherwise. "Before the Fall" achieves a memorably resonant interplay of flawed, beautiful characters who are more often than not (to steal a page from "Before the Fall") also good people.
Two star-making performances enrich "Before the Fall". One needs more structural support from the filmmakers, and I've gone into this in the Fan Edit at Amazon. Then there is Ethan Sharrett's performance as Ben. No matter where he is in the frame, Sharrett anchors the movie. He is right up there in my estimation with the score, direction and cinematography. When I looked up his other roles, I was astonished how the "Paradox Alice" physicality had morphed into Ben - the gait, the cadence, and a confidence that far rom stealing scenes, does something generous: it enriches the entire ensemble. Sexuality is never the issue with Ben: doing the right thing is. A lot of boy scout rises up in Ben, and damned if every expression of it doesn't work gangbusters. A pleasurable example is the half-beat pause around Lee (Chase Conner) as Ben's smile and the breath falter mid-expression, this from a character who is otherwise well-suited and together. If one can ever will into being the movies in one's head - a long-overdue remake of "The Conformist" with the American surveillance state as the backdrop, or an American take on Karim Aïnouz's "Futuro Beach", or a fun revisit with a new "The Last of Sheila" - here is my one and only submission for the A-list.
If we're projecting, then a message for everyone involved: that your collective investment in these characters not be let go too easily. Ben, Lee, Jane Gardiner (Brandi Price) and Chuck Bingley (Jason Mac) are immensely attractive characters for all the right reasons. Set in southwest Virginia, "Before the Fall" already proffers narratives beyond the main stories here. Before the movie has ended, we take in poverty, nature conservation, the law (including an assistant prosecutor you want to see again), unseen "political buddies", and I can't be the only one who thinks that George Wickham (Jonathan Horvath) wants revenge, rather like Darth Vader at the end of Star Wars Episode IV. A sequel or limited series would let the core quintet loose, now that the groundwork has been laid. This, too, would be faithful to the historic response to "Pride and Prejudice", which has spun myriad, and often disparate, sequels.
The core of "Before the Fall" - a solid hour - is a state of grace. Perplexing are the ways in which the filmmakers don't fully anchor what they've got with Lee and Ben. If the camera can go DePalma (close) - twice - on a heterosexual kiss, then the least the film syntax can do is give back more to Ben and Lee. By this, I mean more than the length and nature of a same-sex kiss, when it arrives. The movie would benefit greatly by loosening its grip on Lee. This would release more agency in Lee via Chase Conner's characterization. Conner gets emotionally powerful scenes, yet the movie lets him down more than once, by not cutting at the right moment, by leaving in an extraneous line of dialogue, by dissipating a shot's impact by playing it too long.
Our focus is compromised from the start, in the way the film sets itself up, then intercuts between Lee and Ben, then throws in a dissolve flashback. The opening scene doesn't do the work it's supposed to: and we are left with a clunky flashback structure quickly forgotten. As the movie stands, we are also left with the distinct sense that Ben is doing the heavy lifting. Greater attractions exists between Lee and an anonymous pick-up (take it as a pun), and especially between Lee and Chuck. The way around these competing relationships is not to reduce their screen time, but to achieve greater emphasis elsewhere: accentuate what is already there - a deeper pain in Lee and a stronger evolving interest in Ben.
Within the confines of the film, and assuming no other footage, such an alternate structure exists. See the Fan Edit at Amazon, based on Amazon time signatures. Since my intention was only to build with what I saw, I take nothing away from the filmmakers behind and in front of the camera, and what they accomplished, which is why the review there is, and will remain, 5-stars.