 Jeffrey
The drop-dead hilarity of Jeffrey begins early, with a
scene I've longed to see ever since I sat through
Philadelphia , which starred Antonio Banderas and Tom Hanks
as live-in lovers whose romantic activity seemed limited to manly,
affectionate little pats on the back. Jeffrey (Steven Weber) goes for a
full-on kiss with another man. We cut immediately to two straight
couples, watching the movie in a mall somewhere near you, who respond
to the kiss with a fully outraged "EEEYYYUUWW!!!"
Jeffrey is full of sketch comedy like that, but it's
inordinately fine sketch comedy. Based on the noted play, it follows
the travails of a hero who, out of terror of AIDS, has given up on all
of this sex business. Like every other celibate in recorded history,
his love life immediately blossoms.
Steve (Michael T. Weiss), whom Jeffrey meets at the gym, is very cute,
very available and very HIV-positive. Jeffrey is fearful but has the
example of his chum Sterling (Patrick Stewart), who is himself carrying
on an affair with an HIV-positive man. If there were any one reason to
see Jeffrey , it would be Stewart, who must have honed his
sarcasm during all of those years he spent frowning at a blue-screen
pretending it was a Romulan spaceship.
Stewart is funny , f in the grand tradition of the bitchery
of such performers as Franklin Pangborn, Jonathan Harris and the late,
great Gale Gordon. (Planning his own funeral, he anticipates dishery
even there: "I want an open casket. Let them say it to my face.")
Even Stewart has to take a back seat to Sigourney Weaver, who has ten
minutes of ballsy farce. As Debra Moorhouse, a "New Age Evangelist,"
Weaver works her seminar, using mock compassion to stroke a confession
out of pigeons and then deriding them as wimps. After seeing Safe's
cool assault on professional grief-wringing, it's a pleasure to witness
the profession so broadly satirized. ("I don't know you," Moorhouse
tells a visitor at her seminar. "Maybe you should have low
self-esteem.")
Paul Rudnick wrote and co-produced Jeffrey . Previously, he
scripted Addams Family Values ; and you can easily see the
hand that came up with all of Wednesday's quotable lines at work here.
Rudnick is also responsible for the muted dishery in the "If You Ask
Me" column by Libby Gelman-Waxner in Premiere .
Now, if you ask me, that column is aggravating, mostly because of the
bland hunks Libby slavers over. Dennis Quaid indeed! To Rudnick's
favor, I have to say that until he dropped the mask I never would have
known Libby wasn't a woman.
Rudnick's certainly a wit, but Jeffrey hasn't made a full
translation to screen, under first-time director Christopher Ashley. At
its best, the film's blackouts and frame-breaking sharpen the humor and
make Jeffrey a gay Annie Hall. The
show-stopping "but, seriously, folks" moments, however, haven't been
filtered for the screen. In one scene describing first sex, and in
another during which Jeffrey is roughed up by queer-bashers, the pathos
is resistible.
Weber, who was in Single White Female , is personable,
likable and often rather a blank. He's just not screen-sized somehow.
In the company of people like Stewart and Weaver, all Weber can do is
sit back and let them take over. He's a second banana in the lead,
which is something else that works better on stage than it does in a
movie.
The supporting cast is a delight. Both Nathan Lane as a desperately
horny priest and Peter Bartlett as a seen-it-all casting director are
notable. Weiss, as Steve, is ridiculously handsome in that way you
associate with the leading man in a gay romance. Bryan Batt has a
running gag as a goofy chorus boy gainfully employed in one of those
from-here-to-eternity musicals (Cats , in this case).
Jeffrey doesn't work every moment on screen, but many of
the best comedies are kind of unkempt. It does help to consider the
subject matter: In movies sympathetic to gays, as with dancing dogs,
it's not how well the dog dances, it's that he dances at all. Here's a
film bold enough to start out with the kiss, which should chase out the
bigots. This kind of comedy is too good for them, anyway.
[ Movies Central | MetroActive ]
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
Copyright © 1996 Metro Publishing, Inc.