Chris Knipp
07-07-2015, 03:51 PM
Dito Montiel: BOULEVARD (2014)
Robin Williams' last film is a mixed success, and decidedly not for everyone.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/blvd.jpg
ROBERTO AGUIRE AND ROBIN WILLIAMS IN BOULEVARD
Late bloomer
Boulevard's topic seems a retro one for this day and age when gay films are more like Ira Sach's full-throated, complex, and almost mainstream Love Is Strange, which depicts fallout from lingering prejudice but still is full of joy and openness. Dito Montiel's movie, his fifth, tells a late-in-life gay coming-out story. Nolan (Robin Williams), a married Nashville branch bank officer more reliable than ambitious, is a closeted gay man who's suddenly gone on a gay hustler called Leo (Roberto Aguire). Apparently the first time he has acted on his feelings, though he is sixtyish, this comes about almost by accident. On a sudden whim after a visit to his dying father in a nursing home, Nolan cruises the titular boulevard of prostitutes, where he accidentally grazes the young man with his Mercedes. In the stifled "date" that follows Nolan only talks to Leo (with his shirt off) in a motel room, but he latches onto him obsessively from then on, seeking tenderness but totally eschewing sex. Some kind of floodgate is quietly opening in the life of this sad, quiet, repressed man. Of course there still are closeted gay men, but the film skirts cliché.
Nolan's new obsession may point toward emotional liberation but plays out as an growing disaster, gradually disrupting his job and his marriage through a series of embarrassing situations and scenes caused by his new obsession. He gets a hard-to-explain black eye when he intercedes to protect Leo from a beating by his pimp Eddie (Giles Matthey). He makes unconvincing excuses at work and to his wife, ironically named Joy (Kathy Baker), for increasingly noticeable missteps his passion leads him into -- irregularities a more worldly and less buttoned-up man could probably get away with. Nolan tries to help the young man, but his relationship with him is confused and conflictual, though it develops some tenderness even on Leo's side. Male prostitutes long for tenderness and love, but they are not ready for jobs and college or even for hugs without sex. Nolan incidentally loves his wife, and she loves him; they just sleep in separate bedrooms. Their non-marriage is a tender one, even if it's a sham. He brings the same tenderness to Leo, this time attracted physically, but unable to act on that. Sex is what Leo's primed for, so he can't understand Nolan's behavior toward him. .
There is much cluelessness here. Tactlessly, in a heavily sentimental and unnecessary scene, Nolan reveals his age-twelve sexual self-realization to his mute bedridden father. Wishful or deluded, Joy keeps planning a cruise for her and Nolan to go on. Nolan's best friend Winston (Bob Odenkirk) is a college teacher and serial seducer of girl students, yet he's unaware of Nolan's secret, and sees his marriage as ideal. Nolan is pushed by his bank's supervisor to interview for a a similar job. But Leo derails everything, though in the cobbled-together finale, all that intensity is cast aside and the cathartic scene, appropriately, is a shout-out between Nolan and Joy -- who true to other wives of closeted men, confesses she married him to escape from "the real world," which he now finally wants to join. The movie seems to be trying to cram in a lot of information at the last minute, and in its haste fudges its final moments.
As the wife and the hustler, Baker and Aguire give fresh, convincing performances that transcend the patchy writing by Douglas Soesbe. Of course it's impossible to avoid awareness that this is Robin Williams in his last onscreen acting lead. He gives a well-meant, intelligent performance, perhaps even as some say one of his best. But the sight of him is haunted by his sad end and by a host of good and bad performances and comedy routines ranging from the manic and hysterical to the imploded and pathetic to the creepy. He tries to avoid sentimentality here and does pretty well, but it lingers in the conception of the character and the casting and certain scenes, particularly Nolan's confession to his father. Williams taps here into the implosion and loneliness he played so well in Romanek's One Hour Photo (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=63) and less creepily and more sentimentally in Good Will Hunting. But while Good Will Hunting was a mainstream crowd-pleaser and One Hour Photo was an art piece (and a very successful one), Boulevard is something else again, a coming-out movie for late bloomers. In all of these roles Robin Williams plays troubling variations on the same sad, sweet, desperate man that it now seems may have contained too much of himself.
Boulevard, 88 mins., debuted at Tribeca April 2014, and played in several other festivals, including Frameline and Miami's Gay and Lesbian. The US theatrical release date is Friday, 10 July 2015 (NYC Landmark Sunshine). It comes to the Landmark's Opera Plaza and Shattuck theaters (San Francisco and Berkeley) 17 July.
Robin Williams' last film is a mixed success, and decidedly not for everyone.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/blvd.jpg
ROBERTO AGUIRE AND ROBIN WILLIAMS IN BOULEVARD
Late bloomer
Boulevard's topic seems a retro one for this day and age when gay films are more like Ira Sach's full-throated, complex, and almost mainstream Love Is Strange, which depicts fallout from lingering prejudice but still is full of joy and openness. Dito Montiel's movie, his fifth, tells a late-in-life gay coming-out story. Nolan (Robin Williams), a married Nashville branch bank officer more reliable than ambitious, is a closeted gay man who's suddenly gone on a gay hustler called Leo (Roberto Aguire). Apparently the first time he has acted on his feelings, though he is sixtyish, this comes about almost by accident. On a sudden whim after a visit to his dying father in a nursing home, Nolan cruises the titular boulevard of prostitutes, where he accidentally grazes the young man with his Mercedes. In the stifled "date" that follows Nolan only talks to Leo (with his shirt off) in a motel room, but he latches onto him obsessively from then on, seeking tenderness but totally eschewing sex. Some kind of floodgate is quietly opening in the life of this sad, quiet, repressed man. Of course there still are closeted gay men, but the film skirts cliché.
Nolan's new obsession may point toward emotional liberation but plays out as an growing disaster, gradually disrupting his job and his marriage through a series of embarrassing situations and scenes caused by his new obsession. He gets a hard-to-explain black eye when he intercedes to protect Leo from a beating by his pimp Eddie (Giles Matthey). He makes unconvincing excuses at work and to his wife, ironically named Joy (Kathy Baker), for increasingly noticeable missteps his passion leads him into -- irregularities a more worldly and less buttoned-up man could probably get away with. Nolan tries to help the young man, but his relationship with him is confused and conflictual, though it develops some tenderness even on Leo's side. Male prostitutes long for tenderness and love, but they are not ready for jobs and college or even for hugs without sex. Nolan incidentally loves his wife, and she loves him; they just sleep in separate bedrooms. Their non-marriage is a tender one, even if it's a sham. He brings the same tenderness to Leo, this time attracted physically, but unable to act on that. Sex is what Leo's primed for, so he can't understand Nolan's behavior toward him. .
There is much cluelessness here. Tactlessly, in a heavily sentimental and unnecessary scene, Nolan reveals his age-twelve sexual self-realization to his mute bedridden father. Wishful or deluded, Joy keeps planning a cruise for her and Nolan to go on. Nolan's best friend Winston (Bob Odenkirk) is a college teacher and serial seducer of girl students, yet he's unaware of Nolan's secret, and sees his marriage as ideal. Nolan is pushed by his bank's supervisor to interview for a a similar job. But Leo derails everything, though in the cobbled-together finale, all that intensity is cast aside and the cathartic scene, appropriately, is a shout-out between Nolan and Joy -- who true to other wives of closeted men, confesses she married him to escape from "the real world," which he now finally wants to join. The movie seems to be trying to cram in a lot of information at the last minute, and in its haste fudges its final moments.
As the wife and the hustler, Baker and Aguire give fresh, convincing performances that transcend the patchy writing by Douglas Soesbe. Of course it's impossible to avoid awareness that this is Robin Williams in his last onscreen acting lead. He gives a well-meant, intelligent performance, perhaps even as some say one of his best. But the sight of him is haunted by his sad end and by a host of good and bad performances and comedy routines ranging from the manic and hysterical to the imploded and pathetic to the creepy. He tries to avoid sentimentality here and does pretty well, but it lingers in the conception of the character and the casting and certain scenes, particularly Nolan's confession to his father. Williams taps here into the implosion and loneliness he played so well in Romanek's One Hour Photo (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=63) and less creepily and more sentimentally in Good Will Hunting. But while Good Will Hunting was a mainstream crowd-pleaser and One Hour Photo was an art piece (and a very successful one), Boulevard is something else again, a coming-out movie for late bloomers. In all of these roles Robin Williams plays troubling variations on the same sad, sweet, desperate man that it now seems may have contained too much of himself.
Boulevard, 88 mins., debuted at Tribeca April 2014, and played in several other festivals, including Frameline and Miami's Gay and Lesbian. The US theatrical release date is Friday, 10 July 2015 (NYC Landmark Sunshine). It comes to the Landmark's Opera Plaza and Shattuck theaters (San Francisco and Berkeley) 17 July.