Film Review: Any Day Now

Garret Dillahunt & Alan Cumming, Any Day Now

With the recent flurry of gay rights victories—and even an inaugural nod by Obama—it can be tough to recall how incredibly homophobic the US was during the 1970s. While attitudes were becoming more liberal on many fronts, GLBT people were decades from being accepted by most of the population. Gay marriage was just about nonexistent, unless enacted in private. And 2 gay men adopting a child? Completely unheard of. Gay men were largely judged not by their character but by their sexual activity, which was condemned as “immoral.” Thus, bringing children into the picture was considered less desirable than letting them live with drug addicts or serial abusers.

Inspired by a true story, the new film Any Day Now relates the story of a gay couple who decides to fight for their right to adopt a child. This is not just any child, but an utterly charming young man with Down syndrome, who has been abandoned by his junkie mom in LA. Remarkably it was directed by a straight man (Travis Fine), who related to it via his own custody battle.

Alan Cumming plays Rudy Donatello, a musician and cabaret drag performer who’s as queeny as his partner, Paul (Garret Dillahunt), is straight-laced. Former NYer Rudy pulls no punches, and when he sees that his junkie neighbor is severely neglecting her teenage son, Marco, he steps in to take care of the boy as his own son. An attorney for the DA, Paul is initially less enthusiastic, worried about the potential legal challenges should they attempt to keep Marco permanently. The pair have no experience in caring for children, but their deep love for the boy informs their fight through the legal system.

Some of the most touching scenes in Any Day Now show the couple dropping Marco off at school for the first time, dressing him up for Halloween, and playing at the beach. It’s clear that the men’s love is allowing him to blossom from a withdrawn kid who once hid in the corner to a vibrant teenager who loves to disco dance. When they set him up in his own room, his only question is, “Can I stay forever?”

And yet… The court system and even Paul’s coworkers simply will not allow the evidence that the couple is providing a loving, happy home to suffice. The film shows the degree to which members of the system seem to delight in their prejudice against the couple, in no way grasping the role of love in this family.

Dillahunt, Cumming, and Isaac Leyva, Any Day Now

First-time actor Isaac Leyva does a stellar job of portraying young Marco, whose enjoyment of life’s simple pleasures put me frequently on the edge of tears. Alan Cumming plays what could have easily been a stereotypical role with heart and grace. His character is a fierce advocate, yet funny and tender—ironically the exact guy you’d choose for a dad, if you were allowed to pick. Paul nicely balances Rudy’s more overt theatricality with his stable, consistent, loving presence. Marco intuitively understands that they are the people who love him most in the world, and thus, recognizes where his home is. They form a band of outsiders who know all too well the hole left by being marginalized by society.

George Arthur Bloom’s script, written more than 30 years ago, feels so authentic to the times, and makes us truly grasp just how prejudiced and hate-filled that era could be, despite appearances to the contrary. Musical supervisor PJ Bloom provides an exquisite ’70s soundtrack. 

Any Day Now is one of the few gay films I’ve seen where the focus is on something other than 2 people of the same sex falling in love--as if that were unusual. Three decades ago, it was a novelty to watch a film that had gay central characters, so it didn't have to be all that complex. Maybe it’s a sign of progress than we can finally focus on other, more thought-provoking facets of gay life, such as justice in the child-adoption process. 

Currently more than a million gay people are parents, and 2-6 million more would like to be. Let’s hear it for New England, the West, and all of the 16 states in which these people are able to do so legally, without being tried as perverts. I'll spare you all the "love makes a family" bumper sticker cliches that would make for a cheese-ola ending. But see the film. Just see the film.

The Beaches of Agnès

 Granted, I am a huge fan of Agnès Varda’s work—and persona. And granted, one of my favorite moments as a journalist came when I was standing in the newsroom at the Santa Fe New Mexican and picked up my phone to hear the “Godmother of the French New Wave” calling me from Paris. (I was writing a long retrospective of her career when she received a Santa Fe Film Festival award.) I’ve seen most of her American releases, which are, unfortunately, far fewer than the 46 films she’s directed. Sorry to report that even Netflix only stocks 8 of her films; my local video store and library system, not even 1. Then again, the latter failed miserably in the catalog of Jean-Luc Godard as well (0), making me wonder if the French New Wave was simply a figment nested in the imagination of my film school peers.

Eighty-one-year-old Varda is, first and foremost, a poet who happens to be holding a videocamera. And with The Beaches of Agnès, her autobiography, she quickly brings us into the stream of consciousness of her brilliant mind, regaling us with both fantastic images, filmic experiments, and words rendered so quietly and sweetly that it belies their utter veracity. With the fluidity of a Russian ballerina, she weaves still photos, clips from her films, present-day documentary footage, and fictional re-creations.

A viewer with a familiarity of her oeuvre will obviously take away greater understanding and enjoyment of this recounting of her life and work. Yet, I believe it’s accessible even for the uninitiated, as a tribute to an artist and iconoclast who sustains a strong vision and keen insight into life and art. And a great big heart.

“ ‘If we opened up people, we’d find landscapes.’ If we opened up me, we’d find beaches,” she begins, an apt conceit for the half-Greek filmmaker who has lived her life near the sea--even living aboard a boat during WWII. And thus, in the film’s opening shots, she constructs a web of mirrors propped on easels in the sand, reflecting the incoming waves. These are fancy, gilded, furniture mirrors, large and small, capturing both la plage and Varda’s reflection as she begins the narrative of her childhood. In and of itself, it’s a beautiful installation piece—greatly enhanced by the reflexive quality of a sea of cameras filming themselves. 

Moments later, she sets up family photos on blades of grass in the sand. While discussing an image of herself and her sister in their bathing suits, two little girls appear in current time, wearing the same sorts of suits. “I don’t know what it means to re-create a scene like this. Do we relive the moment?” Varda wonders. But her answer seems less about reconstructing the past (this is not a wistful film like Bergman’s Wild Strawberries), but more about delight in her powers as a magician with a camera. “For me, it’s cinema, it’s a game,” she says.

Some of the film’s sweetest moments derive from shots of her family—her two children and late-husband, fellow New Wave auteur Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). She obviously has great affection for the “peaceful island,” as she describes them. In one lovely scene, the extended family is dressed in white gauze, frolicking with the sea at their backs, while she is attired more formally, in a black dress and jacket. “Together they're the sum of my happiness. But I don't know if I know them, or understand them. I just go toward them.”

Varda employs an unusual technique of re-creating the major moments of her life/films while bringing her current self into the proceedings. In the age of social networking a la Facebook, with gambits toward entering the past as we simultaneously dwell in the present, this seems a very contemporary notion. With the gift of memory, we both do and don’t inhabit all of the times of our life at once. As she states, “I live. And as long as I live, I remember.”

One of La Varda’s most lovable traits is how utterly herself she can be. Her 8-decade-old hair sports its trademark bowl cut, yet in some scenes is colored almost parfaitlike (sans cerise) with white on top and deep red around the ends—gloriously unconventional, and wry. And indeed her sense of humor is continually present. (Watch for the naked old lady.) She also has the good sense not to take herself completely seriously. After revisiting her early home in Brussels and discovering that it is now inhabited by an avid train collector who prattles on about his collection, she concludes, “The ‘childhood home’ part was a flop.”

In 55 years of making films, the director has clearly spent ample time pondering the art of her craft. As she notes, “I think I've always lived in it.” This is obviously so, and without traditional tutelage. She claims to have made her directorial debut, La Pointe-Courte (1955), after having taken in just 10 films in her first 25 years. “I used my imagination and took the plunge.” This greatly flouted convention within French filmmaking of the time, in which training and credentials were paramount. Much of the film concerns images and the context of their creation— the process of birthing, what prompts images into being, the results of their existence, the ripple effects of the filmmaker’s art, and the inextricable link between maker and film.

Although Varda includes reenactments in this walk backward, she also allows the viewer to be in on their making. It’s as if she hopes to underscore the artifice and revels in the fact that we will knowingly suspend our disbelief anyway. In one scene, she sets up a production office atop sand dumped on a city street.

In addition to her calculated manipulations, however, Varda has also wracked up a good deal of documentary work. Early in her career as a photographer, she traveled to China to document the first stirrings of the Cultural Revolution. Later, she and Demy lived in Cuba, where she shot 4,000 stills, which she later animated for her film Salut les cubains. During the 1960s, she and Demy lived briefly in Los Angeles, where she shot a documentary about the Black Panthers and also the hippie-themed Lions Love. Having worked in the realms of both real and fabricated, she seems to beg the question, What is the true nature of reality?

The movie’s final scene reveals Varda’s “shack,” a studio she’s recently built on the beach. The filmmaker-as-architect metaphor made real, its walls are constructed of strips of celluloid from a 1966 film in carefully chosen colors, bathed in light. The structure is fragile yet appears solid. This is a wondrous metaphor, one that seems to encapsulate the artist’s spirit and life. "In here, it feels like I live in cinema," she notes. 

In a 6/25/09 New York Times interview, Varda recalled, “At one screening, there was a young man, maybe 22-years-old, who said about this film: ‘It gives you the desire to grow old.’ ”

Agreed.

Love and Grief, Singularly Expressed

The elegance of Tom Ford’s new film, A Single Man, has stayed with me for days. Based on the Christopher Isherwood novel of the same name, the picture studies a day in the life of George Falconer, a gay college professor whose partner has recently died in an accident. As we might expect from Ford, the renowned Santa Fe-based fashion designer, it proves a work of art in every respect, with close due paid to subtlety and nuance--right down to the glowing tip of its pink cigarettes. And the sets, costumes, and musical score are, of course, divine.

Cinematographer Eduard Grau has lensed the film with a palette ranging from highly saturated color to soft, brown-filtered grain. The action would seem to happen in pastel. Ford’s people are so very pretty, from Colin Firth’s impeccably groomed professor, to Nicholas Hoult’s wide-eyed schoolboy, to Julianne Moore’s gin-soaked fading flower. In stark contrast to the film's grief-infused theme, each surface, everywhere we rest our eyes, is lovely, pointing toward one of Isherwood’s meditations: Sometimes in great pain lies great beauty. As George discovers, grief can slow the world's pace, offering appreciation of the many details we may have otherwise missed: the sensual grace of a mouth, the buoyant spirit of an all-too-honest child, the aching heart of a lonely young man yearning for connection.

Having lived the typical life of a gay professional man in midcentury America, George has been walled behind a web of facades. His upper-class British background has wrought a template of strictures. He has successfully hidden a 16-year relationship with a much-younger man from all but his closest friends and family. And in his obsessive devotion to the surface details of his life, he appears to be even a mystery to himself. The film is set during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, when fear and paranoia have spiked to epic levels, and even in Los Angeles, a gay professor at a small college can be given no quarter. But curiously enough, he and his partner have built an elegant glass house in Santa Monica, bringing the light of day into their quiet existence and allowing those who would look to glimpse the truth.


This is just one of many metaphors Isherwood puts forth in his deceptively simple story. Himself a gay man, he seems to have clearly understood and reckoned with the apparent necessity for walls in a hostile environment, and the deep sensitivity they sequester.

Ford has wisely selected his cast, all of whom turn in outstanding performances. Each is pitch-perfect and skillfully directed by the fashion designer, who solely funded this project after years with Yves St.-Laurent and Gucci. Foremost is Colin Firth, who's received an Oscar nod for his adept rendering of the complex character behind the horn-rims. And young actor Nicholas Hoult positively glows in his white mohair sweater and crème-colored jeans, the epitome of twink naivete.

A film littered with such seductive trappings is a pleasure to watch. But observing what lies beneath as it bubbles to the surface like a lily bursting through blacktop is the real joy of this subtle masterpiece.