Movie Review	Movie Reviews Archive

History Boys
Directed by Nicholas Hytner
Starring Samuel Anderson, James Corden, Stephen Campbell Moore, Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour.

How to order

Dreamgirls
Directed by Bill Condon
Starring Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy, Jennifer Hudson, Beyoncé Knowles.

How to order

Homosexual sensibility-- whatever that is-- takes a bizarrely broad array of manifestations. What exactly do Mildred Pierce, Dame Edna, Auntie Mame, Marilyn Monroe, the Cockettes, Billie Holiday, Tosca, Paris Hilton, Patachou, Gloria Gaynor, and The Importance of Being Earnest have in common? Well, all are beloved of some subset of queens and idolized for their qualities of extravagance, silliness, satire, parody, wit, dumbness, daring, musical beat, tackiness, or sheer beauty. And really, that's just Tosca.

T

View our poll archive

wo films-- both released Christmas week and now out simultaneously on DVD-- are each the epitome of gay sensibility. Both are loved by queens, lauded in the gay press, and could not be more different in the most profound and curious ways. We're talking about The History Boys and Dreamgirls-- whose titles resonate with (and could be gendered reflections of) one another, like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, Victor/Victoria, Justin and Kelly (now that's camp). Both are great in their different ways, and quite gay. To be fair, there's some overlap. All of the comely young men in The History Boys are very, very dreamy and certainly Dreamgirls is even more interested in history than in music-- which is odd since it is a musical. But both films are the logical, inevitable conclusions of threads of gay sensibility that have been shaping Euro-American culture for at least the last century.

The History Boys-- written by Alan Bennett and directed by Nicholas Hytner-- is based on the London and New York stage hit on which they both collaborated. As with all of Bennett's work, it is informed, witty, smart, and mostly brilliant. In the past, Bennett has written works with overtly gay content. There was the 1987 film Prick Up Your Ears, about playwright Joe Orton. Other times, Bennett's gay content was coded-- such as in The Madness of George III (whose meditations on the nature of the monarch's mal-ady ran in clear parallel to the AIDS epidemic). But here Bennett reaches a certain apotheosis of queerness.

The History Boys is a snapshot of Thatcher's 1983 Britain seen through a group of working- and middle-class youths training for their entrance exams for Oxford and Cambridge. Suddenly they are caught between two teachers, one old, one new. They can't help feeling devotion for Hector (Richard Griffiths)-- the eccentric, flamingly gay (but heterosexually married) teacher who coaches them through "general studies"-- a course that seems to include memorizing a great deal of poetry by W.H. Auden and A.E. Housman and performing scenes from Brief Encounter and Now, Voyager. But as well, they are dazzled by the young Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), a more closeted gay teacher who will actually get them into Oxbridge, but who is filling their heads with academic shorthand that will impress testers but shortchange them intellectually.

The idea that enacting scenes from Now, Voyager will better prepare you for life is, in itself, fabulously gay. But more than that, Bennett constructs a universe of gay male pedagogy. Both teachers are gay, and though the boys, save one, are all heterosexual, they are very gay friendly-- none of them seem to mind getting felt-up by Hector. Bennett cuts the Gordian Knot of debates over Socrates and Plato's Symposium. The issue here isn't really about pederasty (in the pedagogical sense) but rather about the kinds of pederasts-- those Socratic ones who help you grow as a person, or those sophists who get you into good schools through intellectual tricks. This being Thatcher's England you can imagine who wins out, and for Bennett that's the tragedy.

Aside from really, really cute boys doing impersonations of Bette Davis and Celia Johnson, offering to suck off their teachers, and generally being overly friendly with one another, this is a very gay film. Bennett's homosexual sensibility-- wedded with gay content, to boot-- permeates the script. While his writing style is reminiscent of Oscar Wilde's-- how else can you explain the placement of "cunthound" and "compound-adjective" in an offhanded witticism?-- his intention is quite different. Wilde's plays are elaborate facades intended to expose a concealed truth by concealing it more-- this is the essence of camp, which British artist Philip Core describes as "the lie that tells the truth." But Bennett, under a barrage of pithiness, is more interested in lecturing us, telling us what to think. It's a brilliant lecture-- and certainly profoundly queer since it posits gayness as central to private and public life-- proving that the love of boys is at the root of teaching them and that this is a profoundly good, wonderful act.

Blacks and the blues

Dreamgirls is less of an old fashioned musical-- although it is certainly a gay cult favorite in that genre-- than a lesson in African-American musical history. Tracking the career of a girl group that becomes superstar huge-- obviously The Supremes-- Dreamgirls is more interested in the details of how career is shaped by attitudes about race than the career itself.

As a musical Dreamgirls is a downbeat 42nd Street with a redemptive ending. Deena Jones (Beyoncé Knowles), Effie White (Jennifer Hudson), and Lorrell Robinson (Anika Noni Rose) move from backing James Brown-like James "Thunder" Early (Eddie Murphy) to headlining the show. As "The Dreams," they become a crossover hit, but only after enormous artistic compromises: beautiful Deena is moved to lead singer and Effie-- the strongest singer, but too outspoken and too heavy for their new image-- is finally kicked out for a thinner, more feminine Dream replacement. Along the way Deena finds heartbreak and Effie hits the skids, only to come back as an R&B star who belts out a series of diva showstoppers. It is this tradition of diva-narrative-- a gay staple from Aeschylus's Medea through Puccini's Tosca to the present-- that forms the gay heart of Dreamgirls.

The book and the lyrics here are by Tom Eyen-- the only mainstream work by the legendary writer who, along with Robert Patrick and some other, mostly gay writers invented off-off-Broadway in the 1960s. While the writing is ambitious it always feels cramped. The pastiche songs (with music by Henry Krieger) are accurate but have little wit. Eyen understands the material-- and he provides perceptive, sly commentary along the way. But so much of Dreamgirls is at cross-purposes. The emotional thrill of it should be the songs and the singing, but they are always on the down side of disappointing. The intellectual thrill should be its grand, sweeping survey of American music history, and when this succeeds it is terrific. We get a crash course on the effects of the 1967 urban riots on popular music, the payola scandal, white singers "covering" black hits. But too often the history feels slack, overly easy. Maybe it's no surprise, since this is a Broadway musical dumbed-down for white people about how black music was dumbed-down for white people.

Bill Condon-- who gave us the brilliant 1998 Gods and Monsters and the excellent 2004 Kinsey-- directs. His usual intelligence is at work here-- and much of the film looks great-- but the material prevents him from soaring. The gay appeal of Dreamgirls-- and it made the cover of many gay magazines-- is clearly diva-driven. That's enough to make it really gay, but not to make it really good.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com