Since its first trailer debuted, and maybe even before that, Stonewall, Roland Emmerich’s dramatization of the 1969 riots at Stonewall Inn, a seismic event credited with kicking off the modern gay-rights movement, has been met with dread. Partly because, yes, it’s Roland Emmerich, the mega-schlock auteur behind disaster flicks like The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day, and 2012, and outright disasters like Godzilla. He’s certainly a strange fit for a piece of relevant political rabble-rousing. (Day After Tomorrow could maybe be seen as a climate-change call to action, but then the C.G.I. wolves show up.) So, there was some trepidation about that, certainly.
But more troubling was how Emmerich seemed to be framing the story, with Jeremy Irvine playing some beautiful, blond angel from the Midwest, sent to the Village to marshall the non-white, gender-queer street kids into action. Which, y’know, is certainly not how the Stonewall riots, which were largely incited by drag queens and trans women of color and lesbians, actually happened. And yet there was Irvine in the trailer, looking corn-fed and fit in a white T-shirt, while various characters closer to the demographic of the real Stonewall rioters slinked around him in the dark. So, there was hue and cry about that, as well there should have been.
Some dumb part of me, though, found myself giving Stonewall, and Emmerich, the benefit of the doubt. I rather enjoyed Emmerich’s other recent out-of-the-box film, the surprisingly affecting 2011 Shakespeare-authorship drama Anonymous, a piece of historical hogwash that was nonetheless lovingly, thoughtfully made. Maybe Emmerich could bring the same personal sensitivity to Stonewall, a movie he’s reportedly wanted to make for a long time. Plus, in 2015 a movie couldn’t be that tone-deaf about its politics and its optics, right? Surely they were just using sort-of-a-name Jeremy Irvine to advertise the film, while in actuality, the movie is the fair, appropriately representative ensemble piece that a story like this requires. That was my naïve hope, anyway.
Turns out, Stonewall is perhaps even worse than some feared it would be—more offensive, more white-washed, even more hackishly made. It’s so bad that it’s hard to know where to begin a catalogue of the film’s sins. Maybe you start with its leering, bizarrely sex-shaming tone, which has poor cherubic baby-hunk Danny (Irvine)—kicked out of his house by his football-coach father after he’s caught giving the quarterback, yes the quarterback, a blow job—being preyed upon by gross, sweaty, teen-hungry older men upon arriving in New York. In two different scenes, Danny cries pitifully as one of these horrible, horrible men (one of them in grotesque drag) fellate him. (He needs the money, and is then turned out against his will.) Danny shuns the advances of any younger man who isn’t strapping and white, particularly those of Jonny Beauchamp’s Ray/Ramona, a queer Latino street kid who has a big crush on pretty-boy Danny.
Rather horrifically, it’s taken as a given, an implicit fact, that Danny could never, ever fall in love with, or have sex with, someone like swishy, gender-fluid Ray. No, no, people like Ray are meant to forever pine in the shadows for American godlings like Danny. But when Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s character successfully seduces Danny, while playing “A Whiter Shade of Pale” on a jukebox no less, it’s understood to be O.K., because he’s at least a somewhat masculine white guy. In that scene, Emmerich keeps cutting back to Ray’s sad expression as he watches the seduction happen, and though Danny is largely meant to be the audience’s safe, easy stand-in, in that scene I think Emmerich wants us to sympathize with Ray.
Because surely we all wish we could be with a Bel-Ami certified twunk like Danny, right? Well some of us do, sure, but of course plenty of other people are instead into what Ray is selling, or any of the other non-white or non-butch hustlers who populate Stonewall but get only a minimal, pat-on-the-head kind of attention. The movie could never even consider such a possibility, though. Here is a startlingly direct exercising of entitlement: “Yeah, I know in real life it happened to those people, but wouldn’t it be better if it happened to someone like this?”
Stonewall insists, with its hokey story about Danny’s personal growth and struggles with his family back home in Indiana, that what actually happened isn’t good enough. That no one will care unless there’s a beautiful young white man at the center of the story. Because who is more wonderful, compelling, appealing than that? Which may sadly be the opinion of certain corners of the market, but who cares about those people. They have plenty of movies made for them. Meanwhile, there are plenty other recent movies that aren’t catered to their narrow tastes but that have done just fine.
What this really is, I think, is the filmmakers tending to their personal preferences and prejudices, and then blaming the system. Darn it, this is how it has to be, because that’s how the world is. We have to literally see a black character hand Danny a brick so Danny can be the first to throw it and the first to cheer “Gay power!” (This is the moment my screening audience, of professional critics, was lost to groans and laughter for the rest of the movie.) We simply must redirect as much history as possible through a white, bizarrely heteronormative lens, or else, the thinking goes, no one will care. People like Emmerich throw up their hands at this supposed inevitability and say, “That’s just the way it is.”
Which, of course, is nonsense. When Straight Outta Compton is earning $60 million on its opening weekend, it’s nonsense. When Tangerine is earning rave reviews and art-house dollars, it’s nonsense. When a show like Transparent is winning Emmys, it’s nonsense. But Stonewall demands that we accept Emmerich’s evasive, self-serving sociology and then has the audacity to ask that we be moved by it. We’re not.
Aside from its offensiveness, Stonewall is, plain and simple, a terribly made movie, with an alarmingly clunky script by acclaimed playwright Jon Robin Baitz (“I’m too angry to love anyone right now” is one howler—of course delivered by Danny to poor, still pining Ray) and a production design that makes late 1960s Christopher Street look like Sesame Street. The story plunks along, until the riots rather unceremoniously, and confusingly, begin, and then the movie hobbles lamely to a close, giving us a resolution to the family-strife plot that’s the least interesting thing in the movie. Emmerich takes one of the most politically charged periods of the last century and turns it into a bland, facile coming-of-age story.
Throughout all this, Irvine looks good in the aforementioned T-shirt, but that’s about all he does. Beauchamp at least offers some glimmers of life, but Ray is so tragically, meanly written that there’s only so much that can be done to turn him into a human. Real-life Stonewall hero Marsha P. Johnson only gets a little screen time, and is played as comic relief, flatly, by Otoja Abit. Many of the characters who don’t look and sound like Danny are rendered as jokes, silly people who need Danny’s relatively rugged masculinity to get them angry and organized. Stonewall is ultimately yet another cartoonish fantasy about white saviors and square-jawed heroes; it should be called Independence Gay.
Maybe it’s asking too much to get a smart, accurate Stonewall movie. After all, a heck of a lot of straight history has been schmaltzified by Hollywood, neatly edited and tidied up, so why shouldn’t gay history get the same shitty treatment? But that this film was directed by a gay man, written by a gay man, with an obvious intent to educate, uplift, and inspire, in this particular political climate, and is still so maddeningly, stultifyingly bungled serves only to show us how ridiculous the concept of a monolithic “gay community” really is. Stonewall at least does that bit of good: it illustrates how systems of privilege and prejudice within a minority can be just as pervasive and ugly as anything imposed from the outside. And that’s an outrage. So how long until someone throws a brick through the screen?
