Changing Places
FILM: Boys Don't Cry
DIRECTOR: Kimberly Peirce
STARRING: Hilary Swank, Chloe Sevigny
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BRANDON TEENA (OSCAR-NOMINATED HILARY SWANK, RIGHT) FORMS AN UNLIKELY ROMANCE WITH LANA TISDEL (OSCAR-NOMINATED CHLOE SEVIGNY) IN BOYS DON'T CRY.
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In 1993, a gruesome triple murder took place in Falls City, Neb., a small rural
town tucked into a wedge of the state close to the borders of both Missouri and
Kansas, 70 miles southeast of Lincoln. Among the victims was a 20-year-old
delinquent known locally as Brandon Teena, a raffish ruffian who ran with a
tough crowd and squired some of the most popular girls in the area. But the
youth turned out to be Teena Brandon, a Lincoln girl with a series of arrests
for petty theft, public disorderliness and other such crimes. Somehow, she had
successfully managed to pass herself off as a male for some time. But when the
members of her own beer-swilling, hell-raising crowd discovered her deception,
they turned on her with a vengeance, first humiliating her, then raping her,
finally murdering her. The story captured the fascination of many, and in
Boys Don't Cry, filmmaker Kimberly Peirce has brought her version
of Teena Brandon's story to the big screen.
As related here, Teena Brandon (Hilary Swank) is an unstable youth
in and out of trouble with the law throughout her teens. She seems to have no
adult supervision, though she does have a caring older brother. She already has
taken on a male identity by the time we meet her, an instance of cross-dressing
and posing that her brother presumes is just a prank. But Teena is more serious
about switching genders than her brother is prepared to believe. Although this
particular background is not developed in satisfactory detail, Teena has done
research about transgender surgery and perhaps plans one day to pursue a
sex-change operation. Regardless, she's an instant hit with girls who seem to
take one look at her in masculine garb and begin to swoon.
Pretending to be male one night in a Lincoln bar, she falls into
the company of some young people from Falls City and, after a night of
carousing, winds up 70 miles from home. She's got her hair cut like a boy's,
wears tight boys' jeans and has her breasts strapped flat with an ace bandage
under a loose flannel shirt. She says she's a boy and the Falls City gang
accepts her as one. And then Teena, now Brandon Teena, meets Lana Tisdel (Chloe
Sevigny) and falls in love. Pretty soon, the two are talking of starting their
own trailer park and making love under the prairie moon. But for reasons
utterly baffling, Lana doesn't notice that Brandon fails to bring the usual
equipment to their coupling.
Though it is only incidentally concerned with matters of recent
sociology, the film does paint a disturbing picture of contemporary
working-class youth. Educations already squandered, stuck in dead-end jobs, the
young people in this film none too happily live purely for the moment, for the
rush available in drugs, the buzz provided by a belly full of beer, the thrill
of driving fast and recklessly, the jangle of needlessly courting danger. They
are trapped, and they know it, and their irresponsible lifestyle is a howl of
despair. Mostly, this movie has been hailed for its acting. Jeannetta Arnette
contributes a chilling performance as Lana's completely dysfunctional mother.
Last week, Sevigny captured an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress,
while Swank was Oscar nominated for her lead performance.
And yet, with fear of being accused of critical heresy, and despite
Swank's Golden Globe award, I never found her work entirely convincing. From
certain angles, she passes as male, but even when she does, she looks like a
boy not much older than 12. From other angles, she looks exactly what she is: a
pretty young woman with unusually short hair and a mannish style of dress.
Photographed straight on, her mouth, eyes and cheekbones always appear
feminine. Crucially, Swank's appearance is of surpassing importance, because
the film doesn't otherwise convince us that the Falls City layabouts would
think that Teena Brandon is a boy.
She first becomes friends with John Lotter (Peter Sarsgaard) and
Thomas Nissen (Brendan Sexton III), the two toughs who become her killers. Even
if we suspend our disbelief and embrace the notion that they accept Teena as
male, we haven't any idea why they want to be friends. The problem is
multiplied in Teena's interaction with the women who instantly adore "him."
Even were the person we see here convincingly male, "he" possesses few of the
attributes we associate with powerful heterosexual appeal. Brandon isn't big or
strong. And the script for Boys Don't Cry doesn't give its focal
character other attractive traits to compensate. Brandon isn't depicted as
smart, for instance, or witty or ambitious or well organized. Aside from the
fact that "he's" petite and pretty, and perhaps unusually "sensitive,"
Brandon's just as much a deadbeat as the crowd "he" hangs out with.
Absent such reasons to buy Hilary Swank as a boy, I found myself
balking at lots of details. How does Brandon get that first date with the girl
at the skating rink before Teena even cuts her hair? With all the beer those
kids drink out in the field under the power lines, how does Brandon handle the
inevitable need to urinate? And what is Brandon conceivably thinking when "he"
decides to ask Lana to marry? The psychopathology of such an act is
fascinating, but it eludes successful investigation by this film. Comparably,
what is Lana thinking throughout her relationship with a "boy" who hardly
behaves in a normal heterosexual fashion? If the film were to ask us to
understand that she and Brandon were both lesbians trying to conceal the
discomfort of that fact in their traditional community, we might at least have
answers to some of the questions this film raises. But as best I can tell, Lana
Tisdel's behavior has eluded Peirce's comprehension as surely as has Teena
Brandon's.
All of this is not to say that one is sorry to attend a screening
of Boys Don't Cry. The Teena Brandon story is fascinating enough to hold
you through the film's two-hour running time. Still, the film doesn't really
satisfy. We expect the filmmaker to promote a thesis, and Peirce evidently
doesn't have one. As a result, Boys Don't Cry is a puzzle without a
solution.
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