06/12/97
MOVIE REVIEW: Love! Valour! Compassion!

'Love!' and a great cast are all you need

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

**** (out of five)
Starring Jason Alexander, Randy Becker, Stephen Bogardus, John Glover, John Benjamin Hickey, Justin Kirk, Stephen Spinella. A Fine Line Features release written by Terrence McNally from his play, directed by Joe Mantello. Rated R, contains nudity, sexual situations, profanity, adult themes. Running time: 115 minutes.

Terrence McNally's Tony Award-winning play Love! Valour! Compassion!, about eight gay men coming to terms with their lives during the course of a summer at a big Victorian country house, was such a smash Off-Broadway that it moved to Broadway, where it found even more success with straights as well as gays.

The screen version has all the same hands on board -- save for Nathan Lane, who has been replaced by Seinfeld's Jason Alexander -- in a heady mix of poignancy, passion, love and compassion. It touches so many human frailties and emotions and the acting is so movingly powerful that you don't have to be gay to be touched by the film's message of caring and need for love.

Still, I fear the film won't be as successful as the stage version in attracting straights as well as gays, moviegoers generally not being as adventurous or as sophisticated as theater audiences.

I must confess to early doubts. At first glance, the plot seems an updated version of Matt Crowley's '60s smash The Boys in the Band.

But that piece was for a different era -- when homosexuality was first coming out of its closet and the tone was of men who were sorting out their feelings about who they were. The characters in Love! Valour! Compassion! are pretty comfortable with who they are. It's their relationships with one another that are a little shaky.

It's contrived, sure. Here we have eight very different kinds of men, including such stereotyped characters as the hot-blooded Latino and the guy with AIDS who is lost in the reveries of Broadway musical comedy. There's also the yuppie couple, the aging choreographer with a stammer, the blind guy and the identical twins -- one dying of AIDS, who is the milk of human kindness, and the other remote, loveless, haughty, nasty.

Thrust together on the three summer holidays -- Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day -- of course their personalities are going to collide and there will be bickering and backbiting and hurt feelings, romances that will be stretched to the limits and romances that will be formed. And by the end of the evening one can count on the fact that GREAT TRUTHS will be unearthed as they discover their inner beings and come to terms with love and their own lives and each other.

No surprise there. Nor is the fact that there is great wit and some good one-liners to be bandied about, even though the chatty script uses words like "dissembled" and "apotheosis" in everyday speech.

Magical happenings

But Love! Valour! Compassion! really revolves around the three words of its title, and the way it brings these snapping characters together is part of its magic.

Looking for love can be one of the most dispiriting things in the world. Finding it is hard. Keeping it is harder.

It's the compassion these characters eventually find in one another and the accommodations they must make to hold onto something so precious that makes the film so moving and touches chords in all of us, whether gay or straight or somewhere in between. What the play reaches out to -- and the reason it won the Tony as best play -- is the human condition.

I won't go into the film's ending, but if you're not near tears then, you might want to check your pulse to see if you still have one.

Most of the cast has been together so long -- the play opened in 1994 -- that they're beyond ensemble playing. Yet Alexander, the only one new to the company, fits right in in the crowd-pleasing role of Buzz, the teddy-bearish man who buries thoughts about his own impending doom in his passion for musical comedy.

He could have been merely a clown. At one point he comes out dressed in red heels, heart-shaped sunglasses and an apron, and urges his friends to put on tutus for a romp through Swan Lake at an AIDS benefit.

But McNally and Alexander get below the surface to make him a man of undiscovered passions and anxieties, and great needs. It's heady stuff.

Surprises, despite stereotypes

Joe Mantello, who directed for the stage, opens up the film without losing the thrust of the story. The nice thing about McNally's script is that although some characters are stereotypes, they still aren't always what you might expect.

Thus Brown grad Randy Becker's Puerto Rican dancer, the object of everyone's desires, doesn't make Ramon the flamboyant male version of Charo that one might have feared, but a young man of fire, yet with sensitive feelings. He's the one who rails at the men that they must first learn to love themselves before they can love someone else.

John Benjamin Hickey's Arthur hides his insecurities and frustrations in anger and proves to be a frightened man who tries to make amends for his outspokenness. Stephen Spinella is his 14-year partner, who may be at the end of his rope in trying to accommodate his lover's moodiness.

Stephen Bogardus is the host, an aging choreographer who fears he might have lost his talent and who must reassess feelings about his lover when his trust is shattered. Justin Kirk is the blind character, who could have been just an object of sympathy, but shows his human frailty when he's tempted from a longterm relationship by passing passion.

They're all very good, though towering over them is John Glover in his Tony-winning Jekyll-Hyde roles of twins John and James Jeckyll.

John's sin is that he hasn't learned how to love, although briefly he had flings with two of the others. He's one of those sure-they're-superior types who is a master of put-down, but who seems sad when we learn how his feelings are caught up in his first sexual experience.

His flip-side twin brother James is kind and unassuming and tries to make connections to the others. He even finds love, almost too late. Glover creates two very distinct personalities, making us feel very differently about each.

Despite all the plot's givens, Love! Valour! Compassion! doesn't always wind up where you thought it would. And that's the best thing of all.