Two Gay Men

Good Grief a film by Dan Levy.  With Dan Levy, Ruth Nessa, Himesh Patel, Luke Evans.  Streaming on Netflix **

Rustin a film by George C. Wolfe.  With Colman Domingo, Ami Ameen, Glynn Turman, Chris Rock.  Streaming on Netflix ***1/2

Good Grief tells the story of a man whose husband dies.  Marc (Dan Levy) is living an upscale life in London, husband to a man (Luke Evans) who writes highly successful children’s books.  Marc makes a living illustrating them.  The movie opens with a Christmas party at which the hilarity seems forced to me, a bunch of upscale people proclaiming We’re All So Good Looking and Talented and Having Such a Wonderful Time while the truth wasn’t quite like that (reminds me of a Facebook post).

Marc’s husband Oliver has to leave in the middle of the party for a book signing in Paris (a book signing for children’s books?  In Paris at Christmas?).  And soon a horrified Marc looks out the window and sees that his husband’s taxi has been in a wreck, and rushes out to find that he has died.  (I don’t mean to be nit picky—actually I do—but I was puzzled that a fatal accident would occur on such a well-traveled road, where cars seemed to be moving at a moderate pace.  And in full view of the apartment, of course.  That whole first scene seemed contrived.  I don’t move among such glamorous folks, but I didn’t buy it.)

Marc, then, is dealing with grief, in the presence of two friends, Thomas (Himesh Patel) and Sophie (Ruth Nessa).  The story moves a full year into the future, and those two have been caring for him the whole time, but they have their own problems: Thomas can’t find a long-term relationship with another man, while Sophie (one of the more obnoxiously flamboyant characters in recent memory) feels dragged down by her own relationship and has decided to end it.  Marc in the meantime is dealing not only with his grief, also with the fact that he is suddenly out of work (since he was Oliver’s illustrator), and the publisher wants its substantial advance on Oliver’s next two books to be returned, since he won’t be producing them.  Marc also, a year after the fact, discovers a shocking betrayal by his husband.  The trio takes off for Paris because Marc has suddenly discovered that Oliver had an apartment there, and in Paris, in various ways, they confront their issues.

So.  Glamorous gay life instead of glamorous straight life, and it’s a plus that Levy is able to portray it in a mainstream movie, as he couldn’t have some years ago.  But I have the same problems with this movie that I would have with one about straight folks.  These people lead what seem to be show business lives.  None of them, as far as we can tell, does a lick of work.  There’s an assumption here that life is fundamentally about romantic relationships, and until they are perfect, or at least extraordinarily good, a person can’t be happy.  And everyone seems to be a victim and to feel sorry for himself, certainly our main three characters.  I don’t mean to be callous, and grief is a real thing, but honestly, one more shot of Daniel Levy’s anguished face as he was undergoing some kind of agony and I was going to scream.  The movie was a downer almost the whole time.  The fact that people ultimately “found” themselves and straightened out by the end seemed too pat.

Rustin is another thing altogether.  It is the portrait of a kind of person we’ve rarely seen in the movies, not the man we think of as the star of the 1963 March on Washington (that would be Martin Luther King Jr.) but the person who got the idea for the march and organized the whole thing, Bayard Rustin.  His was one of those names I’d heard for years (along with King, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Ella Baker, Adam Clayton Powell) as leaders in the black community, but I hadn’t realized what role he played.  He was a charismatic man, full of ideas, and had a complex understanding of the difficulties of organizing (according to Julian Bond, Rustin once said, “Martin Luther King couldn’t organize vampires to go to a bloodbath”).  He was also, because of a Quaker background, absolutely dedicated to nonviolence.  That was a hallmark of the work he did.

He didn’t get full credit for these things, and didn’t emerge publicly as central to the march, because he was gay, and in the various skirmishing that came up among men hoping to take credit, that fact emerged as a liability.  In fact, earlier in his career, someone had improbably—and incorrectly—linked him romantically with King himself, so Rustin spent years languishing in the War Resister’s League, and only came back into the racial struggle when he got the idea for this march as a way to put pressure on the Kennedy administration to pass civil rights legislation.

So this movie revolves around a major historical struggle of our time.  It is also about the way that being gay in those days made people unable to do the work they were meant to.  There were no flamboyant parties for Rustin.  He had a younger white boyfriend who was part of the struggle for civil rights, had a near romance with a black civil rights worker, a minister, who was married but living a closeted gay life.  Rustin largely found solace by hanging out in one of New York’s gay bars, though there was always a danger of being discovered there.

Colman Domingo is brilliant as the charismatic and soulful Bayard Rustin, and fully deserves his Academy Award nomination.  He may have been freed up by the fact that Rustin wasn’t well known by the public.  But the other actors—this is a problem with a period piece—all seem to be doing imitations of the person they’re playing, rather than portraying a human being.  Some are better than others—I thought Chris Rock was excellent as Ray Wilkins, who emerges as a homophobe—but the whole thing feels staged to me.

“It’s like a very good made-for-TV movie,” my wife said afterwards, and that seemed about right.  She also felt—though she understood that the film wanted to focus on 1963—that the movie should have made more of Rustin’s Quaker upbringing, because he was so adamant about nonviolence being central to the struggle.  I agree.  People speak a lot of the religious background of civil rights leaders, but I hadn’t heard of Friends Meeting as part of the mix.

Good Grief is a movie focused on a certain kind of rarified gay life, while Rustin is about a great man who happened to be gay, and who was handicapped by people’s prejudice.  Both movies have a place in the world.  But Rustin is the one to see, especially for that lead performance.