The Boys in the Band (2020)
dir. Joe Mantello
Rated: R
image: ©2020 Netflix
There’s a risk in adapting a play for the screen. The typically confined nature of the source material can lead to a stage bound feel in the movie. That locked, static aesthetic is anathema to an art form that’s known, after all, as motion pictures. (Take a look at many movies made in the wake of noisy, bulky sound equipment being introduced to the process in the early 1930s if you don’t believe me. The worst of them look like filmed plays.) One of the best examples of a director and movie that thrillingly breaks free of the source material’s stage roots is Miloš Forman’s dazzling Amadeus. Chicago, too, adds a cinematic spectacle feel to its musical number sequences.
Joe Mantello’s adaptation of playwright Mart Crowley’s seminal LGBTQ melodrama The Boys in the Band only breaks free of the source material’s stagy feel in a few key sequences. Each time it happens is thrilling; it injects the wider world into the hermetically sealed one of the story. While the rest of the movie could have easily taken place on a stage, Boys has plenty more going for it to make it an electric experience.
Crowley wrote Boys in 1968 – which is also the year both the play and the film are set – and it was an absolute phenomenon. Focusing on nine gay men at a birthday party who confront each other and their emotional hang-ups as the night wears on and the liquor flows, the show was a sensation. It was the first major piece of popular entertainment that focused on homosexuality in a frank and open way. It premiered just one year before the 1969 Stonewall uprising.
After opening Off-Broadway (it ran for 1,001 performances), Boys was turned into a movie in 1970 which was directed by William Friedkin and both written and co-produced by Crowley. That adaptation featured six gay and three straight actors in the principal roles. In 2018, entertainment juggernaut Ryan Murphy – Nip/Tuck, Glee, American Horror Story, and Pose are just a few of the maestro’s properties – mounted a 50th anniversary Broadway revival of Boys, with Mantello directing. When that revival closed, Murphy announced a film version featuring the complete cast of the Broadway revival, all of whom are openly gay.
There’s no doubt the chemistry that these men built together on stage, night after night, gives The Boys in the Band such an authentic, lived-in feel. As each character shows up to the birthday party, we feel an emotional (and sometimes physical) charge as they interact with one another. It doesn’t hurt that the acting talent involved is also incredibly strong.
The film begins with a knock-out opening montage that has style to burn. It’s one of those moments that breaks free of the stage, and it features Erma Franklin’s smoking rendition of Hold On, I’m Coming. It also establishes an authentic late-1960s mod feel.
The film opens as Michael is making last minute preparations for a birthday party he is throwing for Harold, his friend and sometimes nemesis; they are what would now be called frenemies. On the guest list is Donald, Michael’s on-again-off-again boyfriend who has fled New York City in an attempt to break free of the NYC gay scene.
Meanwhile, Larry and Hank, who have a conflicted relationship, are also attending. Hank can pass as straight and has left his wife for Larry. But Hank is angry with Larry because the latter doesn’t believe in monogamy.
Bernard is a Black gay man working as a librarian in NYC.
Emory is the most flamboyant member of the group, an interior decorator with serious Chi-Chi Rodriguez vibes, who delights in calling his friends queens and referring to them as “she” and “her.”
Crowley – who wrote this version of the screenplay with the help of Ned Martel – based each character on his own circle of friends from the late sixties. They can be catty and mean, but also, which we see as the night unfolds, forgiving and supportive. Crowley may be working in stereotypes, but each character also feels richly drawn, and borne out of the playwright’s intimate understanding of the community he’s writing about.
This birthday party might have been like any other, where everyone eats Emory’s lasagna, has some birthday cake, drinks a little too much, but leaves having only said a few unkind words.
Then an unexpected guest arrives.
Alan, Michael’s old college roommate, is in the city, and he’d like to have a drink with Michael before he meets other friends for a dinner party. Alan is straight, Michael advises his other guests, and, more importantly, he doesn’t know that Michael is not.
As the party gets going – Mantello and his editor, Adriaan van Zyl, crafted a fabulously realized dance sequence, set to Heat Wave by Martha & The Vandellas – the drinks begin to loosen tongues, particularly Michael’s. He insists everyone play a game where each man calls someone that he truly loves and confesses his feelings. Points are given for how far into the call each player gets.
The game leads to a devastating series of events, as each man deals with his sexuality and how society heaps shame and revulsion (which causes the men to heap those things on themselves) onto everyone like them. The game (and the booze) cause Michael to dredge up deep-seated anger, and he confronts Alan about his old roommate’s own possible hidden desires.
The most affected by the game is Bernard. He calls the straight white boy he fell for in high school, the boy whose family his mother worked for as a maid. Mantello uses artfully shot flashbacks during each phone call, as a way to make the memories of each past love more visceral and to further break up the staginess of the main setting.
This one phone call emotionally wrecks Bernard, a man who has to deal with the ignorant prejudice against both gay and Black people. Bernard confronts racism within his own circle of friends. The play, and also the film, use the “n” word at a few key moments, but Mantello cleverly covers it up with overlapping dialog.
Michael Benjamin Washington, who plays Bernard, defended the use of the slur in the movie, saying:
“If you’re setting a play in 1968 and you have a Black character and we’re gonna pretend like he’s not black, then you’re not telling the truth. Just as if I wrote a play about 2020, but Black Lives Matter doesn’t happen.”
In addition to Washington as Bernard, the rest of the cast are equally ruthless about mining emotional truth for the film, which culminates in a cathartic climax. Jim Parsons as Michael is harmlessly neurotic on the surface, but seething with rage underneath. Matt Bomer is magnetic as Michael’s sometimes lover Donald, a man almost as desperate as Michael is to wish away his homosexuality.
Robin de Jesús is fabulous as Emory, an unapologetically out gay man who relishes his freedom to be who he is. Zachary Quinto steals every exchange he’s involved in as Harold, a cynical, self-described “ugly, pock-marked Jew fairy” who laments his fading looks and advancing age. Harold’s acid tongue burns everyone at the party, and Quinto delivers each cutting line with delicious precision. The movie gives Harold an outstanding, memorable introduction – which is also present in the 1970 version – and Quinto lives up to the expectation it creates.
Harold doesn’t even spare Cowboy, the hot hustler Emory rents as a birthday present for his friend. Charlie Carver plays the not-so-bright Cowboy with an affability and easy (pun intended) charm.
Full disclosure: I’m straight. I don’t pretend to speak knowledgably about the LGBTQ community, as I’m only tangentially connected to it through a few treasured friendships. At the time The Boys in the Band play came on the scene, it was hailed as a frank discussion about the inner lives of a segment of society that was all but shunned.
In the 30-minute making-of featurette about the 2020 film that’s available on Netflix, where Boys can also exclusively be found, the cast members talk about why this story is still relevant. They each mention how it’s an artifact in the history of the gay movement. They seem to hint that the shame and self-hatred many gay men felt, as the product of a society that reviled them, is a thing of the past.
I won’t be presumptuous enough to act as though I know if that’s the case. I do know that I grew up in a time (I graduated high school in 1998) when it wasn’t acceptable – especially in rural east Texas – it be openly out as a gay person, and I know several gay men who struggled with it, probably just as much as any of the characters in The Boys in the Band. I think things have gotten better in the last 20 years or so, but I’m very much looking at it from the outside.
What’s undeniable is that The Boys in the Band would still be relevant even if not one LGBTQ person across the globe felt the need to hide who they are. If nothing else, it’s a touchstone cultural artifact that represents the gay community in a certain time and place at the beginning evolution of that community seizing the power to make their voices heard.
Mantello’s film – which is also Crowley’s, who passed away in March of this year, after production on the picture had wrapped – is a vibrant and engaging piece in the legacy of LGBTQ history.
Why it got 4 stars:
- What The Boys in the Band lacks in dynamic movement (due to the source material), it more than makes up for in emotional and social upheaval. This version feels as vibrant and immediate as the 1970 version did, and no doubt as much as the original stage play did. It’s a stark reminder of LGBTQ history.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I want to thank my friend, Rex Edwards, for agreeing to take a look at my review before I published it. As a straight, white, cis man, I always like to get the perspective of someone whose lived experience is closer to the subject matter of the movie I’m reviewing when it deals with a historically oppressed community. Thanks for making sure I didn’t say anything (even unintentionally) ignorant or hurtful, Rex!
- I mentioned in the review that the entire cast of Boys are all out gay men. I should also mention that the director, Joe Mantello, is as well.
- The set design department did a fantastic job of bringing Michael’s apartment to life. It looks very similar to the 1970 version, and (I’m guessing) the original play.
- The production design team, too, deserves accolades. Both inside the apartment and outside, on Michael’s balcony, looks lived-in and authentic.
- Seeing a whole movie centered around a party (even one that takes an ugly turn, like this one does) made me jealous in these COVID/quarantine times.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Like I mentioned above, The Boys in the Band is exclusively available on Netflix, which is how I saw it.