The catty screeches of the smashed birthday partying queers in Mart Crowley’s Off-Broadway play “The Boys in the Band” were not merely sliver-sharp gibes and ice pic-like verbal jabs for their own sake. They were, rather, frayed confessions of self-loathing, a velvet rage that had curdled into shouts that were partially enough to mobilize gay and queer men to assert their identities in an unwelcome world. Though perhaps necessarily narrow, or specific, in its point of view, “The Boys in the Band” was a manifestation of a social tipping point, produced just before the Stonewall Uprising. Thus, the 1970 film adaptation, directed by William Friedkin, has always curiously saddled the queer cinematic history lines as both a milestone of gay cinema and yet something that some in the community may want to designate as a period piece, as if to distance themselves from a pre-liberation mindset, even so early in what is codified as some sort of gay rights movement. But, regardless of how successfully the loud rejoinder to the straight theatre (and film) world “The Boys in the Band” functions in its own time, indeed a piece that has its characters work through shade as a weapon against others and oneself, how is a re-adaptation supposed to succeed, or, rather, what’s it supposed to mean in 2020?
To run the fool’s errand of divorcing the film from a political context and examine it merely qualitatively, Joe Mantello’s starry-eyed stab at the material is thrilling, an exciting cobbling together of consummate performers delivering acid dipped quips and making the Greenwich Village apartment the film is set in a both dramatically and cinematically elastic playground. The Ryan Murphy-produced picture brings, like Friedkin’s, a stage cast to the camera, this time with the likes of Zachary Quinto, Jim Parsons, Matt Bomer, and Andrew Rannels, who led the 2018 production, a fiftieth birthday occasion for the text celebrated, for the first time, on Broadway, and it’s impressive how well these actors (and their director) are able to translate the Edward Albee-esque drama to the screen. Framed around a birthday party for Harold (Quint) thrown at Michael’s (Parsons) apartment, the fun and games turn verbally lethal with each proceeding cocktail and the arrival of Michael’s college friend Alan (Brian Hutchison), who may or may not have something to get off his chest.
Mantello has a confident hand as a director, returning behind the camera for the first time since the film adaptation of Terrence McNally’s “Love! Valour! Compassion!” He slides between rooms with ease and frames his partygoers both in alliance and antagonism with a surprising dynamism, given how stagebound the material might seem. It is, when it comes down to everything, about a group of people in a single room getting progressively drunker and spilling their guts, and, on a meta reflexive level, a broader (but not too broad) community confronting how severely their marginality in society has shaped their wants, desires, and ability to decide how they want to negotiate that part of themselves in that society. His ability to garner performances that feel lived in, wrapped around the curve of the streets in the West Village and attuned to the temperature of a kiki here and a drink at Julius’ there makes for a compelling argument that Mantello’s film is at least as good as Friedkin’s, whose approach leaned more into the fury, where Mantello’s finds the various shades of these characters in possibly a more thorough way.
Jim Parsons, who plays party-throwing Michael, has honed a new skill in distributing searing swipes in a venomous hiss, having been the one highlight of Ryan Murphy’s braindead Tinseltown fanfic miniseries “Hollywood.” But his acumen is better served here; the frailty beneath Michael’s aggressive, cruel zingers is discernible with a slight turn of Parsons’ mouth, or with the minor fissure in a claw-like read of the femme Emory (Robin de Jesus), or in his explosive demands of the mysterious Alan. Parsons is extraordinary at allowing just enough sadism to show the deep woundedness beneath the alcohol-fueled ribs.
Elsewhere, the cast is quite good, with Michael Benjamin Washington and de Jesus as crucial pieces of humanity to challenge Michael’s (and, in a way, Mart Crowley’s) reflexive gamesmanship. It’s evident that their own sense of difference within this friend group paces around like a white elephant, which, though it does not compensate for whatever the text’s myopia, at least conveys an essential facet of the dynamic. Washington and de Jesus reveal themselves in a tender, bracing way, de Jesus’ Emory snapping a fan-like fearsomely fabulous proclamation of selfhood.
But the subject of politics is unavoidable, even in clinical evaluation; whatever goodness or badness of “The Boys in the Band” is inextricable from where it exists in a queer and political landscape, not least of all a culture that has seen both the rise of LGBTQ representation in film and TV, but also one where the rights and livelihoods of trans people (particularly Black trans women) are routinely attacked. Thus, as good as this version of “The Boys in the Band” is (the gradations in the performances might even argue that it’s better than Friedkin’s version), it’s hard to figure out why it exactly it exists. If it’s a “reminder” of “how far” we’ve come in the crusade for equality, a deliberate period piece anchored by ascots and loafers, it seems a little po-faced, a little, if not ill-timed, then at least a tad limited in its milieu. Why watch queers engage in such savage, solipsistic self-laceration for two hours? Michael’s despairing claim, “You show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse” exists differently now.
If it is, conversely, a piece of evidence to suggest that a cis (mostly white) gay male community has grown little in the wake of its initial premiere over fifty years ago, that we are still inclined towards a particular brand of cruelty, exclusion, superficial obsession, self-hatred, overcompensation, etc., then the film appears to wag its finger in a somewhat scolding manner. Even if this is so, the detail and specificity in most of the performances neutralize a vibe of admonishment; Parsons imbues a palpable weariness when he reveals his debt-ridden routine to his friend Donald (Bomer): “Run, charge, run, buy, borrow, make, spend, run, squander, beg, run, run, run, waste, waste, waste!”
At one point, Michael finds himself looking at, instead of the secret he’s trying to excavate from Alan’s past, his own reflection in a mirror hanging on his bathroom door. There’s uncertainty written across his face. Ambivalence, too. Maybe this version of “The Boys in the Band’s” inability to square its period politics and existence with that of a contemporary queer political terrain is a feature, not a bug. Maybe it’s looking at itself, and its own place in queer cinematic history, with the same unease and anxiety it thinks cis gay (predominantly white) men might be confronting now, as more space is being necessarily cultivated for growing, unheard from voices deeper in the community. (Ironic, then, that this should arrive within months of “Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen.”) Perhaps “The Boys in the Band” has newly become a text about that ambiguity, of cis white gay doubt. Maybe that’s fine, and maybe the band should play on, with new players. [B+]
“The Boys in the Band” arrives on Netflix on September 30.