Yen Tan (2018)
The title and the black-and-white cinematography aren’t the only yesteryear aspects of Yen Tan’s 1985. The whole scenario – a young protagonist, returning to the family home after a lengthy absence, prepares to reveal a dark secret – has an antique flavour too. The set-up and the nature of the secret also bring to mind Xavier Dolan’s more recent It’s Only the End of the World (2016) but the mood and style of 1985 are more predictable. The sparse, sensitive piano score by Curtis Heath is an immediate indicator of what’s in store. After a while, you can practically guess what the next camera movement will be.
Like Jim Cummings’s Thunder Road, this feature derives from a more imaginatively conceived short film (although both versions of Cummings’s piece are better than either version of Tan’s). In the nine-minute 1985, available on YouTube, it’s clear virtually from the start that Adrian (Robert Sella) is suffering from AIDS. The bulk of the film comprises a visit to his home by a sympathetic cosmetician (Lindsay Pulsipher). She applies make-up to the young man’s face to obscure the telltale Kaposi sarcoma patches before Adrian returns to his mother in Florida. The film ends with his arrival at an airport; he looks into the camera and says, ‘Hi Mom’. In the feature version, Adrian (Cory Michael Smith), after three years in New York, comes back to small-town Texas to spend Christmas with his parents (Virginia Madsen and Michael Chiklis) and younger brother Andrew (Aidan Langford). The film covers the few days Adrian spends in Texas and concludes with his return to New York in spite of now being jobless there. Adrian has already lost his partneri to AIDS and is himself terminally ill.
His mother Eileen and father Dale are traditional parents for a gay son. Eileen dotes on and fusses over Adrian. Dale is ex-military (a Vietnam vet), blue collar, keen on sport, decidedly unkeen on anything arty-farty. The dinner table conversation on the first night of Adrian’s stay turns to Andrew’s recent appearance in a school play. He played the (male) lead in Arsenic and Old Lace, making his mother proud and his father embarrassed. Andrew, in his early teens, looks all set to be gay too. Both parents are devout churchgoers. (The unresolved question of how much Adrian’s childhood faith persists is one of the stronger elements of the story.) The family situation is, in other words, believable but not freshly insightful: it’s clear the success of 1985 will depend heavily on how inventively Yen Tan develops the familiar combination of elements. In the course of the film, both parents have surprises in store for Adrian but they’re sprung mechanically. They’re not surprises for the audience once the writer-director’s peel-away-the-layers-of-disguise tactics have become obvious – as they soon do.
Tan seems to want to blur the issues of Adrian’s sexual orientation and medical condition to keep us guessing whether both are still a secret from his family but the film is too unsubtle for this to work. Dale’s evident discomfort in the presence of his elder son, from the moment he meets him at the airport, is hard to miss yet there’s a long delay before the father reveals, after a few drinks one night, what he already knows. He was visiting New York a while ago; Adrian said he wasn’t free to meet up but Dale took a cab to his son’s address to check the area out and saw him outside the house kissing another man. (Talk about a likely story …) Even though he’s homophobic, Dale wants his son to know that he’ll always be there for him. Up to this point, Yen Tan’s treatment of the father has been thoroughly negative. In addition to being a Christian and a Republican, he’s a cheapskate (as the family’s opening of Christmas presents makes clear) and he snores. From the point at which Dale says something nice to Adrian, all these defects vanish.
His mother amazes and delights Adrian when she tells him she voted for Walter Mondale rather than Ronald Reagan in the previous year’s presidential election, though she hasn’t dared tell her husband. A main reason for supporting Mondale, she says, was his support for equal rights. This seems meant to introduce Eileen’s potential to accept her son’s sexuality but Tan’s screenplay is otherwise vague as to how and when she sees the light. Early on, she is urging Adrian to renew what she clearly believes was a serious relationship with a local girl called Carly. Quite late on, when Carly (Jamie Chung) calls at the family home, Eileen promptly excuses herself, as if to allow her and Adrian to get on with romantic business. Her husband hasn’t told Eileen what he saw in New York because, Dale tells Adrian, it would break her heart. At one point, Eileen and Adrian are preparing a meal in the kitchen, he cuts himself and, when his mother goes to get a plaster, quickly throws in the waste bin the food he’s been handling. Eileen notices this when she returns to the kitchen. She doesn’t comment but it appears to be all that she requires in order to understand, assimilate and accept what Adrian is keeping from her. As she drops him off at the airport for his flight back to New York, an emotional Eileen tells her son he can talk to her about things whenever he feels ready to. Virginia Madsen and Cory Michael Smith play this farewell scene very well but to baffling effect.
There are relationships and scenes in 1985 that make little or no sense. On Adrian’s return home, Andrew is barely speaking to him. From the moment that Adrian mentions a Madonna album (which Dale has forbidden his younger son to own), the brothers are simply the best of friends. When Adrian first meets up again with Carly, she’s doing stand-up in a club in Houston (this is just to enable a distinctive couple of minutes – it doesn’t connect with anything that follows). They have a drink; Adrian says he’s had a tough year but Carly doesn’t ask him to expand – it’s not convenient from Yen Tan’s point of view for her to do so at this stage. Carly and Adrian go back to her apartment. She makes a move on him and he tells her ‘I just want to hang out’. Carly gets very upset and indicates she doesn’t want to see Adrian again. She seems to have had no inkling that he was gay: it’s quite unclear what their earlier friendship amounted to – or why, after this exchange, she comes to Adrian’s parents’ home to apologise. Well, the second thing isn’t really unclear: Tan now needs someone for Adrian to confide in.
The oddest sequence occurs when Adrian takes a bath and Eileen chats to him bath-side. It brings to mind a good, funny scene in Steve Buscemi’s Lonesome Jim except that Tan doesn’t seem to have comic intentions. Even if Eileen still regards her thirtyish elder son as a little boy, it seems highly unlikely he’d be comfortable for her infantilising side to express itself in this way. It’s just as well the soap suds in the tub are nearly neck high: in the very next scene Adrian, in the privacy of his bedroom, opens his bathrobe to the mirror and looks aghast. The camera reveals the Kaposi patches on his chest in the later scene in which he tells all to Carly. She instantly gets over her disappointment about not having the physical relationship she clearly wanted with him and confirms, like Dale, that she’ll always be there for Adrian.
Both siblings have a skin condition – Andrew’s face is usually dotted with blobs of anti-acne cream – but the large age gap between them means things can work out better for the generation-younger brother. Before he leaves for New York, Adrian makes a tape for Andrew that tells him how to cope with being different. It might seem surprising that – in 1985 – helpful advice from an AIDS sufferer doesn’t also draw an adolescent’s attention to the advantages of safe sex. Perhaps – in 2018 – that might be misunderstood as somehow qualifying gay pride. This is the second film of the month welcome because it gives a lead role to a young actor who has shone in smaller parts. Cory Michael Smith (Carol, Wonderstruck, Olive Kitteridge on television[1]) doesn’t, though, get the opportunities that Lakeith Stanfield was offered and seized in Sorry to Bother You. Smith gives a committed performance but Yen Tan locks him into the role. Smith has a receding hairline and deep-set eyes. From the first family meal scene onwards, Tan lights the doomed Adrian to suggest the skull beneath the skin.
28 December 2018
[1] I haven’t seen the TV series Gotham, for which Smith is probably more widely known.
