Film review

Trudie Styler (2017)

Alex Lawther is a gifted young actor whose brief appearances have illuminated two mediocre films of recent years (The Imitation Game and Goodbye Christopher Robin).  On television in 2017, he had a major role in The End of the F***ing World (which I’ve not seen) and a smaller one in Kenneth Lonergan’s very effective adaptation of Howards End.  Even though Lawther’s career seems to be flourishing, his unconventional appearance and voice seem bound to restrict his opportunities, especially in cinema.   Trudie Styler’s Freak Show, in which he plays the lead, illustrates the point.

With a screenplay by Patrick J Clifton and Beth Rigazio (based on a novel of the same name by James St James), Freak Show is a farrago of cartoon-strip satire and poignant (or that’s the idea) coming-of-age drama.  Lawther’s protagonist Billy Bloom spends his formative years with Mauvine (Bette Midler), the off-the-wall, hedonistic mother whom he adores; she’s divorced from the stuffy, conservative father William (Larry Pine) whom Billy loathes as much as she does.  When Muv, as her son calls her, disappears for a spell in rehab, teenage Billy relocates from Connecticut to William’s mansion somewhere in the South.  At his new high school, Billy’s flamboyantly gay persona and gender-blurring outfits result in continuous insults and abuse, culminating in a savage beating that puts him in a coma for five days.  Muv now reappears but not for long:  Billy discovers she’s returned not to rescue him but to get a payoff from her ex-husband for ‘raising the son I bore you’.  Once Muv departs the scene again, Billy focuses his attention on a campaign to be high-school Homecoming Queen.  His opponent is the Bible-thumping cheerleader Lynette (Abigail Breslin), whose election slogans include ‘decency vs depravity’ and – believe it or not – ‘Let’s make America great again’.

Most of Billy’s contemporaries are more homophobic and conservative than the school authorities.  The silver-haired principal (Michael Park, with a slight resemblance to Billy Graham) seems vaguely uneasy about Billy but doesn’t ban his outré wardrobe or obstruct his Homecoming Queen ambitions.   Is Trudie Styler making a dismaying political point about the different generations or (more likely) is this set-up simply necessary for taking the plot forward?  Even if Styler, in her debut as a feature director, doesn’t mean to suggest today’s teenagers are more intolerant of difference than their parents, Freak Show is depressing in other ways – I was increasingly unsure whether it meant to be or just liked making ‘ironic’ jokes.  After his spell in hospital and convalescence, Billy returns to a banner-waving welcome-back at school, though nothing that follows suggests the other kids’ feelings towards him have changed.  Lynette and Billy make their final Homecoming Queen pitches:  he tells the audience that he represents every teenager scared of not fitting in (‘the freak in you’).  Billy gets a standing ovation, his rival doesn’t but, when their classmates make their choice (voting on smartphones), Lynette emerges the winner.   In theory, this could be a credible cynical comment on the way democracy often operates: many of the electorate say they’ll vote one way and end up voting another.  In fact, Billy must lose in order to have the thoroughly clichéd follow-up conversation with his father:  William Bloom accepts his son’s sexuality and tells Billy ‘you were the real winner’.

Although Trudie Styler says her film’s subject is bullying in general, she doesn’t show anyone but Billy on the receiving end of it.  One of his few consistent allies, a logorrhoeic girl he calls Blah Blah Blah (AnnaSophia Robb), assures Billy, as his election campaign gets underway, there’s a whole swathe of their schoolfellows who, unlike him, have kept a low profile but who will see him as their champion and join the campaign – as they do.  There’s no suggestion as to why any of these teenagers have lived in the shadows until now (or what they feel about emerging from them):  they’re just a hook on which to hang Billy’s we’re-all-freaks speech.   Styler’s claim to be exploring teenage experience more generally is disingenuous, given the exclusive focus on Billy’s extraordinary individuality.  His only male friend at school is Flip (Ian Wilson), a dreamboat combination of star quarterback and generous-minded aesthete.  He repeatedly encourages Billy to tone down his camp mannerisms, eyeliner and cross-dressing in the hope that doing so will gain Billy wider acceptance.  In the end, Flip learns from Billy the lesson that the most important thing in life is to be who you really are, although the script can’t be bothered to work out who Flip really is.

Freak Show’s actual message, in other words, is ‘Be yourself, no matter what they say’ – a line in a memorable song by the director’s husband but Mrs Sting steers well clear of addressing its implications.  The homophobes at Billy’s school are presumably being themselves.  Only one of them, a boy called Bernard, is excused when it’s revealed that he’s been concealing that he too is gay (though ‘concealing’ is hardly the word:  Christopher Dylan Smith, who plays Bernard, telegraphs the truth.)  Muv too was presumably being herself in letting her son (played as a child by Eddie Schweighardt) indulge his fantasies without warning him how others might react, worship her and believe that his father, not she, was the family’s champion dipsomaniac.  Billy’s treatment at school drives him to wear increasingly outlandish and, as he well knows, inflammatory costumes and make-up – an attack-is-the-best-means-of-defence tactic that lands him in hospital.  This is one of the potentially interesting bits of the film – the hostility of others pushes Billy beyond self-realisation into self-parody – but Trudie Styler skims over it.

Some of the audience for Freak Show at the BFI Flare festival chuckled whenever Bette Midler was on screen – as if, because she’s a sort-of gay icon, she’s necessarily one of the good guys in the story.  (A gentler but similar reception greeted the extended cameo from Laverne Cox, a transgender woman, as a local TV reporter covering the Homecoming Queen contest.)  As a result, Midler was a doubly dispiriting feature of the film:  while not to blame for this dim audience reaction, only she is answerable for the lazy, automatic performance she gives.  In view of Muv’s importance to Billy, his lack of response to her betrayal of him seems an almost offensive oversight but perhaps Styler and the scriptwriters, with their target audience in mind, knew better than to handle a character played by Midler with anything other than kid gloves.  It’s striking too, in a piece of social satire, that the main character’s sexuality eclipses considerations which would apply if that sexuality were different.  If the protagonist were straight, it’s almost inconceivable that we wouldn’t be encouraged to see his circumstances as worryingly privileged and his egocentricity as objectionable.

The narrative tends to lag behind what a thoughtful viewer is liable to be wondering.  Doesn’t his friendship with Billy endanger Flip’s macho ace footballer cachet?  Does Billy have to do any sport or gym – if so, what’s it like for him in the locker room?   About halfway through its ninety minutes, the film gets round to both things in the same scene.  When other boys make fun of and threaten Billy in the changing area, Flip intervenes and aspersions are cast about his sexual preferences.  In a quaint touch, Flip answers these by laying out his accuser with a punch that only a Real Man could land.  Stepping in to end the locker-room argy-bargy is a gym teacher, played by John McEnroe.  That’s right:  John McEnroe is the frazzled peacemaker in a war of words in a sports context.   You cannot be serious:  at this point, it looks as if Trudie Styler had nothing much in mind beyond organising a jokey celebrity get-together that’s more fun for her and the other A-listers than it is for people who’ve bought a ticket to watch their collaboration.  In addition to Midler and McEnroe, the well-connected rookie director has recruited some high-profile names behind the camera.   The DP is Dante Spinotti, though Styler isn’t able to create a strong visual scheme; she takes the easy way out of showcasing the costumes by Colleen Attwood and Sarah Laux.   The editor is Sarah Flack but there’s a botched sequence in which Muv and Flip are meant to be caught in an apparently compromising position with each other for Billy to be astounded by, cut in such a way that the characters look to be trying and failing to pretend they’re getting intimate.

Some of the cast acquit themselves well, notably Celia Weston as Billy’s father’s straight-talkin’ but good-hearted housekeeper and – against the odds, given the phony conception he’s saddled with – Ian Wilson as Flip.  Alex Lawther plays Billy with empathetic grace and wit throughout.  In Little Miss Sunshine (2006), Abigail Breslin impressed as a skilled and likeably eccentric child actress but you wondered what future roles a girl with her looks could hope for.  Breslin’s had plenty of work since but, with the qualified exception of August Osage County (2013), it’s not been much to write home about.  More than a decade on from Little Miss Sunshine, here she is with the thankless task of interpreting the cardboard monster Lynette.   It’s to be hoped Freak Show leads to much better things for Alex Lawther but don’t hold your breath.

29 March 2018