I Am Michael

Justin Kelly (2015)

Michael Glatze was born in Washington in 1975.  After graduating from Dartmouth College, he worked on the magazine XY in San Francisco.  Recognised as a particularly well-read, articulate and vigorous advocate of gay rights, Glatze was in a relationship for some ten years with a man called Benjie Nycum, whom he met at XY.  They moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia and, in 2004, founded another magazine, Young Gay America.  (Whereas XY was aimed specifically at a male gay market, YGA catered for young LGBT readers generally.)   Over the course of the next couple of years, however, Glatze became a Christian and politically right-wing.  He distanced himself not only from the gay rights movement but from his own homosexual past.  In 2010, after a brief period as a Mormon, he started a course of study at a Bible college in Wyoming.  In 2013, on completion of his studies there, he married a fellow student – a female one.  He’s now the pastor of a church in rural Wyoming.  The trajectory of Michael Glatze’s personal and professional life is the opposite of what you might expect in a film selected to open BFI’s Flare/LGBT Festival – as I Am Michael did a few days ago.  Michael Brooke, introducing the second BFI Flare screening of Justin Kelly’s account of Glatze’s change of heart, stressed the importance of a film that forces ‘us to grapple with expectations of what a gay film is’.  The movies in BFI’s regular Flare slot raise this kind of question in my mind nearly every month:  a film seems to be Flare-worthy if it’s made by a contemporary director known to be gay, or if it exposes attitudes towards homosexuality of film-makers of bygone days, or just by including, even as subsidiary figures, one or two sexually ambiguous characters.  Still, I Am Michael is, on the face of it, a refreshingly challenging choice to headline a festival of queer cinema.

Only on the face of it, though.  Justin Kelly’s first feature isn’t ‘the remarkably even-handed account’ that Variety’s Peter Debruge perceived in his review of the film that featured in the BFI programme note.  Kelly’s surface objectivity functions as a barrier to probing the complexities of Michael Glatze’s ‘conversion’.  It’s true, of course, that Glatze’s reasons aren’t easy to understand but Kelly and his co-writer Stacey Miller explore them less than Benoit Denizet-Lewis, Glatze’s former colleague at XY, did in the 2011 New York Times article (‘My Ex-Gay Friend’) on which the screenplay for I Am Michael is based.   (Michael’s partner in the film is named Bennett – a conflation of the real-life Benjie and Benoit?)  Justin Kelly does acknowledge that, even in his XY days, Michael (James Franco) was uncomfortable with the labels ‘gay’ and ‘straight’, which he describes as ‘social constructs’, but Kelly doesn’t present any conflict between Michael’s restless intelligence and the simplistic political and moral opinions which he comes to espouse.  According to I Am Michael, the central character doesn’t merely change his mind:  he loses it – to the bafflement of those who love him.

Before his U-turn, Michael, Bennett (Zachary Quinto) and a young student called Tyler (Charlie Carver), who’s moved in with them and whom they share sexually, travel the country to make a documentary about being young and gay in America.  One of those they interview, in ‘Jerry Falwell country’, is a young man who’s a practising Christian and who explains that, while some people insist that being Christian if you’re gay is a no-no, he believes ‘that’s just as crazy as the anti-gay brigade’.  Although Justin Kelly makes clear that these words register strongly with him at the time, Michael doesn’t appear to spend much time trying to reconcile his own new-found Christian faith with his gay feelings or advocacy.  In contrast, Benoit Denizet-Lewis’s piece makes clear that:

‘…  by the end of 2004, after his health scare, Michael was devouring books by openly gay theologians like Mel White and Peter Gomes and trying to integrate his sexuality and spirituality. He was initially drawn to a liberal interpretation of the Bible and argued against a fundamentalist approach to Christianity. “People have been raised incorrectly to believe that the prejudices they’ve been taught by their pastors are God’s word,” he wrote in a 2005 Y.G.A. issue devoted to spiritual questions. “The only Truth is Love.”’

The ‘health scare’, and the existential crisis that appears to have precipitated it, are the turning point in I Am Michael.  Both of Michael Glatze’s parents died when he was a teenager: his father suddenly, from a previously undiagnosed heart condition; his mother subsequently, from cancer.  The film shows Michael becoming preoccupied with thoughts of death and whether there is life after death – his anguish is centred on the loss of his parents.  When he visits the spot where his mother’s ashes were scattered, in woodland near his home town (Olympia, Washington), he finds some dusty residue at the foot of a tree and decides ‘She’s still here’.  He experiences palpitations and is convinced, in spite of assurances from a succession of doctors, that he’s inherited the heart complaint that killed his father.  Michael emerges from this psychosomatic trauma ever more desirous of being reunited with his parents in an afterlife – and increasingly anxious that his homosexuality will send him to hell and prevent this reunion.  (Neither his mother nor his father was actively religious although Michael seems not to be concerned by the post-mortem implications of this, even when he’s become a fundamentalist Christian.)  A movie character who weeps and sweats and imagines he’s having a heart attack makes for more exciting viewing than one reading books but Justin Kelly’s concentration on Michael’s crisis makes a political point too.   While it’s believable that neurotic and infantile fears played a part in setting him on his Road to Damascus, their dominance in the film helps to reinforce the idea that Michael’s reversal is bereft of reason.

I liked the way Justin Kelly used obsolescent illustrations of furtive homosexuality to describe Michael’s apprehensions of religious faith.  At one point, he goes into a church the way that a repressed homosexual, in a film two or three decades ago, might have sneaked into a gay bar.  He sits ashen-faced in his room – anticipating, like the kid who has to tell his parents that he’s gay, the moment when he comes out, to those closest to him, as a Christian.  But I Am Michael has no real sympathy for its protagonist.  It doesn’t show him even as the victim of the societal forces that his former partner Benjie, according to Benoit Denizet-Lewis, blames for what has happened to Michael:

‘“To me, Michael is a victim of this insane society we live in, where we grow up with all these conflicting messages and pressures around sexuality and religion, and where we divide into these camps where we’re always right and the other side is always wrong. Some people are susceptible to buying into that, and I think Michael is one of them.”’

Instead, Justin Kelly presents Michael as an inexplicably ridiculous hypocrite.  (What he did and said elicited increasing laughter in NFT1.)   During the process of reorientation, he becomes friendly with Nico (Avan Jogia), a gay Buddhist, and joins him on a retreat.  As soon as his new friend makes a move on him, Michael coldly reproves Nico.  In order to prove the falseness of Michael’s claim that he’s become heterosexual, Kelly shows him picking up a girl in a bar then walking out on her once she’s stripped down for sex:  this glosses over the fact that Michael, who by this stage is well on the way to fundamentalism, is presumably uncomfortable with extra-marital relations even if he does find women physically attractive.  (Kelly similarly keeps off the issue of whether the ménage à trois involving Tyler made a difference to Michael’s breaking off his relationship with Bennett.)  Rebekah (Emma Roberts), the student Michael meets at Bible college and eventually marries, is a virgin from ‘a very conservative family’.  There’s barely a hint that Michael might genuinely have loving feelings towards her:  he’s shown, rather, as exploiting her sexual inexperience.   Rebekah is so innocent that she finds out about Michael’s gay past only after other girls at the college have done so and drop heavy hints to her.  It’s surprising that Michael has even tried to keep this past a secret, given that he’s publically notorious as someone who has – on the internet – renounced homosexuality.  (The film virtually ignores the possibility that he experienced any difficulties in convincing his new Christian brethren that he was a changed man.)

One of Michael’s favourite verses from the Bible (he quotes it several times) is Matthew 10:39 – ‘He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it’.  The final shot of the film is a close-up on Michael’s face, as he smiles to welcome his congregation in Wyoming.  The smile then fades, to confirm the simplistic, how-can-he-live-with-himself message of I Am Michael.  (The score, by Jake Shears and Tim K, suggests insistently that we’re watching a man losing rather than saving his soul.)  In his introduction to the screening, Michael Brooke reasonably described the film as a ‘going in’ rather than a ‘coming out’ story and this has dramatic implications beyond the specific subject matter.  We naturally expect an actor, as a film or play progresses, to reveal more of the personality and motivations of the character he’s playing.  James Franco as Michael has to go in the other direction.  He does this impressively:  his facial muscles harden into a mask; his gait becomes gradually more guarded.  Franco’s inexorable closing off from the viewer may not be a problem if you’re content to see Michael Glatze’s story as an aberrant cautionary tale but I found it frustrating – partly because of the intrinsic interest of Justin Kelly’s subject, partly because James Franco is an actor who effortlessly draws you in to his character (as he does in the early stages here).  His portrait of Michael may succeed in confirming the political prejudices of many members of the audience but it also demonstrates the deficiencies of the film as a character study.  I Am Michael is a strange combination – an undernourished drama and, at the same time, a constipated one.

20 March 2015