Boys Don't Cry (1999) Reviews

• Disturbing and powerful film

  FlickJunkie-22000-05-06

  This is a poignant and powerful film. It is the true story of Teena Brandon, a young woman who is in the throes of a sexual identity crisis. She cuts her hair and dresses like a man to see if she can pass for one. What starts out as an experiment turns into a full fledged alter ego as she is accepted as a man by a group she meets in a bar. The story follows the group's escapades, including Brandon's love affair with Lana, who falls in love with Brandon, thinking she's a man. It culminates with the discovery that Brandon is actually a woman with a dramatic confrontation in the finale. This is film noir at it's finest. A lot of people think that this is a story about courage and lesbianism but it is really about neither. It is about the search for identity; not just sexual identity but the search for a deeper self . All the characters in this film were lost and confused, but Brandon was the only one who realized it of herself. The rest were basically playing out their despondent lives trying not to think of who or what they were. Here was a person they loved and accepted, but who turned out to be the most heinous of deviants as defined by their own prejudices and fears. This is why they were so fundamentally shaken upon the revelation of Brandon's true identity. It left them to confront their own flimsy identities. They were left with no respite from the emotional vortex. Brandon presented a terrifying threat to the way they viewed themselves. They were compelled to change who they were or hate someone they had grown to love. This film was also about obsession. Brandon takes extraordinary risks to live the male role, not out of courage, but out of an obsession to know and understand it, and to see if she can find comfort and a sense of belonging. Likewise, writer/director Kimberly Peirce had been obsessed with this story and researched it for five years before finally making the film. Obsession generally leads to one of two places: greatness or death. For Peirce, at least for the moment, it has lead to greatness in the production of this film. Strictly from a technical directorial standpoint there was nothing special here. The lighting was amateurish, the shots were mostly mundane. The sets and locations were realistically trashy, but it is a lot easier to create realistic trash than realistic elegance. Peirce also bogs the film down occasionally with excessive character development. However, Peirce captures in the story and the filming, the essence of rural lower class crudenes, bigotry and hatred and fear. It is the raw emotion that reaches out and grabs us. Her lens brought into sharp focus the base reality of inescapable despair and deluded hope. Reality often has fangs, and Peirce was undaunted in showing them and then ripping us to shreds. As to Hilary Swank, I can only add one more rose to the bouquet of praise that has been heaped on her. If there was any courage in this story, it was the courage of Swank to take such a complex and disturbing role. The subtlety of her performance was astounding. She needed not just to be a woman playing a man. She needed to be a woman playing a woman playing a man, trying to look convincing yet insecure and unsure of how she was being perceived by the other characters. When in character, her many skillful lapses into moments of femininity, only to snap back into masculinity were masterfully done. For Swank, this was a meteoric rise from obscurity. It remains to be seen if it was just the perfect alignment of actor and role, or something more. I hope for the latter and look forward to seeing her next project. Greatly obscured by Swankmania, was the performance by Chloe Sevigny as Lana, Brandon's love interest. She gave an outstanding performance in another extraordinarily difficult role. Her conflict over the implications of her sexual and emotional feelings for Brandon were sensitively and delicately portrayed. She played the part with a tentative eagerness, just as one would expect of someone whose sexual identity had been thrown into upheaval. It was also no easy career choice to be cast in a role with so many explicit sexual scenes with another woman. This film was stark reality with no holds barred. The filmmaking was technically unsophisticated (and I'm usually a real stickler about that), but I rated it a 9/10 on pure emotional power. This film is not for you if you are offended by lesbianism, graphic violence or profanity. But if you are not intimidated by the naked reality of the darker side of life, this is a film you must experience.

• Sometimes they do

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  (Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.) This movie really made me think about sexual differences and what it means to have a sex change or to want one, or to be trapped in a gender you don't want. It was very effective to have us see Hilary Swank (who plays Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon) with short hair and male facial expressions and gestures without giving us a glimpse of her as Teena. (Actually we did get a brief glimpse in a photo.) Swank looks like a boy, acts like a boy, in fact works hard to be a boy; indeed that is (sadly) part of what this movie is about, what it means to be a boy in middle America as opposed to being a girl. And then when we have the scene with the tampons and the breast wrapping and we see her legs, the effect is startling, an effect possibly lost on those who knew that the person playing Brandon was a woman. It was when I saw her legs and could tell at a glance that she was a woman with a woman's legs that I realized just how subtle, but unmistakable are the anatomical sexual differences, and how convincing Swank's portrayal was. I was reminded as I watched this of being a young person, of being a teenager and going through all the rituals and rites, unspoken, unplanned, without social sanction, that we all go through to prove our identity, because that is what Brandon was so eager to do, to prove his identity as a boy. I thought, ah such an advantage he has with the girls because he knows what they like and what they want. He can be smooth, and how pretty he looks. It was strange. I actually knew some guys in my youth who had such talent, and the girls did love them. The direction by Kimberly Peirce is nicely paced and the forebodings of horror to come are sprinkled lightly throughout so that we don't really think about the resolution perhaps until the campfire scene in which John Lotter shows his self-inflicted scars and tosses the knife to Brandon. Then we know for sure, something bad is going to happen. Hilary Swank is very convincing. Her performance is stunning, and she deserved the Academy Award she won for Best Actress. She is the type of tomboy/girl so beloved of the French cinema, tomboyish, but obvious a girl like, for example, Zouzou as seen in Chloe in the Afternoon (1972) or Élodie Bouchez in the The Dreamlife of Angels (1998), or many others. Indeed, one is even reminded of Juliette Binoche, who of course can play anything, or going way back, Leslie Caron in Gigi (1958). Chloe Signvey, who plays Lana Tisdel, the girl Brandon loves, whom I first saw in Palmetto (1998), where she stole a scene or two from Woody Allen and Elisabeth Shue, really comes off ironically as butch to Swank, yet manages a sexy, blue collar girl next door femininity. She also does a great job. Peter Sarsgaard is perfect as John Lotter, trailer trash car thief and homophobic redneck degenerate. Very disturbing is the ending. If you know the story, you know the ending. Just how true this was to the real life story it is based on is really irrelevant. I knew nothing about the story, but I know that film makers always take license to tell it the way they think it will play best, and so it's best to just experience the film as the film, independent of the real story, which, like all real stories, can never be totally told. Obviously this is not for the kiddies and comes as close to an "X" rating as any "R" movie you'll ever see. It will make most viewers uncomfortable, but it is the kind of story that needs to be told.

• powerful, disturbing human drama

  Buddy-512000-05-13

  The most impressive aspect of `Boys Don't Cry' is that it refuses to shy away from the sordid details of much of its protagonist's life, yet manages to convert her (or him if you prefer) into a sympathetic and comprehensible figure. In our most honest moments, we can all acknowledge aspects of our own lives and personalities that we don't understand, that we would love to change and that often make us feel alienated from the `norm' of society at large. In the case of Teena Brandon – a young man `trapped' in a woman's body - the anomaly happens to be a more pronounced and certainly less socially acceptable one than most of us are forced to endure in our lives. And she paid the ultimate price society demands from those it fears and does not understand: she was murdered in Nebraska in 1993, simply for being `different.' The film builds a convincing case for compassionate understanding without converting Brandon into a saint-like figure. Not only do we witness the petty criminality of her life, but we see her propensity for duplicity and deception, a personality trait that actually leads in part to many of the troubles she encounters, playing a crucial role to a large extent even in her death itself. Yet, given society's out-of-hand rejection of transgendered people, what real options but a life of dishonesty is Brandon really given? Similarly, Lana, the young woman with whom Brandon falls in love and the one person who has ever accepted Brandon unconditionally for what she is, suffers from a number of her own demons. Credit writer/director Kimberly Pierce and co-writer Andy Bienen for not taking the easy commercial path of reducing the moral complexities of the personalities involved to a black-and-white world where good and evil are displayed in neatly arranged patterns for our easy consumption. There are many times in this film when literally none of the people we are involved with are the slightest bit appealing. The filmmakers, in their faith in our maturity, ask us to go along on a pretty harrowing journey at times, but it is one that leads us to a very rewarding destination. The scenes in which Brandon's companions expose her secret is riveting and terrifying in its dramatic intensity and human sadness. The utter humiliation Brandon is forced to endure at the hands of the hooligans who are tormenting her broadens to become a symbolic representation of every person who has suffered such an injustice at the hands of unreasoning ignorance for whatever reason. It is a chilling reminder of the danger of the mob mentality unrestrained by empathy and enlightenment. Like so many of the best off-Hollywood independent productions, `Boys Don't Cry' finds its truth in two crucial elements: the canny depiction of the bleak sterility and stifling provincialism of its Midwest setting and the uniformly first-rate performances by a largely unknown set of actors. Hilary Swank, in her Oscar-winning turn as Brandon, and Chloe Sevigny as Lana achieve a naturalism in their portrayals that neutralizes any theatricality that might have robbed the film of its indispensable quality of immediacy and believability. They convert what might, in less capable hands, have become little more than a sensationalized freak show into a powerful and understandable drama about real, thoroughly recognizable human beings. For that alone, `Boys Don't Cry' becomes a cinematic experience impossible to forget

• Remarkable depiction of real life drama

  nick-3232000-02-09

  After finally getting the chance to see this film, I have to say it was worth the wait. Hillary Swank's performance was outstanding, she certainly deserves the golden globe she's already won and the oscar, she's sure to be nominated for. Brandon Teena was real, no questions. The director, Kimberly Pierce deserves much credit for telling the story subtlety, no black and white, he's wrong, she's right. I came away from this movie realizing the courage you have to possess to be different, the dangers from it are real and we must admire those brave enough among us to be.

• A Moving Piece of Filmmaking.

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  Boys Don't Cry was a major success with the critics and the Academy Award's, so I looked forward to seeing it. Easily one of the best films of the past year, Boys Don't Cry is a moving experience that deserved all the credit it got, and then some. The film takes for its source material the true story of Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank), a girl who, well, just wants to be a boy. A sex-changing (getting her hair cut and sticking a dildo down her pants) credit sequence sees our hero(ine) at first on the pull, duping a local girl into a bit of nookie, and then on the run, when the truth about her sexuality rears its bizarre head. A fugitive of the law, as well as a few irate townsfolk, a twist of fate leads to her befriending a bunch of trailer-trash misfits and, temporarily, enjoying a new-found freedom under her manly guise. Of course, it's all going to go horribly wrong - particularly when she falls in love with the local girlie sweetheart (Chloe Sevigny). Chloe Sevigny, who plays the girl Brandon falls in love with, deserved to win an Academy Award. Her performance still lives in my memory, and it has been some time since I first saw Boys Don't Cry. Hilary Swank, who did receive an Oscar, pulls off an absolute barnstormer of a performance as Brandon Teena, it is easily one of the boldest and most memorable performances I saw in the 20th century. Kimberley Pierce is also another stand-out, she is in the director's chair, and she hardly got any praise for her amazing effort that she put into this film. I applaud everyone involved in Boys Don't Cry, even the one's who got little credit, particularly Brendan Sexton III (who plays a trouble-making misfit) and Andy Bienen (co-writer). Groundbreaking performances and a brilliant debut directing effort make this film unmissable. I rate Boys Don't Cry 9 out of 10.