Film Review: Failure to Launch, Transamerica, R.E.N.T and why Brokeback is a great film

Failure to Launch: A surprisingly intelligent film with a witty script, Failure to Launch satirizes the American culture phenomenon of young adults who refuse to move out of their parents' homes. Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew McConaughey are perfectly casted as lovers whom audience members can only fantasize to be. Unfortunately, such romantic comedies never depart from their saccharine sentiments and formulaic happy endings that are mandatory of the genre, making it an enjoyable escape from real life for two hours but nothing much else.

R.E.N.T: Director Chris Columbus of Harry Potter and Home Alone fame deviates from his usual repertoire to take on the gritty story of a desperate community of gays, artists and AIDS sufferers in NYC. Having seen the original musical, the edgy and emotive power of the book loses its energy through this cinematic translation. Dull and unimaginative, much of the film feels perfunctory in just showcasing the song sequences.

Transamerica: This is a travelling road film that follows the physical and emotional journey of a man-to-woman transsexual who is awaiting her sex-change operation. Felicity Huffman and her co-star son shine with much warmth and humanity to make the film watchable and believable. However, the script is riddled with cliches (e.g. delinquent son who turns gay because of sexual abuse in the South) and conventions that saddle the film with more emotional fluffs than effective punches.

And that is when I realized how monumental Brokeback Mountain is as a film of our times.

Brokeback is a highly accomplished film, depicting a tough subject matter with much grace and dignity. Having seen Transamerica, which deals with a somewhat similar theme of alternative gender issues, Brokeback stands out as a impressive and challenging work that is in a class of its own.

Transamerica is an example of Queer Cinema - films that deal with alternative gender lifestyles, their hopes and struggles. It categorically fits into this type of cinema by using very traditional narrative methods as a catalyst. Road movies that symbolize a pyschological journeys of the characters are trite devices that conform to one-track linear narratives. With its series of supporting characters to inject some colour and comic elements, Transamerica resorts to pedestrian storytelling techniques to elevate the sympathetic status of its marginalized protagonist. In dealing with a topic as complex and contested as gender reassignment, the filmmakers of Transamerica choose the safest route of sugar-coating the realities of the issue to make this a palatable and unmemorable film.

In comparison, Brokeback is a more matured film that never conforms. Ang Lee pushes and challenges the taboo topic of homosexuality in the homophobic setting of the American cowboy western. In theme, Brokeback re-mythologizes the constructed image of the cowboy, insinuating in the most subtle of touches the personal and emotional depth of this American icon, personified in the lead characters. The film is grand in its scope (geographically and temporally) but most personal in its treatment. It never betrays the spirit of Annie Proulx's short story by claiming to speak for anybody else except for Jake and Ennis. The drama of Brokeback is most restrained and refined, with its supporting actors adding insights to the protagonists lives and they act as cultural barometers of the time

As described by a classmate of mine, Queer Cinema are films made not for gay people, but for their parents, as a way for the latter to negotiate and come to terms, in a scrubbed down manner, to alternative lifestyles. Brokeback Mountain, on the contrary, is a film that is true to its subject, which is the bittersweet affairs of love and life both fulfilled and left wanting.