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By: BO SHELL
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Lost parents, lost children and the search for reunion and closure are threads that tie together two gay films premiering locally on Jan. 13.
“Loggerheads” is a film about the consequences of closed adoption, and “Breakfast on Pluto” tells the story of an orphan’s search for his birthmother. Both movies bring diversity to the big screen, with the former shining as the better film.
Written and directed by gay filmmaker Tim Kirkman, “Loggerheads” explores the guilt experienced by the three parties in the aftermath of a closed adoption. Grace (Bonnie Hunt) is a birth mother consumed with grief after being forced to give up her child. Elizabeth and Robert (Tess Harper and Chris Sarandon) are adoptive parents who shun their gay child. Mark (Kip Pardue) is the gay, HIV-positive adoptee struggling to reconcile his life with his need to meet his birth parents.
Audiences meet members of the adoption “triad” in separate years and locations, but at equally important times in their lives. About halfway through the film, the three stories collide and time melds together, eventually leaving audiences with a sad but honest ending.
Kirkman says “Loggerheads” is more about adoption and the need for communication than its gay themes.
“I think anyone who’s ever lived in a family understands the ways things we don’t talk about can surface in other ways,” Kirkman says. “It’s about the importance of communicating and trying not to regret the choices you’ve made, and yet being open to revisiting your whole belief system.”
Kirkman’s screenplay, his first attempt at fictional narrative, paints rural North Carolina and particularly conservative Christians in harsh light. Homophobia plays a major role in the lives of adoptive parents Robert and Elizabeth, a minister and his wife.
“Ministers who are not anti-gay are very rare in the South,” Kirkman says. “They’re banished in a way from their own religions. I have relatives in the ministry, so it’s not caricature in my life experience.”
Michael Kelly, who grew up in Atlanta and flawlessly plays George, a gay motel owner who befriends Mark, says the film accurately portrays the South.
“I think that in any film that takes place in a certain area, you’re going to run into people saying, ‘It wasn’t this way,’ but anything can happen anywhere,” Kelly says. “[In the film] there were people in that town like the bartender who knew George was gay and she was fine, but there were people who definitely weren’t fine with that.”
Kelly, a straight man who plays gay for the first time, says departing from his own orientation was not a challenge for sex scenes, but that portraying being in love with a man was more difficult.
“Kip and I got along, but to actually play someone who’s crazy in love, and you have these two straight men playing the roles, it’s difficult in that way,” Kelly says. “Not that I was apprehensive about the kiss or being naked — it was just going beyond that was more difficult.”
Bonnie Hunt’s performance as Grace is remarkably touching, but her character, like the others, never really receives the pay-off expected at the end of such an emotional drama, leaving the film a little flat.
The film ends in a sad place for all the characters, but Kirkman insists that, by the time the credits roll, the characters are better off than they begin.
“In the beginning, they weren’t saying anything, and in the end they were talking,” Kirkman says. “That’s inherently better.”
Neil Jordan’s “Breakfast on Pluto” doesn’t bring the quiet strength maintained by Kirkman’s character study.
“The Crying Game,” Jordan’s Oscar-winning film about a transgender woman in love with a man who doesn’t know her biological sex, was a apparently a fluke for the director, who brings to life another tortured tale of cross-dressing, this time starring Cillian Murphy.
We meet Murphy walking down the street in post-swinging, mid-’70s London, pushing a pram in full-on drag to the catcalling delight of a neighborhood construction site. Before the opening credits are even done, audiences are treated to two talking robins and Liam Neeson in a clerical collar, as if to announce that “Breakfast on Pluto” looks smashing, but isn’t a film terribly grounded in reality.
The same can be said for Murphy’s character, Patrick Braden. He abhors anything too “serious,” and his orphan’s quest for his absentee mother leads him to abandon his brutal foster family and strict Catholic schooling and adopt the moniker “Kitten.”
He hits the rouge and the road and turns ...
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