Stonewall takes the gay out of Stonewall. Directed by an ill-fitted Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow), the film turns the single most important event in gay liberation into a schmaltzy public service announcement. Set in what appears to be a snow globe and starring a cast of clichés, Stonewall is a mighty disappoint.
Danny (Jeremy Irvine) looks like a Ken doll and talks like an Archie comic. He’s a farm boy from Indiana, new to the “big city,” with suitcase in hand. Muscular and moral, he’s as American as apple pie (never mind that he slips into a heavy British accent). He’s supposed to go to Columbia University, but his conservative family won’t sign some kind of “paperwork.” Through flashbacks to his life in Pleasantville, U.S.A. we learn that his father, who also happens to be the coach of the high school football team, banished Danny after catching him with another boy. After a teary goodbye with his sister and his mother, who, like all ’50s housewives, is mute, Danny boards the bus for New York City, the gay capital of the world.
Dropped off on Christopher Street, Danny befriends Ray (Jonny Beauchamp), a cross-dressing, streetwalker with a heart of gold. Ray introduces Danny to a gang of displaced gays, and they cavort around the neighborhood doing what gay men do – shoplift and talk about Judy Garland. Ray has a crush on Danny, and like any good, gay tour guide, he takes Danny to the Stonewall Inn, a seedy bar run by a nefarious mobster (Ron Pearlman). When Danny enters the club for the first time, he takes in the male go-go dancer and the queer camaraderie with wide-eyed awe. For a second, there is a glimmer of hope in what Stonewall could do. It could illuminate the importance of nightclub culture in 20th century gay life. It could provide a window into the shadowy roots of gay acceptance and the role of identity politics within that context. Then a dashing man shows up, and the whole movie devolves into a half-baked romance.
The love interest is Trevor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), and he takes Danny to a meeting of the Mattachine Society, a real-life organization that fought for gay rights through assimilation. Ray gives Danny a rough time for betraying the street gang and their anarchism, but as the film implies, he’s really just jealous.
When a romantic rift between Danny and Trevor prompts the Christopher Street mafia to kidnap Danny and force him into doing a trick, Ray attempts a rescue, which inadvertently prompts the famous Stonewall riot. As if this ridiculous and fictionalized set-up weren’t enough, writer Jon Robin Baitz puts the brick that started the riot in Danny’s hand.
Skipping the activist’s persistence, the social tensions and duration of the riots, which lasted multiple nights, Stonewall offers only a truncated and whitewashed version of events. It’s problematic that the makers of the film felt it necessary to tell the story of the riots through the normative perspective of a straight-seeming, white man. Diminishing the role that women and people of colored in the fight for gay rights, Stonewall insults not only the intellect of their audiences but also the movement itself.
The film is book-ended by random statistics about gay acceptance. They’re in Courier font, which apparently means they’re important. Appearing over feel-good footage of a pride march, they extract from the Stonewall riots only the stalest of messages. The difference between the Mattachine Society’s strategies of appeasement and the street gang’s one of direct rebellion is left unexplored. It’s too bad because, in light of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, protest movements are as relevant as ever.
Stonewall isn’t without some merit. Beauchamp, the actor who plays Ray, is charismatic and convincing. He’s the boy with nowhere to go, and his scenes are good enough to hold our attention. The film fails as a whole, however, because it tries to please everyone, the surest route to pleasing no one. It’s too gay for straight audiences and too straight for the gay ones. It’s rated R, but it’s not sexy. Fake tears fuel the drama, and its riot scenes fizzle out like a faulty Molotov cocktail. Stonewall was a momentous political and social uprising, but its anarchy and radicalism is all but erased by the standard Hollywood treatment. Now that’s something to riot about.