Big Eden is an annoying and mediocre film that is mystifyingly popular, winning audience awards at gay and lesbian film festivals left, right and centre and taking a long lease near the top of every online gay DVD store’s “viewer’s favorite” list. In theory, it deserves this success as its basic premise is tantalising and its use of older, plain looking guys to tell a romantic story in a rural setting makes a refreshing change from gay-themed films about spunky, jaded hustlers living out angry lives of petty crime in the big city (see: The Living End, My Own Private Idaho, Speedway Junky, Proteus, et al.) In execution, though, it all goes belly-up and by mid film, even I was dying for some cute blow-in from the big smoke to rock up with his scuffed boots and embittered attitude and steal something from the general store of Big Eden, the sleepy/comatose country town where our hackneyed story lays its scene.

Henry Hart (Arye Gross) is a successful middle-aged artist living in New York. Single and dejected, he returns to his bumfuck home town (Big Eden) to tend to his sick grandfather. Once there, he re-encounters Dean (Tim Dekay), the unrequited love of his life, who’s now married with a couple of kids. Henry’s old friend Grace (Louise Fletcher) welcomes him home, and a mysterious Native American general store clerk called Pike (Eric Schweig) casts melancholy glances around the place.



It’s a lovely set-up, and a story to which many viewers can no doubt relate. Having moved to the city ages ago, to find success but a bit of loneliness, how do we go back to our roots and cope with all the emotions and paths-not-taken that we find there?

Things go wrong in the film very quickly however with Henry recast as a kind of Alice, who’s fallen down a rabbit hole into a fabulous, mystical place where the general rules don’t apply. All the locals, including a gossipy hag who organises a tea party with a surprisingly large group of single, rural gay guys are rooting for Henry to find butt-slammin' love with at least one of the town’s men. When Pike (mystifyingly) begins to fall for Henry, everyone mucks in to make their friends’ path to love as smooth as possible. Again, this approach isn’t such a bad idea, but it’s carried off so clumsily and is so hypocritical at heart that it starts to eat itself alive.

Pike tends the general store with shy and wordless grace, his baseline social status in the town dressed up with gentle ribbing from the locals who treat him like a team mascot and who’ve squeezed him into a feminised role as cook and nurturer, from where he suffers in noble silence. While indentured Pike never stops working, the yokels sit around and chew the fat, and no one seems to question why it’s Pike who has the duty to run around the town each early evening and make sure Henry is fed. And when Pike, who’s tall, young and quite good looking, falls for the older, wealthier white man, no one bats an eye at that either. Pike's such a stock rural Native American he may as well be carved in wood. Henry’s feelings for Dean, which have lasted through the decades, suddenly drain with convenient rapidity to Pike, though I didn’t notice any point in the story where this transfer of emotions could have plausibly taken place.

All I could think of was the thousands of older, decaying white gay men who decamp to Phuket and Pattaya every year and take up with much younger, poorer Thai boys who won’t ask too many questions and who’ll think all their Christmases have come at once when Mr Potato turns up with his platinum Amex. When life fails, you’ve always got the natives.

It would have been smarter scriptwriting if Pike and Dean had gone for each other, and left Henry stranded, or at least had an established relationship before Henry showed up. Instead, Big Eden exhibits a very troubling appropriation of its indigenous character, who is a powerless sack of emotion ready to be picked up by the mobile, empowered lead character after every other white-skinned option has gone down the drain.

Big Eden moves too slowly, and all the characters are like felt stick figures, ready to be placed wherever the writers need them to be at any given moment. If, as we learn, Dean leans gay and has feelings for Henry, then why did he marry and have kids? How does he feel about this? Just as well the wife and mother has been erased from the story, so there’s no pesky tension from that corner. That’s good for our gay lovers, but bad for viewers, as no tension means little drama, and a gentle movie like this needs drama to stop itself from fading away. As usual, in an attempt to sing a love song to gayness, the film makers have ignored basic principles of storytelling and movie making.

Big Eden may be a fable, but it’s a lame fable, told poorly with some pretty dubious devices. It’s strange, isn’t it, how as long as the gay male lead gets his way, gay audiences don’t tend to notice every other marginalised character in the movie getting a bum deal.

Related Reading
The Broken Hearts Club

Review by Mark Adnum