Though Longtime Companion suffers from excessive sentimentality and doesn’t contain a single complicated or contradictory character, it’s not at all the train wreck you fear it’s going to be. It’s not a movie masterpiece, but it is moving, overall, and there are scenes involving the physical and mental decay of gay men with AIDS in the pre-combo therapy eighties that are compelling. It’s not a dumb film, in fact, its attitude to the AIDS epidemic is at times surprisingly frank, and this counterbalances the film’s cloying earnestness and predictability.
The plotline is AIDS-epidemic stock standard: starting at Fire Island gay parties in the very early 1980’s, it moves at a pace through the early days of the unfolding epidemic in New York City. The characters are drawn from a nearby well: TV soap writers, wealthy philanthropists, lawyers, young buff guys with rent-paying jobs, all out for love and a good time, all really good souls, all best friends.
Though it’s a great overview of the epidemic, there are sections that alone could have generated six or seven separate full length movies but which get fifteen minutes screen time each, max. As a result, we’re dragged by the hair through the opening Fire Island sequence, where we glimpse a bit of hedonism and AIDS-eve gay culture, before almost every character has a five or six second telephone scene, rustling the New York Times and informing their friends about a page twenty article about this mysterious new gay cancer. Next thing we know, someone’s prostrate on a gurney with an oxygen mask, then another character’s got a brain lesion, someone loses his job because he’s obviously infected, and before you know it most of a decade has passed, the survivors all have new hairstyles and we’ve entered the brave new world of red ribbons and safe sex.
It’s just too much, and we don’t settle on anything long enough for it to have its proper effect. There’s three or four too many characters in the ensemble, and more than once, when we skip ahead two or three years and we’re at the funeral of “Bob” or “Sean” or “Steve”, we aren’t quite sure whose funeral we’re at - there’s a bunch of characters missing from the service, and they all had generic American guys’ names. Real people aren’t dying in the movie, just characters from the ensemble of Longtime Companion, who aren’t really that distinct from each other.
Inevitably, because of the time of the film’s production and release, the film has an axe to grind: all those gay men didn’t deserve to die of AIDS, and mediaeval sickness and death wasn’t necessarily a product of being actively gay. That message is understandable, but it would have been nice, and a little more realistic, to have seen someone habitually fucking, or shooting up recreational drugs. There’s a little tiny bit of the Andrew Beckett syndrome here, with people just suddenly up and dying from AIDS, with no information given as to how they may have caught it. This ties a ironic knot in the whole AIDS doesn’t equal gay argument, because we’re left wondering why and how these gay guys, so stridently normal and nice, have caught AIDS at all. This disease, Hollywaids, looks a little immaculately conceived - self-generating. All the gay guys in this movie that die of AIDS do so after they’ve “developed” it - we just cut straight to them in hospital beds, as though they were born HIV positive, and are suddenly and unexpectedly at a critical stage of their condition. Bath houses, dark parks and the beds of strangers are missing from the movie, and that’s a mistake. Black and Hispanic central characters are missing as well, and that’s a mistake too.
To it’s credit, though, the movie doesn’t exclude the sometimes contentious behaviour of the gay community before and during the AIDS epidemic. Though David’s (played by Bruce Davison) partner benefits from his lovers wealth with home care and a live-in maid/nurse, his poorer friends battle it out in the overcrowded corridors of emergency rooms. In the first ominous years of the epidemic, some characters shut down conversations about GRID and the disappearance of a friend here and there - they don’t want to know about it, don't want it to ruin their ambitions, their plans and their mood. Years later, of course, this kind of under-carpet sweeping attitude would be quite forgotten as all and sundry turned their attention to the “shocking” and “unforgivable” attitude of the Reagan administration, which, in the early and mid eighties, had itself turned a selectively blind eye to the spreading epidemic. In one very telling scene, a wasted, beanie clad guy appears on a Fire Island beach, waving to his old acquaintances who are enjoying a gut busting lunch on their holiday-share verandah. One waves hello back to the dying guy, but the others pretend he’s not there, and showing their backs to him, ignore him until he goes away.
Much has been said about the cloying ending, where all the dead reappear at once for a dream-sequence reunion on the Fire Island beach of fun. It is a dopey ending, but in many ways, appropriate for this film, which, because it can’t get any kind of real handle on the Sodom and Gomorrah doom and gloom of its subject, has packaged the whole thing with suburban familiarity, filming it in the style of a 1980s TV mini-series.
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