Leave it to the BBC to give a coming out film an intelligent treatment - intelligence being the one thing that coming out films are almost always missing. David Leavitt’s novel of the same title was a sombre tale about missed connections, secrets and those seductive paths to happiness that are really roads to nowhere. This skilful adaptation distils Leavitt’s story down to a limber eighty-seven minutes without eliminating anything necessary. Even the haunting tale of the abandoned toddler who learns to communicate with a construction site crane is included.
Owen and Rose Benjamin (Brian Cox and Eileen Atkins) are a professional couple approaching their sixties. Their landlord is moving back home after twenty years or so, so they’re in search of a new flat. Their son Philip is in love with a visiting American, and determined to tell his parents that he’s gay. Rose takes the news badly, affronted by Philip’s assumption that she’s a magazine article Mom, who’ll just bear it all like water off a duck’s back. Owen seems most shocked by his son’s revelation, but unbeknownst to all, that’s because Owen’s gay too, trawling gay porno theatres on rainy afternoons for some much-needed male affection.
On the pretence of finding a partner for his son, Owen sets up a dinner for the family, with a cute college professor that Owen has a bit of a crush on invited along as Philip’s “date”. Rose isn’t fooled, though, and Philip’s gay pride story is soon demoted to the chorus line as husband and wife go hammer and tongs.
While her son keeps eating at her for acceptance and understanding, Rose reminds him she’s got other things to think about. Philip has better luck with his father, but that’s largely because Owen has greeted his son’s homosexuality as leverage to his own coming out. Like his parents, then, Philip is left to find his own absolution.
It’s a chilling but truthful story that upends our expectations of the coming-out subject. A young guy makes his big announcement, but has his thunder stolen by the secret lives of his parents. This is not a PFLAG production. Eileen Atkins is majestic as the mother who suddenly discovers both her son and her husband are gay. She views the former as a crushing disappointment, something she may never ever really accept. The latter is a life-wrecking meteor from outer space, a cancellation of her identity and most of her memories and emotions, and something she views as beyond forgiveness and understanding. Atkins steels her character from the start of the film, and though you know she’s collapsed internally by the third act, she’s so tough and knowing there’s a comforting sense that she’ll somehow get through.
It’s Brian Cox’s Owen that will come off the worse, a late-middle aged queen new on the gay scene and with heartbreak and disappointment hyphenated onto his name for all time. As for Philip, well, he’s got a long life stretched out in front of him, and this non-sentimental film seems to suggest that like his parents, his greatest troubles and heartaches may lay ahead.
