| Politics is the not the only arena that makes strange bedfellows. Those with health problems inevitably encounter health providers from very different backgrounds, as Flawless director and writer Joel Schumacher discovered while witnessing a close friend recover from a stroke (and Bruce Roberts, who developed the movie’s filmscore). So Walt Koontz (played by Robert De Niro) also learns in the film Flawless. Both the victim of the crime and health provider in Flawless are drag queens. As a divorced middle-aged security guard with medals for bravery and trophies for athletic endeavor, Walt is at first annoyed by the loud music in his rundown Lower East Side residential hotel as drag queens rehearse songs for their evening performances, accompanied on the piano by fellow apartment resident Rusty Zimmerman (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman), who is both flamboyant and hardboiled. After using his gun to stop mobsters during a shootout in the apartment building that results in the death of Rusty’s best friend, Walt has a stroke, ends up in the hospital, leaves barely able to talk and walk, and then drowns himself in alcohol. Much of his self-pity is about his inability to enjoy his one pleasure in life, dancing the tango at a dance hall with his special girlfriend and then rewarding her after sex with rent money. Encouraged by a social worker and his security guard buddy Tommy Walsh (played by Skipp Sudduth) to start physical therapy at home, he gradually learns how to walk from an African American therapist named LeShaun (played by Kyle Rivers), but his speech impediment continues and requires additional help. Falling before he got into a taxi to go to a speech therapist uptown one day, he retreats to his apartment and receives an offer from Rusty to provide singing lessons, as singing is proven to be the best therapy to revive more normal speech. Walt ultimately accepts the invitation, goes to Rusty’s apartment, and ultimately graduates from do-re-mi scales to sing “The Name Game,” though Walt’s speech appears to improve most when he and Rusty engage in mutual namecalling in fits of temporary rage at each other. The story also features underworld characters who persist in collecting debts and stolen money from transgendered performers, notably Mr. Z (played by Luis Saguar), who was responsible for the death of Rusty’s friend. Drag queens cannot be portrayed on screen without clever lines and raucous humor, and Flawless does not disappoint. The title refers to a yearly contest for the man who best dresses up as a woman, and the film shows some of the preparations as well as the interaction among the drag queens, reminiscent of Paris Is Burning (1991), a film exposé that was nominated for an award by the Political Film Society. The movie Flawless focuses on the transformation of Walt and Tommy from mutual antipathy to mutual acceptance. Walt learns that drag queens are females trapped in men’s bodies who cannot afford sex-change operations and that drag queens often cope with more masculine challenges than the most macho males, resulting in a hostile outlook expressed in strong language directed at narrowminded straights. Indeed, Walt comes to admire how Rusty has overcome obstacles far worse than his own, and Rusty revels in acceptance from the debilitated but proud macho man. At the end of the film, Mr. Z returns to terrorize Rusty. When Walt comes to Rusty’s defense, he again lands in the hospital, whereupon Rusty uses the stolen money (saved for a sex-change operation) so that Walt will be ambulanced to an upscale hospital to receive the finest of treatment. The tagline “Nobody’s perfect. Everybody’s flawless.” classifies the film as an effort to explain to general audiences that the transgendered deserve more than a break-they should be respected for their courage and their contributions to our society. Underneath the exterior, humanity knows no gender, race, nationality, disability, age, or sexual preference. Those who are wedded to the superficial are the problem. MH |