Opening on the same day as My Summer of Love, Heights, which is
adapted by Amy Fox from her own play and directed by Chris Terrio,
should have taken a lesson from it. A movie about role-playing and
identity can be either comic or tragic but what it cannot be — or
cannot be and still be reasonably watchable — is stodgily
moralistic, as Heights is. You wouldn’t think, in this day
and age, that anyone would still bother to make a whole movie about
a young man’s having to come to terms with the fact that he is gay
— let alone that anyone would bother to load it up with further
portentous musings about role-playing on and off stage, sexual
fidelity and feminist proprieties about the balance between work
and relationships. Haven’t we seen all this stuff somewhere
before?
That is no objection if the movie has something new or original
to say, but Heights does not, at least so far as I can
see. Moreover, even at the most basic dramatic level the movie has
no energizing force. The story meanders on its desultory way while
leaving us mystified as to why Jonathan (James Marsden) wants so
badly to pass as a heterosexual and marry the beautiful Isabel
(Elizabeth Banks) while obliterating all trace of his homosexual
past. This is not an implausible scenario in itself, of course, but
the movie offers no hint — either in terms of social stigma or
family pressures or some peculiar psychology of his own — why
passing himself off as something he is not is so important to this
particular young man, who hasn’t got the excuse of a teenager or a
Michael Jackson that he’s just trying something on.
It’s true that passing oneself off as something one is not is
the family business Jonathan is hoping to marry into, since
Isabel’s mother, Diana (Glenn Close), is a world famous
stage-actress and director. There’s a hint of the connection here
when Alec (Jesse Bradford) is reading for a part before Diana and
the author and asks: “I wasn’t sure if the character was gay.”
“Well,” replies the author, “he’s gay, but not gay.” Just like
Jonathan, you see.
But this only compounds the problem. The more unexplained
self-deceptions there are the more irksome becomes the authors’
habit of not explaining them. We know, that is, why theater-people
might be tempted to confuse the theater with the real world, and to
carry their stage roles over into their daily lives, even though
Jonathan himself is a lawyer and not an actor. Lawyers have roles
to play too. But this is all the more reason why the play or movie
in which they appear has to keep the bright line separating the two
firmly in view. Doing so would seem to demand as a minimum
condition a clear understanding of the kinds of self-deception that
both Jonathan and Isabel are engaging in. Instead, self-deception
is simply taken for granted here. In the world of the film, that’s
just the way of the world.
It’s not just Jonathan. It’s also Diana, whose posing as a
sexual adventuress fails to take the sting out of her husband’s
infidelity. It’s also the improbable surprise of the biographer
(John Light) of a prominent British photographer at further
evidence of his subject’s cruelty with each interview of the string
of ex-lovers to which Jonathan belongs. It’s also Alec (Jesse
Bradford), a young actor who looks like a candidate for Diana’s
next seduction but who doesn’t know quite how he feels about his
current lover. It’s even an old boyfriend of Isabel’s who now wants
her back without understanding why she dumped him in the first
place. And then what about Isabel herself? What does she think
she is playing at as Jonathan’s fiancee, busily planning
her wedding, when what she really wants is to be a
photo-journalist?
Golly! What a lot of mixed-up individuals. Not that there’s
anything wrong with that, of course. But each of these dilemmas is
more banal than the last, and if they’re all just mixed-up for the
sake of being mixed-up, or so that Mr. Terrio and Ms. Fox can
demonstrate their own cleverness in revealing to us what is hidden
from the characters themselves, the effect is artistically
enervating. They offer us only drearily predictable choices between
the right roles and the wrong roles, between self-knowledge and
self-delusion, so that when, in the final reel, self-discovery
finally comes, it does so anti-climactically. Doubtless it is a
good thing if people are able finally to see the truths about
themselves which have hitherto remained hidden from them, but if
those truths have been obvious to us all along — or if they are
such pedestrian truths as that they like boys rather than girls or
that they want a career more than a relationship — we are inclined
to yawn and ask: “What took you so long?”
There may be good reasons why what the authors and the audience
can see about them should be so obscure and difficult to see for
the characters themselves, but without some accounting for those
reasons, the drama of self-discovery falls flat. Moreover, as
My Summer of Love reminds us, real dramas of
self-discovery are usually negative. That is we find what are the
wrong roles for us much more easily and, cinematically speaking,
much more interestingly than we find (if we ever do find) the right
ones. That’s why there’s something too neat, too pat and just a bit
smug about this movie which spoils it.
