 |
 |
| Directed by David Moreton; Starring Chris Stafford, Tina Holmes, Anderson Gabrych, Lea DeLaria, Stephanie McVay, John Eby, Antonio Carriero, Jason Scheingross, and Tony Maietta |
Edge of Seventeen is yet another gay oriented film in which I have been forced to sit through to keep up my quota. Not that I have any predisposition towards the genre (see Get Real review), it is just that I tire of seeing the same thing again and all in the same genre and display. Not only is the film about the normal coming out of the closet for its lead, but also shows him coming of age, what a delightful mixture (yes, sarcasm).
Set in 1984 in a small Ohio community, the film follows Eric (Stafford), a young man in the midst of two relationships stemmed from his summer job at an eatery. The first relationship is with his childhood friend Maggie (Holmes), who sees Eric as simply trying to be different; the other is with a fellow waiter named Rod (Gabrych) who takes Eric into the world of homosexuality. Eric keeps up the relationship with Maggie as a cover to keep his parents from discovering that their son is gay. The affair with Rod comes to an abrupt stop when Eric finally figures out that Rod was simply using him for the sex. But the damage has already been done and now Eric sets out to find that male that can make him happy, heading to a local gay bar (you know, the millions of gay bars that were in small Ohio towns) run by his employer at the eatery (DeLaria). All through this there is two subplots involving Eric trying to get to NYU for work in the music business and the amount of trouble his homemaker mom (McVay) goes through to help pay for him to go there.
The film left me with one really big problem: the story seems to be that homosexuality can be brought on by simple human contact. During the first thirty minutes of the film, Eric seems to be a heterosexual male, even running away when he learns that Rod is gay, but the minute he has two minutes of free time with Rod, Eric is suddenly Boy George. So is homosexuality now like the common cold?.
As for the film itself it is rather shallow and uninteresting. I must say that none of the three leads had any dynamic appeal, just going around saying their lines. The only performance that I thought stood out was DeLaria, who brought a feeling of compassion and understanding to the film which was truly needed. What ever happened to good films in the genre like Gods and Monsters and Get Real?
