Video
Chasing Amy
Reviewed by Mark J. Huisman
We all know the movie tradition about hetero-homo love. When a gay character falls for someone of the opposite sexual orientation, the gay lover gets the short end of the stick. That’s what’s so fresh about Chasing Amy, the third film (following Clerks and Mallrats) in the New Jersey trilogy by director Kevin Smith. Here a straight man falls in love with a lesbian, and wherever he winds up, it’s not on top. Although its execution is flawed, Smith’s story is unique. With some wonderful jabs at gender and racial stereotypes, Chasing Amy eschews political correctness to explore sexual identity with more thoughtfulness than we’ve seen before, at least from a filmmaker who happens to be a 26-year-old straight guy.
Chasing Amy tells the story of het buddies-cum-roommates Holden (Ben Affleck) and Banky (Jason Lee), coauthors of the successful cult comic book series Bluntman and Chronic. Holden falls in love with a fellow comic-book author, Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams), who, according to the film’s coy production notes, “has set her romantic sights elsewhere.” In other words, she’s a big dyke. As the curious triangle between Holden, Banky, and Alyssa twists and turns, the film weaves between comic and heartfelt moments.
Although Smith’s dialogue tends to be cardboard and mechanical, Chasing Amy evidences a maturation in his writing. There are terrific exchanges between the provincial but determined-to-be-hip Holden and the subtly self-loathing Banky, who is privately battling demons of his own. Best of all is the friendship of Holden and the flamboyantly gay Hooper (Dwight Ewell, from Stonewall and Flirt), an African-American comic-book author masquerading for his public as a latter-day Black Panther. Although Holden and Hooper are opposites in many ways, Smith gives them a bond that’s both joyous and moving.
Smith underscores his themes with just the right tinge of desperation, the kind everyone (gay or straight, male or female) feels over finding true love and, sometimes, losing it. Affleck and Lee turn in well-rounded, gently nuanced performances that are terrific to watch, and Ewell’s work is fabulously dead-on.
But the fact that some things are so good only makes the bad all the more obvious and painful. The introduction of Alyssa’s lesbianism is a hackneyed, amateurish moment, played for laughs at the woman’s expense. Smith may want to be fair about all this lesbian stuff, but that doesn’t mean he understands it well enough to present it convincingly.
Adams, to whom the hardest task admittedly falls, turns in a performance so consistently and voluminously shrill, it’s as though she went over the top and right on down the cliff. The character of Alyssa begs for restraint; there’s too little of it here. And the film’s epilogue ending is a truly disappointing film-school device: Holden, Banky, and Alyssa each get “I’m moving on” moments that, instead of conveying the intended triumph, land with a thud.
On the whole the idea of this film is more successful than the film itself. While at some level Chasing Amy is really about a man successfully pursuing a woman, there’s something thoroughly enjoyable about seeing male virility challenged so roundly, especially by some very heterosexual characters. And it’s terrific to see straight characters grappling in a realistic way with what it means to be a gay person in contemporary America.
This is not a film filled with rampant political correctness or sympathetic liberal archetypes. Chasing Amy leads gay viewers to examine ourselves: If we don’t mind when straight people fall for gay people (and who can blame them?), what makes us so hostile when someone who’s gay sleeps with someone of the opposite sex? How ironic that a straight director should make a movie that reminds gays and lesbians of what we’ve been saying all along: Rules are meant to be broken.
Mark J. Huisman writes on the arts for The New York Times and The Village Voice.
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