Stonewall
Directed by Roland Emmerich
Opens Fri., Sept 25, Limited Release
thestonewallmovie.com
Rated R, 2 hr 9 min.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Between the Supreme Court ruling to legalize gay marriage and the Kentucky county clerk who refuses to issue those marriage licenses, Stonewall couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time in the long battle for LGBT liberation.
Based on the real events of the Stonewall Riots in 1969, we follow the fictitious story of Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine). He’s the stereotypical blond, homegrown, all-American boy who finds his way to the big city of New York to start college at Columbia, and start a new life. As he becomes acquainted to the city, we get flashbacks of how he ended up in Greenwich Village: he was caught in the heat of passion with a long-time friend, lover, and football teammate (Karl Glusman). Small-town opinions and traditions left him ostracized by his friends and disowned by his family, with the exception of his caring sister Phoebe (Joey King).
In the city, Danny finds true friendship and camaraderie with Ray (Jonny Beauchamp) and his ragtag crew of homeless, street-savvy kids who hang out on Christopher Street near the Stonewall Inn, local gay bar run by the Mafia. With job opportunities unavailable to them as gay men, they turn tricks and are pimped out by the club owners to make some cash.
Tensions slowly build as Danny’s college scholarship is withheld courtesy of his homophobic father (David Cubitt), he is brutally assaulted (and almost sexually assaulted) by the police, and he’s pimped out without consent by the Mafia to high-spending customers. While Danny’s older lover Trevor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) pleads that this battle can only be won through peaceful protests and communication, the younger generation is over it. Hitting rock bottom and continuously ground into it, they have nothing left to lose.
This anger finally boils over during yet another police raid of the Stonewall Inn, raids that result in arrests of those without identification and drag queens. Violence breaks out as a butch woman is arrested and tries to escape repeatedly, yelling to the crowd, “Why don’t you guys do something?” Danny’s friend Cong pulls out his trusty brick out of his purse, which Danny throws at the Stonewall screaming, “Gay power!,” sparking the crowd into a violent outrage. Bottles are thrown, fires are started, and chants are sung while chasing off the police to victory.
Critics of Stonewall have boycotted the movie after viewing the trailer, claiming that it “whitewashes” the events of the New York riots, but there is more diversity in the movie than seen in the limited eye of the trailer. Regardless, there is irony of a movie revealing the lack of opportunities for LGBT individuals by furthering the problem: Mostly cisgender white actors were hired for lead roles, and no transgender actresses were cast in the movie. You can’t get better representation of marginalized stories than right from the source, and Stonewall overlooked an opportunity to open a door on an alienated community.
Following the story of Danny, an outsider of the New York scene, allows the audience to transition into becoming an “insider” through the movie’s narration, but seeing the character development put into Ray, Cong, and the other queer youth makes me wish we could have followed their deep, intricate stories instead.
Realizing that no movie can ever encapsulate the events that transpired during the 1969 riots, especially in a time frame of two hours, Roland Emmerich (director) made a valiant attempt to do history right in a compassionate, humanist manner. Being openly gay, Emmerich explains that he was deeply affected when reading about the Stonewall riots and that’s when he knew he had to tell the story of these unsung heroes that have paved the way for LGBT emancipation.
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2015.