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We're not in Kansas anymore
[Photos: Fine Line Feature]
John Cameron Mitchell is Hedwig Schmidt, a drag queen from East Berlin, in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. |
By STEVE PERSALL
© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 30, 2001
In Hedwig and the Angry Inch, writer-director-star John Cameron Mitchell teaches the movie musical to get up on its spike heels and dance to a new tune.
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Every inch of Hedwig Schmidt has a right to be angry. Lovers use her and leave. The worst heartbreaker stole her songs to become a glam-rock star. A lawsuit is going nowhere, Hedwig's own band is deserting, and there's the little matter of the little matter left between her legs from a botched sex change operation.
What else can she do except sing her heart out?
"I know you're all wondering:" Hedwig woozily tells another sparse audience. "How did some slip of a girly-boy from Communist East Berlin become the internationally acknowledged song stylist barely standing before you?"
Hedwig and the Angry Inch informs us while mutating the movie musical into something deliriously fresh. John Cameron Mitchell -- remember that name at awards time -- spectacularly transfers his 1998 off-Broadway play to film with perspiration, a dash of animation and lots of imagination.
Not surprising that Mitchell commands the screen with his freakish, melancholy lead performance or that his script and songs by Stephen Trask mesh so seamlessly into a shakedown of, as Hedwig calls it, "this business we call show." That much was obvious from the stage. What is remarkable is that Mitchell, with no prior film directing experience, crafted such a fluidly cinematic exploration of such tragically ragged material.
Hedwig leads her rock band on a tour to share her life story through concerts.
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Something deeper occurs here than the calculated hysteria of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the movie closest to Mitchell's decadent vibe. This isn't just a glorified sing-along, although Mitchell playfully tosses in some karaoke lyrics to the perkiest number. Feel free to join in. Feeling free is what Hedwig and the Angry Inch is all about.
That's also what Hedwig is missing. It wasn't her idea to have a sexually abusive father, and the gender change was planned by someone who brought her to America and didn't stick around. Born the same year the Berlin Wall was erected, she gains an epiphany watching it torn down on TV in a Kansas mobile home.
Donning a Farrah Fawcett wig, backed by musicians from nowhere, Hedwig kicks out a wall in the trailer, turning it into a bandstand for the exultant Wig in a Box, one of several songs that won't leave your head. This off-the-wallflower blooms into the stage-stalking survivor who puzzled upon first sight. Hedwig knows who she is now, and so does the audience. We'll follow her anywhere from there, even backward in time according to Mitchell's cuckoo-clockwork scheme.
Hedwig becomes pathetically inspirational, trying to reclaim credit for songs written with Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt), who used them to become the star Hedwig wants to be. She follows him from city to city playing gigs at Bilgewater restaurants nearest Tommy's concerts. Tommy was merely an off-stage voice in the play, but Pitt -- also fine in Bully, opening Friday -- makes him a naive cad with a smidgen of guilt.
Mitchell's performance is a killer, as he purrs the funniest lines with a sing-song boredom common to lounge acts on the skids. As a woman, he resembles Juliette Lewis, yet leaning to the telltale masculinity of some drag queens and androgynous rockers inspiring Hedwig, from David Bowie -- a certain inspiration for Trask's music -- to Toni Tennille. All Hedwig wants, in true pop chart fashion, is "to be a young American in muskrat love, soft as an easy chair . . . have I never been mellow?"
Probably not, and audiences can be thankful for it. Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a swift kick in the tail of a moribund movie year, crossing boundaries with more to show for it than anything since Memento. Mitchell's film is pretty, witty and gay, yet with an exuberance easy for any adult to enjoy. Go ahead. Take a walk on the wild side.
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Hedwig and the Angry Inch
- Grade: A
- Director: John Cameron Mitchell
- Cast: John Cameron Mitchell, Michael Pitt, Andrea Martin, Stephen Trask, Miriam Shor
- Screenplay: John Cameron Mitchell, based on the stage play by Mitchell and Stephen Trask
- Rating: R; sexual situations, profanity, brief nudity
- Running time: 95 min.
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