by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie was To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie
Newmar, an impossible mouthful of a title
for a film from 1995 that seemed to be Hollywood’s response to the surprise-hit
status of an Australian movie with an almost as indigestible title, The
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,
in 1994. The major studios looked at the box-office returns of this tale of
drag queens driving through Australia and figured that a U.S. version with
A-list stars would be even bigger, so Universal and Amblin Entertainment (one
of Steven Spielberg’s companies) greenlighted director Beeban Kidron’s (a
womyn-born woman who was actually in the later stages of pregnancy through the
entire shoot — she gave birth to her baby Noah Kidron Style on the last day of
filming and inserted a credit to Noah as “Best Baby,” a pun on the frequent
listing of technical assistants as “Best Boys”) and writer Douglas Carter
Beane’s project about three racially assorted drag queens driving across the
country in a 1960’s-era yellow Cadillac they acquired from a used car lot (the
man running the lot was honest about the Caddy’s mechanical failings and tried
to sell the “girls” a Toyota Corolla instead, but they weren’t about to go
cross-country in something as hopelessly unstylish!). The film opens at New
York’s Webster Hall (also a locale where several important live jazz albums
have been recorded), where there’s a major drag-queen contest going on in which
first prize is an all-expenses-paid trip to Hollywood to compete in the world’s
championship. As things turn out, the contest is a tie between Black queen
Noxeema Jackson (Wesley Snipes) and white queen Vida Bohème (Patrick Swayze),
but when they come upon Latina queen Chi Chi Rodriguez (John Leguizamo, who for
my money stole the film right out from under his two more famous co-stars)
fleeing from Queer-bashers in her neighborhood, they take her under their wings
and decide to turn in their plane tickets to the contest sponsor and get a cash
payment by which all three will go to California. (The person who they do this
deal with is the contest sponsor, played by Robin Williams in a surprising
cameo — the sort of unbilled appearance that makes you go, “Was that … ?” — and in this case made me wish Williams had
played Patrick Swayze’s part, which would have made a funny film even funnier and more moving.) This begs the question of how they’re going to get to California — not by train,
not by bus (“Who do you think I am — Miss Rosa Parks?” Noxeema spits out in
Wesley Snipes’ surprisingly convincing “queen” drawl), but in that chancy used
Caddy. They have a roadside encounter with Sheriff John Dollard (Chris Penn,
son of Leo and brother of Sean and Michael, who died in 2006 after an odd
career that included important parts in such films as Rumble Fish and Reservoir Dogs), whose badge is misprinted “Dullard.” Dollard stops
their car and sets his cap for Vida, who’s driving — until he reaches under
“her” dress and responds, not by puking à la The Crying Game, but by getting furious and starting an altercation
that ends with Vida knocking him down and leaving him by the roadside,
apparently dead.
Then they head through more desert until they arrive in the
tiny rural enclave of Snydersville, where their car breaks down and the local
mechanic Virgil (Arliss Howard) announces that he can fix it in an hour but
first he has to send for the needed part, which will take three days. They stay
in a cheesy hotel run by Virgil’s wife Carol Ann (Stockard Channing, who aside
from a women’s basketball team the “girls” hang out with in an early scene is
the first womyn-born woman we’ve seen in the whole movie even though she
doesn’t enter until about half an hour through this 109-minute film) and learn
that Carol Ann is a victim of spousal abuse from a man who’ll throw a stew pot
across the kitchen just because one of the queens, thinking she was doing her a
favor, put some spices in it. Chi Chi nearly gets gang-raped by a group of
rednecks (some of whom were being played by genuinely attractive young actors
who did more for me aesthetically than the stars did, even though I must say I
had a lingering crushette on Patrick Swayze after Dirty Dancing — but then I suspect most of Gay male America did
too!) but she’s saved by hot-looking local Bobby Ray (Jason London, who should
have got more of a career boost from this movie than he did — he’s hot,
personable and charming and should
have gone on to better things than a TV-remake of Jason and the
Argonauts), who immediately falls in love
with “her” despite the jealousy of his authentically female girlfriend (at
least she has a crush on him) Bobby Lee (Jennifer Milmore). Vida beats the shit
out of Virgil and gets him to stop beating his wife. Sheriff Dollard comes to
town and sits next to Virgil in a sleazy but definitely straight bar and starts
pouring his heart out about how much he hates male homosexuals — “Men, acting
like women. Men wanting to be with one another, men touching each other. Their
stubbly chins rubbing up against one another. Touching each other. Manly hands
touching swirls of of chest hair. An occasional wiff of a rugged aftershave.
Their low, baritone voices sighing, grunting. They hold one another in manly,
masculine arms. Hold one another. Tight” — which made me think that Douglas
Carter Beane was going to have Sheriff Dollard and Virgil discover their true
sexual orientations and run off with each other, but even a nervy movie like
this wasn’t about to go that far.
Indeed, To Wong Foo probably got
the mass audience it did (it was the #1 movie the weekend it was released)
largely because it virtually ignored the whole idea of a Gay community: we
don’t see any non-drag Gay men,
we don’t see any physical displays of affection between Our Hero(ines) and
anybody else, and though we assume they’re Gay we don’t see any actual romantic
or sexual interests between each other or anyone outside. All we see are these
three guys in endless supplies of flashy dresses acting as fairy (in both
senses!) godmothers to the townspeople, jazzing up their annual strawberry
celebration and leaving Snyderville considerably happier and more fashionable
than it was when they arrived. The scene then cuts to the big pageant in
Hollywood, where Chi Chi takes the prize away from her more experienced mentors
and is presented with the award by … Julie Newmar, who was originally only
asked to lend her name and an autographed photo (Vida steals it from the wall
of a New York restaurant just before they leave) but visited the set and
enjoyed what was going on so much she agreed to play a cameo role as the
award-giver in the final scene (and though her face shows the lines of age, her
body is in excellent shape and one could readily imagine her in a modern-day Batman movie as an older, retired Catwoman mentoring the
latest one). To Wong Foo is a
remarkable movie but also a rather claustrophobic one, and while there’s a
major plot point early on that the other two are experienced drag queens while
Chi Chi is just a boy in a dress, in fact Leguizamo manages to comport
him/herself more convincingly than the other two stars and is much better at
suspending our disbelief — though enough of Wesley Snipes’ usual machismo shows through the dress and the makeup that the
effect is ironic, if nothing else. It’s a nice movie — I’m glad I saw it at
long last and I was entertained — but I was sufficiently tired of the drag
world by the time it was over that I bypassed the deleted scenes offered as a
bonus on the DVD.
