Unlike most of my friends, Holding the Man was not a film I have been desperately awaiting. Nor, with its memorialising structure, stagey execution and heart on sleeve emotions, is it the type of film that I'd generally gravitate towards. In fact, remove the gay angle and Armfield’s is a film I would have run from like the plague.
I'm a bit of an anomaly on the Melbourne queer scene in that 'Holding the Man' was never my go-to gay text. I came to Tim and John's love story late enough in my progression to queerdulthood that the sacred place set aside in my heart for a seminal piece of identifying queer writing had already been taken up by Christos Tsiolkas' darker, more self-loathing 'Loaded'. I found Conigrave's memoir poignant but distant, like I found most "AIDS era" writing, to my continued shame. My attitude towards the work didn't budge after seeing Tommy Murphy's 2006 stage adaptation. Basically, I never felt the impact of 'Holding the Man' until Armfield's film. The pain, the anger, the love, didn't hit home till this thrice filtered, hi-gloss version. Only now does it feel tangibly, horrifyingly real.
So, I am left here trying to explain how I've connected this strongly with a style of film, and a story, that has never "done if for me" in the past, so to speak. The only response I can come up with is one of representation and, dare I say it, respectability.
Armfield's approach to Holding the Man, with its clean-cut, carb loaded (white bread and pasta) tragic lovers, wedges itself deep into modern day, marrying-type gay activism zeitgeist. It speaks directly to the most powerful subsection of queer subculture (the not so queer section) and treats us to terrifyingly progressive normality. Hallmark movie of the week normality.
That's the faint praise I'm throwing around. Faint shade even.
But let me clarify, because Armfield's act of normalisation, along with the acts of his two exceptional leads, Ryan Corr (Tim Conigrave) and Craig Stott (John Caleo), isn't by any means circumspect. The relationship is lovingly explicit, the in-your-face sexual politics still well-rooted in the 70s and 80s, and the parental reactions, though tempered for emotional resonance, still havoc-wreaking. It is just that Holding the Man approaches all this with the rigour of a Nicholas Spark’s adaptation, all lens flare and orchestral swell.
Bear with me though. In a roundabout way, that’s a political act, and one that Armfield and Murphy pull off without compromising the integrity of the young men’s love story. While their version may not be the crossover (if crossover is the word, sexuality-leaping?) hit they were aiming for, seeing Tim and John through the sappy Sparks-esque lens should confirm one thing for queer audiences: romance film clichés are exceptionally resonant when the relationship is reflective. It is just that we never see our stories given such a mainstream polish, at least not without most of the gay being buffed out.
Therein lies Holding the Man’s core effectiveness. It is exceptionally well packaged but still frank enough to be recognisably gay. That level of cinematic equality hasn’t gone unnoticed by some punters who have decried the film’s “tasteful” sex scenes as explicit and its love as politicised. That’s what the hardcore straights get out of it. For queers and allies (the latter personably fleshed out by Sarah Snook as Tim’s best friend, Pepe), the takeouts will be more warming. John’s humour when staring into the dead eyes of the grim reaper (be it AIDS or his own father), Tim’s unashamed and unmaskable “theatricality” (which plays well into Armfield’s directorial territory) and the strength of the love that the two men shared, almost too-well captured in the chemistry of Corr and Stott.
To return to the faint praise, all this is decently served by Armfield and Murphy’s adaptation. Their decision to nest the film’s various time periods ensures the love-rush, the anger and the ever threatening heartbreak is deployed pointedly, though some may say manipulatively. The grounded dialogue, which retains its sense of time through some nicely outdated lingo, is often less than poetic. In terms of production design, many of the implied period touches are washed out by the film’s crispness, an effect that even fights against the evocative soundtrack (T-Rex, Bronski Beat and Pete Shelley’s ‘Homosapien’). And yet, the recognition punches through.
If you need a final litmus test for the film’s queer-capturing effectiveness, look to Corr and Stott’s pitch perfect adolescent mannerisms and how well they work to smooth over the actors’ clearly-too-old-for-high-school scenes. Others have quibbled with this assertion but I stand by it ferociously. To me this signals buy-in, connection, and a willingness on my part to defend a film that, flawed though it may be, brings to life an inspiring and enduring love story.
A blockbuster-worthy one at that.
★★★★
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