MOVIE REVIEW
“Stonewall”
Grade: D+
Starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Ron Perlman and Jeremy Irvine. Directed by Roland Emmerich.
Rated R for sexual content, language throughout, some violence and drug use. Check listings for theaters. 2 hours, 9 minutes.
Bottom line: Its narrative inventions embrace every wrong cliche
Somehow, director Roland Emmerich has made a movie even less historically accurate than “10,000 BC,” the one depicting Egyptian-style pyramids being constructed with the help of woolly mammoths.
But facts are not the problem with “Stonewall.” This is not a documentary, and it owes no one any kind of objectivity or documentary truth on its subject, only a vivid and persuasive fictionalized version of events.
The real problem is that its narrative inventions embrace every wrong cliche, from the first word to the last speech of Jon Robin Baitz’s screenplay and in the desperate lack of nuance afflicting nearly every performance. Director Emmerich hammers the material home in a blunt, screechy style that falsifies even the supporting characters who really were there, in and around the gay bar run by the mob, raided once too often by the police and destined for gay-liberation and civil rights immortality.
In “Stonewall” screenwriter Baitz hangs the story, based on Emmerich’s outline, on the coming-out saga of incoming Columbia University freshman Danny, a fictional hunk (played by Jeremy Irvine of “War Horse”) who flees small-town Indiana life in the closet for the exotic streets of Greenwich Village.
Jonny Beauchamp plays Ray/Ramona, his lovelorn bestie; Jonathan Rhys Meyers is the stealthy, vaguely predatory gay rights activist who becomes Danny’s lover and whose apartment overlooks the Stonewall Inn.
In the Indiana scenes, with Danny and the star quarterback (Karl Glusman) discovering their true feelings together in shame, “Stonewall” plays like a William Inge knockoff, right down to the bookish, progressive little sister (played by Joey King) straight out of “Picnic.”
The film is plainly a meaningful project for the openly gay Emmerich and Baitz. Stonewall carries tremendous symbolic weight for millions the world over. So why this white-bread generica? Where’s the real life in this slice of wholly American protest history?
