Boys Don't Cry Review
by Paul X Foley (paulxfoley AT aol DOT com)November 25th, 1999
Review: Boys Don’t Cry
Starring Hilary Swank, Chloe Sevigny, Peter Sarsgaard.
Written and directed by Kimberly Pierce
This film, based on actual events, chronicles the story of Teena Brandon, a young woman who passed as a man and was raped and murdered when her identity was uncovered. It is a fascinating and disturbing story, an unsentimental look at the American heartland as a place of deeply ingrained intolerance. Rather than nurturing individual freedom, as the American myth would have it, the wide open spaces of rural Nebraska make its people’s lives narrow and pinched.
Enter Teena Brandon (Hilary Swank), who reinvents herself as Brandon Teena. He’s a fearless and outgoing little guy with a big buck-toothed grin. Getting into a barroom scrape with a man literally twice his size, bumper-surfing under the power lines, racing another car on a dark and deserted highway, it’s an exhilarating beginning to his new life. His enthusiasm proves attractive to the doe-eyed Lana (Chloe Sevigny), standing as it does in marked contrast to the bleak hopelessness of her small circle of friends. She’s also attracted by Brandon’s simple kindness toward her. Kindness is something she’s seen precious little of.
Trouble is not far behind. Brandon lives by shoplifting and forging checks, and is dogged by an outstanding warrant for auto theft. Minimum wage jobs and petty crime are the only future these misbegotten souls have to look forward to. Then there’s John (Peter Sarsgaard), the young ex-con and alpha male of the group who wants to protect Lana. Clearly, the only one she needs to be protected from is him. Inevitably there is trouble between him and Brandon. Brandon, I think, sees it coming; he just doesn’t care to get out of the way. He’s burning his candle at both ends. What follows is the heartbreaking destruction of young life.
“Boys Don’t Cry” stands in sharp contrast to the sentimentalized, glamorized violence of “Fight Club”. Stripped of Brad Pitt’s movie star appeal, fighting in barrooms and stealing cars begins to look depressingly low-rent. Unleashed rage leads not to catharsis and manhood confirmed but rather to two corpses on the floor of a farmhouse in Falls City, Nebraska.
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