Jeffrey
First screened around 1996 or 1997 / Most recently screened and reviewed in August 2024
Director: Christopher Ashley. Cast: Steven Weber, Michael T. Weiss, Patrick Stewart, Bryan Batt, Sigourney Weaver, Nathan Lane, Olympia Dukakis, Gregory Jbara, Christine Baranski, Irma St. Paule, K. Todd Freeman, Robert Klein, Peter Maloney, Debra Monk, J. Smith-Cameron, Victor Garber, Kathy Najimy, Kevin Nealon, David Thornton, Marylouise Burke, Alice Drummond, Michael Duvert. Screenplay: Paul Rudnick (based on his play). In Brief:
Strands itself between laughter and grief, looseness and self-distraction. Its "conflicted" gay lead is really just an ass.
VOR:③
By age and identity, I'm right in the demo that sees this as a time capsule piece. For better and worse, it stretches narrative construction.
Jeffrey came along at a tricky but important moment for gay and especially HIV-themed screen stories, including/especially the few told in a different key than pure tragedy. I recall the play and the film fondly, and I know they both touched me or lifted me at the moment of their arrival—which seems markedly longer ago than it does in many other movies I've been watching from the same era. Most of all, what I appreciate in Jeffrey is the attempt, period, as well as the freewheeling, colorful, vignette-ish structure of the piece, which pauses often to let a surprising actor do a wild, almost performance-art riff (Sigourney Weaver) or present a whole different tone and tilt of characterization than they've offered before (Patrick Stewart, who really gets somewhere in his final scene).
But not every object of nostalgia holds up under scrutiny, and not every movie that engenders affection necessarily stakes a claim for quality. It's okay to admit the former without disingenuously attributing the latter. Jeffrey himself feels like a wild miscalculation, as a psychic minefield and a story-killer—committing the same sorts of narcissism and insult over and over, and not really changing or atoning even when the text finally lays the ground for some long-awaited evolution or comeuppance. He's starring in a comedy, possibly a romantic one, but to say the least, I don't think anyone else in the movie or many people watching it smile or pine when they think of him.
Steven Weber, seemingly game but improbably cast, can't solve the problems of Jeffrey as written, not least because he's part of building a charm offensive for a guy who doesn't deserve one. Plus, the script has him and costar Michael T. Weiss, as Jeffrey's object of desire and emotional punching bag, playing similar notes and scene structures over and over. Weber also has barely any gay vibe, which derails Jeffrey almost as much as its weird prudery and adolescent frivolity about sex and bodies, despite the character's delectation in both being the first thing we learn about him.
The direction by Christopher Ashley, a major theater figure but a cinema newbie, is all over the place. He seems to hope that if he keeps goosing us with camp and broad comedy, we'll just go along with the sad or angry dramatic beats when they eventually roll around. Unfortunately, they just feel unconvincing and unearned. Definitely one of those "love stories" where you are begging, begging the second lead to sprint away from the protagonist. The momentary standup scenes by famous cameo players, the indulgence of Paul Rudnick zingers that flaunt his comic voice but don't serve the scene, and the arbitrary flourishes in style all suggest a project without a lot of creative focus, unless all of this is actively trying to distract us from the soggy cake at its center, served up by hosts who swear they didn't leave it out in the rain, or mistakenly add salt instead of sugar.
You don't have to squint too hard at the credits to see that Jeffrey had to scrape its way to the big screen even after being a well-liked and widely-covered off-Broadway hit—and at a time when a certain vogue in gay-themed narrative cinema ought to have created a relatively clement environment for shepherding a project like this. For all of its silly and slapdash qualities, Jeffrey didn't get this far without the commitment of artists, most of them gay and nursing over a decade of copious grief, who thought this story should be told. So much about Jeffrey feels compromised by external factors or by its overweening urge to be "likable" or "fun" as a condition of being allowed to exist. Those tariffs landed heavily on anyone asking audiences, gay or straight, to ponder even momentarily the epidemic that is Jeffrey's pervasive yet barely visible context, or the many forms of aching loneliness it activated, from the panicked retreat from sex to the parish status of the HIV+. There's a story here about a tenacious and resilient team, writing themselves the laughs they wanted or badly needed, as did many in their community (of which, at 18, I was evidently one). They made the movie that was possible, now, rather than wait to build the better, rewritten, properly staffed version that might have missed its moment or never been greenlit. Even though I'm projecting this tale, it moves me more than the film I was actually handed. Grade:C
