Far from Perfect, Far from Terrible

Charming and brutal

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Two hot-bodied hunks dominate this Canadian gay drama about an artist who falls in love with a married "straight" guy. This independent Canadian drama from Brad Fraser, the writer of Love and Human Remains focues on David, a controversial gay painter in the remote Canadian province of Manitoba. His financial success has brought him fame, money and a dull life. He basically hangs out with Kryla, a straight woman and Shannon, an HIV positive trans woman who is also his roommate. To get some inspiration, he takes a job as a waiter at a small cafe run by a married couple, Matt and Violet. The last thing he expects to do is fall in love with Matt, but that's just what happens. David starts painting again -- homages to Matt, his new love wreaking havoc on the marriage and on David. While Leaving Metropolis feels like an old-style "gay movie" -- poor writing and stilted characters, it does have something to recommend. There are several fairly intense sex scenes, both straight and gay and these two guys aren't shy about showing us their bodies. No full-frontal nude shots, but plenty of underwear and chest showing and these two boys have a lot to look at. After some research we learned that the film is based on Fraser's stage play Poor Super Man which had a whole different premise to it. The play emphasized David's personal feelings toward the comic book hero Superman and how he was just as perfect as his hero. Of course, what the play was showing was that no one is perfect. Unfortunately that storyline has been trimmed down in the film. Just a simple gay melodrama with some sweet skin.

This comment contains a huge spoiler which actually is the reason I'm writing it. More times than most when a writer hands his book, screenplay, story, etc. over to a studio where a new screen adaptation is required, plus a new director, the film is usually unrecognizable from the author's original intent. This movie is one of those rare times when a new script and definitely a new director was needed. When a playwright/stage director/moviemaker goes to put his work on screen, he quite often cannot look at the finished product objectively.Listening to Brad Fraser's commentary on the DVD, he explains so many things that he thought the viewer should've known, but in his concept they were never made clear. For example, he tells us that when the husband enters the bus station, that folded piece of paper under his arm is his acceptance letter from a school for cartooning. That would be great if only the viewer had been told that or even a close up of the paper. But in Fraser's mind, we should have figured that out and where the husband was going. Duh... Fraser keeps telling us 'hidden' things to look for. In his mind he filmed it, so why were we so stupid NOT to notice? I realize that Brad Fraser was the god of this film. Everything in it is his own creation and he and only he should have the right to control each and every destiny. Whether Fraser would like to call this a gay movie or not is up to him.To me it's in the vein of a lot of gay movies which are oxymorons."GAY" movie without a happy ending. What's gay about it? Why do gay writers or producers of gay films insist on unhappy endings. Gays are either depicted as stereotype sissy faggots...or dying Camille's.Can't someone, some time, write a serious drama about gays with good acting and let the two heroes ride off into the sunset? The acting in "Leaving Metropolis" is some of the best I've ever seen, especially Vince Corazza and Cherilee Taylor. They play so well together it makes you wonder why a straight masculine husband would leave his wife for a guy who is so fey? Look at the way Troy smokes a cigarette...it's one step above Bette Davis. Brad keeps talking about his low budget of one and a quarter million dollars. Damn! I've seen better movies with half the budget. Sorry Brad, but the movie you THOUGHT you made and the movie that the viewer sees are worlds apart. After all that the husband and artist went through, not to mention us the audience, the least you could do would be to have the heroes wind up together. Great ideas but sloppy executions!

This Canadian effort is accomplished playwright Brad Fraser's film adaptation of his stage play POOR SUPERMAN, in which a celebrated but frustrated artist rediscovers his muse, in the form of a supposedly straight man who's running a downtown diner with his wife. It takes no stretch of the imagination to guess what the basic plot is.From the beginning, lawyers for Warner Bros. and Marvel Comics had threatened suit if the Superman imagery from the play were used in the film. The play was written at the height of public awareness of the AIDS epidemic in North America (ca. 1993), and was replete with metaphor carried by the very imagery lacking in the film adaptation. Just as the protagonist is seemingly the last of his race (gay men not yet victimized by AIDS), Superman was the last survivor of his Kryptonian race. Gay people were in the closet as Superman was masquerading as Clark Kent. So, the film was bound to have major problems once it was cleansed of much of this context. Fraser seems to have compensated for his loss by increasing the gymbot quotient; indeed, the male flesh watchers in the audience were treated to a parade of pecs, abs, and asses. Fraser, who answered questions for the audience after the film, insisting he was working on the principle for "equal opportunity sex scenes," ended up showing much more explicit straight lovemaking scenes. Coming in at a short 89 minutes, this film had me walking away remembering most these scenes with the wife's extra perky breasts. LEAVING METROPOLIS's dialog started out very stilted and the characterizations seemed too heavy handed when translated to film, but as the plot wore on, the uneven acting brought occasional glimpses of brilliance. Troy Ruptash as David the gay artist (in the past, seen on TV in episodes of ER, JAG, THE WEST WING, and BOSTON PUBLIC) put on an occasionally emotionally believing performance. But it is Canadian actor Vince Corazza, a young but veteran TV movie actor, who shone with a great job as the tormented married guy, Matt. Newcomer Thom Allison as David's transgendered, AIDS-inflicted best friend Shannon only endeared with the queeny quips, and fell short trying to bring out the gravity of her situation. David's boozy mentor, Kryla (Lynda Boyd), and Matt's wife, Violet (Cherilee Taylor), weren't given much more than base characterizations to work with. In the end, we don't care much why David didn't seem to think too much about the implications of his helping to break up a marriage, because we don't see much of what Fraser is trying to say about David himself.

This film is basically a gay love triangle. David is a famous painter with "painter's block." He has a live-in, HIV-positive, pre-op transsexual black live-in friend, Shannon. He has a famous-newspaper-columnist fag-hag friend, Kryla. To get his muse back, David decides to become a waiter again. He ends up waiting tables at a small diner owned by Matt and Violet, a married couple (recently married? it's not clear). David is immediately attracted to Matt. Soon, as David encourages Matt's secret talent for drawing comic-book characters and boosting Matt's self-esteem, Matt begins to fall for David. David then paints a series of erotic images of Matt. The film ends predictably enough: Lots of tragedy (divorce, death, friends falling out, etc.) but also a "hopeful ending" (everyone starts over anew). Vincent Corazza as Matt is perhaps the best thing about this film. His physical presence (someone ice me down!) is almost charismatic. But his acting skills are exceedingly strong. He acts with his body, his face, and his voice and makes Matt's confusion about his love for Violet and David believable and moving. Cherilee Taylor as Violet is less effective, although this is probably due to the lack of character development the script gives her to work with. The most telling moment in the film is when she tells a reporter that she collects "wedding couple" dolls. While this has obvious implications and meaning for her character, this is hardly what one would consider "deep characterization." Most of the time, Violet is simply supposed to look dumbly confused by Matt's refusal to spend time with her (while he's off doing the nasty with David). Taylor's effectiveness as an actress comes out best in her final scene, as she confronts her ex-husband outside the art gallery where David's paintings of Matt are shown. The anguish, honesty and intensity of her skills are on display best here. Troy Ruptash as David and Lynda Boyd as Kryla are the film's weakest links. Ruptash is simply unconvincing as the steely-hearted David (the man so traumatized by the deaths of his many friends to AIDS that he cannot love). He fails to carry off the campy/bitchy/queenie comments his character is given, and his confidence in every scene makes it difficult to believe the character is really blocked or that the character is suffering an emotional tempest beneath the locked-down surface. Boyd's biggest problem is that she is given not much more than a caricature to work with -- the tough-as-nails newspaper columnist who can't find love. Kim Cattrall on "Sex and the City" does this a hundred times better. Perhaps the biggest problem with "Leaving Metropolis" is the script and editing. The dialogue is stilted and unnatural, the scenes are truncated and missing sections (due to sloppy editing or bad writing is hard to tell), there is much exposition and characterization missing, and time seems to pass without any visual or verbal clues being given until it's too late. The film's conclusion -- especially the scenes with David in the bath house, Shannon's death-scene, and David pouring Shannon's ashes over the streets of Winnipeg -- seem pointless and serve to drag down the film's momentum. The final scenes themselves (Violet carrying on at the diner, David packing up to move and reconciling with Kryla, Matt at the train station) seem maudlin and uninspired....even trite. The film's editing seems clumsy and clunky. There is little style or point to the cuts that are made. Even simple editing choices like "jump cut or match-on-action" seem to occur randomly rather than with purpose. (True, copyright problems forced director-writer Fraser to cut out most references to Superman, the film's primary cultural reference and main metaphor. This creates blatant holes in the film, which are not present in the stage version, "Poor Superman.") None of this is to suggest that "Leaving Metropolis" is a bad film. In fact, for all its faults, the film still works. There is a certain fascination with Matt's internal debate over his own sexuality, his love for Violet and David, and whether to tell Violet about his affair. Kryla's initial complaints (that David is simply a homewrecker) seem just bitchy at first, but take on a poignancy and morality that is shocking (and surprising, perhaps, to gay audiences that might not prize marriage or monogamy) by the film's end. The plot works itself out fairly predictably, which is unfortunate given the complex issues it presents. Two final notes: First, the soundtrack is goofily "WB" -- too much guitar-driven lesbian-rock or oddly-chosen hard-rock (a la the old Canadian band, Rush). Second, there is a fair amount of nudity -- both male and female, heterosexual and homosexual. The film actually could have done without it, but to my mind it's a nice plus given Corazza's fantastic body.