Themes: Faltering Friendships, Vacation Romances, Living With AIDS
Main Cast: Jason Alexander, Randy Becker, Stephen Bogardus, John Glover, John Benjamin Hickey
Release Year: 1997
Country: US
Run Time: 110 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
Eight friends spend three weekends in the country over the course of a summer as they explore their sometimes conflicting attitudes about love, sex, friendship, life, and death in this screen adaptation of Terrence McNally's award-winning play. Gregory Mitchell (Stephen Bogardus) is a successful choreographer whose skills as a dancer have begun to decay as he slips into middle age. He has a handsome summer home in Upstate New York which he shares with his lover Bobby Brahms (Justin Kirk). Gregory and Bobby often invite several of their friends to join them for holiday weekends: Perry Sellars (Stephen Spinella) and Arthur Rape (John Benjamin Hickey) are a pair of yuppies (complete with a Volvo) who have been a couple for 14 years (as Perry jokes, "We're role models -- it's very stressful"). John Jeckyll (John Glover), a musician and composer with a short temper and a witheringly bitter sense of humor, arrives with his latest boyfriend, Ramon Fornos (Randy Becker), a good-looking dancer who often suffers the wrath of John's foul mood. Buzz Hauser (Jason Alexander) is a witty and flamboyant enthusiast of the Broadway theater who describes his greatest fear as a production of The King and I starring Tommy Tune and Elaine Stritch; he's also HIV-positive, though he stubbornly refuses to discuss his condition with his friends. And John's twin brother James Jeckyll (also played by John Glover) is his brother's polar opposite, a kind and forgiving soul who is now living with AIDS. Love! Valour! Compassion! was directed by Joe Mantello, who also directed the original New York stage production; this film also reunites the show's New York cast, with the exception of Jason Alexander, who stepped into the role created by Nathan Lane. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
It's amazing how quickly the gay zeitgeist changes. By the time this Terrence McNally adaptation hit theaters in 1997, the reality of the AIDS epidemic had been forever altered by the advent of the triple cocktail. And a mere five years later, in the the post-Ellen, post-Will & Grace, gays-everywhere era, even the film's low-key political subtext seems like an '80s anachronism. Yet the enduring strength of Love! Valour! Compassion! is its attention to character, to the complexities of a social set, and to the ways in which chance events can ripple across them, changing everything. Full of fine performances from the well-oiled Broadway cast (with Jason Alexander ably subbing for the absent Nathan Lane), the film doesn't exactly break free from its stage incarnation. But, boxed-in as it is, the film's characters seem real, and the simple push and pull of their interlocking friendships keeps the action moving. A willfully affirming answer to the self-hatred of The Boys in the Band a few decades earlier, the film does tend to wear its heart on its sleeve. But its fine performances, economical setting, and mournful warmth mark it as a superior effort -- superior not only to all those endless, by-the-books coming-out stories, but also to the slew of comedies that followed it in the separate subgenre of scripts that deal with the complexities of gay middle age. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
Love! Valour! Compassion! is a 1997 film adaptation by Terrence McNally of his play of the same name, revolving around eight gay men who gather for three summer weekends. The setting is at a lakeside house in Dutchess County, two hours north of New York City where they relax, reflect, and plan for survival in an era plagued by AIDS.
As with many screen adaptations of stage plays, the script underwent numerous changes, eliminating almost all direct addresses to the audience and the conclusion of one of the subplots. This remains the only theatrical film directed by Joe Mantello, who was nominated for the Grand Special Prize at the Deauville Film Festival.
In this film adaptation, McNally reunited the original cast, with the exceptions of Nathan Lane and Anthony Heald. Seinfeld co-star Jason Alexander stepped in for Lane and Stephen Spinella replaced Heald.
The story of eight male friends who spend the three major holiday weekends of one summer - Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day - together at a house in upstate New York. The house belongs to Gregory, a successful Broadway choreographer now approaching middle age, who fears he is losing his creativity; and his twenty-something lover, Bobby, a legal assistant who happens to be blind. Each of the guests at their house is connected to Gregory’s work in one way or another - Arthur and longtime partner Perry are business consultants; John Jeckyll, a sour Englishman, is a dance accompanist; die-hard musical theaterfanatic Buzz Hauser is a costume designer and the most stereotypically gay man in the group. Only John's summer lover, Ramon, and John's twin brother James are outside the circle of friends. But Ramon is outgoing and eventually makes a place for himself in the group, and James is such a gentle soul that he is quickly welcomed. Infidelity, flirtations, soul-searching, AIDS, truth-telling and skinny-dipping mix monumental questions about life and death with a wacky dress rehearsal for Swan Lake performed in drag.
References
Further reading
McNally, Terrence (1995). Love! Valor! Compassion!. New York: Dramatists Play Service. pp. 104 pp. ISBN0822214679.
