Hedwig
and the Angry Inch (2001)
Wow wow wow wow wow oh fucking wow!
"Hedwig and the Angry Inch" is a masterpiece,
a brilliant and fascinating story with awesome visuals
and a rock soundtrack that will blow the doors off
any theater in which it is played.
Created by John Cameron Mitchell, the
film began as an off- Broadway musical that soon found
an enormous following. The centerpiece of the plot
is Hedwig, a transexual East Berlin cutie who suffered
a botched sex change operation (hence the angry inch),
moved to the Midwest with an American soldier and
then becomes a sort of punk rock celeb. "Hedwig" begins
with the character already a minor star, so that she/he
can sing from the beginning and tells much of the
story in flashback and in song.
Mitchell is hilarious, gorgeous and
sings rock like an angry angel. The music here is
fan-fucking-tastic. Right after you see the film you
want to rush immediately to the nearest record store
and buy the soundtrack. They should sell the CD in
the lobby. They would not be able to keep it in stock.
And for anyone who doubts that Mitchell,
who not only stars and writes here but directs, is
a real filmmaker, they only need to watch the film.
It's gorgeous and perfectly lensed. It grooves when
it needs to and lingers when it must slow to tell
story. The most beautiful example of Mitchell's awesome
eye is the way he films Michael Pitt (Donnie from
"Bully") as Tommy. Pitt is always filmed to become
the perfect ideal of boyhood sexuality. Wan and dour,
his doe-eyed innocence simply screams "love me" from
the screen. And Hedwig does. So Mitchell films him
to accentuate this ideal. The first real image of
him, as love interest, finds Mitchell shooting him
through tangled plastic foliage, so he becomes, as
is central to the plot and dialogue here, an Adam
figure. This of course, is in contrast to Hedwig's
disfigured Eve,
The climax of the film is simply awesome
and filled with exactly the right amount of gay angst.
Mitchell has created a perfect gay love story, steeped
in anger and want and frustration and angst and plays
it out to the beat of the most well-crafted and rocking
musical soundtrack ever created for stage or screen.
Drawing from the playful yet tortured
sexual ambiguity of glam rock, "Hedwig and the Angry
Inch" has everything. It is perfection. This is the
film Todd Haynes was trying to make with "Velvet Goldmine."
My only wish is to see it again and again and again.
Note:
Also with Andrea Martin.
They play ran at the Jane Theater in
NY from 1998-2000.
This film was a big hit at Sundance
this year.
