Spontaneous review

Dear meson,

(personal details of the email omitted for everybody's sake)

...in other news i've been meaning to harass you about, go see Hedwig and the Angry Inch. now. you know you want to see a musical and animation interpretation of Aristophanes' speech from Plato's Symposium! (the very one you translated to me more than a year ago! way cool!) seriously, it's an amazing movie, with a little bit of everything that makes a movie a favorite of mine: fabulous protagonist, stupendous costumes, even more kickass soundtrack, and random plot-advancing animations! added bonus: punks beating down homophobes! John Cameron Mitchell turns in a command performance as the title character, who was born Hansel Schmidt in East Germany the same year the Berlin Wall was built. To marry an American G.I. and escape East Berlin, Hansel is subjected to the botched sex-change operation that left hir "six inches forward and five inches back", albeit with hir mother's name and passport. abandoned to a trailer park in Kansas when hir beau finds a new androgynous boytoy, Hedwig eventually reinvents herself as "miss punk rock star of stage and screen" in a kickin' singalong number that's seriously worth whatever you paid in admission. the amazing supporting cast includes the pan-Slavic (and pan-genres of rock) band, Hedwig's long-suffering husband Yitzhak, manager Phyllis Stein, and our heroine(?)'s ex-boyfriend, alter ego, and nemesis, Tommy Gnosis, who has become a hugely successful rocker by stealing Hedwig's songs. it all comes together in time to completely unravel at the end (i'm still not exactly sure what happened, except that, at least metaphorically speaking, Hedwig and Tommy effect some kind of reconciliation, which in turn allows the former to find some peace with her fragmented (gender) identity).

why are you still reading this? get thee to a movie theater! go!

...
fab


Serious Review

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is hands-down my favorite movie of summer 2001. It's a crowd-pleaser in the grand tradition of Tank Girl, Run, Lola, Run (fabulous protagonists, random animation, kickass soundtrack), The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (even more fabulous protagonists, amazing costumes and soundtracks), to name a few of my favorites.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is based on John Cameron Mitchell's Obie (and New York magazine, and Drama League, and Outer Critics Circle) Award-winning West Village off-Broadway musical of the same name; the play in turn was adapted from a drag persona developed by Mitchell and Hedwig songwriter Stephen Trask for the punk rock drag night Squeezebox at Don Hill's, a Soho rock club. Hedwig the play has been performed in L.A., Seattle, Boston, Kansas City, Cologne, London, Manila, and Iceland. It's coming to San Francisco, Toronto, and Berlin, and since the movie's debut many more local productions are in the works. But, as Mitchell puts it, "the film goes places the stage play never could."

In the stage show, Hedwig's past was confined to monologues; onscreen, we see as well as hear her evolution from a "slip of a girly boy from Communist East Berlin" into the "internationally ignored song stylist" on tour with her band, The Angry Inch: a motley crew (no pun intended) of Eastern Europeans representing different genres of rock. Her bassist is punk, the drummer Poison-esque, the bandleader (played by Trask) a Goth, and Hedwig's much-abused backup singer husband, Yitzhak, is a Guns 'n Roses type played heartbreakingly by Miriam Shor, who invented the role in Hedwig's original off-Broadway incarnation. We are taken backstage and get up close and personal with the band. Flashbacks to Hedwig's youth in East Berlin and abandonment in Junction City, Kansas show us firsthand the tiny East Berlin apartment where the young Hansel learned about rock'n'roll from American Forces radio, and introduce us to the handsome black American G.I. who smoothly tells his would-be bride, "To walk away, you gotta leave something behind."

We meet Hedwig's manager, Phyllis Stein (pun most certainly intended), who has been transformed from an indifferent voice on the other end of a phone to Hedwig and her band's fiercely supportive #1 fan, played by comic actress Andrea Martin as a motherly figure equally at home in designer suits and mosh pits. But the most revelatory, yet mysterious, and all around intriguing addition to the cast is Michael Pitt as Tommy Gnosis.

Stranded in Junction City, Kansas, Hedwig meets the younger man while babysitting for his infant brother. The two fall in love over her performance of "Wicked Little Town" in a local coffee shop (cleverly set in front of a unisex bathroom with the male/female stick-figure ideogram visible through most of the scene). Hedwig teaches Tommy rock star history, introducing him to such greats as Lou Reed and David Bowie, and gives him his stage name, from the Greek word for "knowledge", as a "graduation gift" (the Greek ties back to Plato; "knowledge" ties back to Tommy's conflict with Christianity, and his interpretation of Adam and Eve's fall from Eden as a love story). She trusts Tommy with her life story, and together they write songs like "The Origin of Love", the aforementioned Plato-inspired ballad. Most of all, we see that Hedwig and Tommy are both desperately needy, but in the end that need is not enough to keep the two tortured souls together. Afraid to face up to the truth of Hedwig's gender (or lack thereof), Tommy flees, taking with him the songs they wrote, which he uses to rise to stardom.

Once again, Hedwig is abandoned and embittered, and the performances that explode out of her anger eventually lead to her cataclysmic reconciliation with her ex-lover and herself. In the film's final, cryptic scenes, we see a striking resemblance between a half-naked Hedwig and the barechested Tommy singing a final verse of "Wicked Little Town" in apology; both of them are wearing the trademark silver cross Hedwig painted on Tommy's forehead as she came to the realization that he was her mystical "other half". In the end, a naked Hedwig/Hansel walks out of a city alley into the night, reborn, unnoticed by the people walking down the street—in some ways the opposite of the glamorous Hedwig who parted a crowd walking into an alley to her gig at the very beginning of the film.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch was written and directed by John Cameron Mitchell, and produced by Pamela Koffler, Katie Roumel, and Christine Vachon. Its music, lyrics, and original score are by Stephen Trask, who collaborated with the indie band Girls Against Boys on the film soundtrack. Dar Williams turned in a hilarious cameo musical performance that I didn't recognize until days later. Mitchell, who was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical/Comedy for his performance, stars with Michael Pitt, Miriam Shor, and Andrea Martin. Mike Potter designed Hedwig's hair and make-up; costume designs were by Arianne Phillips (personal stylist to Madonna and Courtney Love, and costumer for The People Versus Larry Flynt and Girl, Interrupted). The animated sequences I loved so much were created by Emily Hubley. Hedwig is a Killer Films production (Killer Films is a subdivision of Fine Line Cinema, an AOL-Time Warner company). Soundtrack available from Hybrid Recordings.


Sources: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 10 p.m. on Friday, August 10, 2001 at Edwards Cinema University 8 at the University of California, Irvine, whose staff were nice enough to give me a poster. Also the official Hedwig movie site, www.get-hed.com, the New York Times and OC Weekly reviews of Hedwig and interviews with its writer-director-star, John Cameron Mitchell.