I saw Boys Don't Cry, a picture about an unfortunate Lincoln,
Nebraska woman (Hillary Swank) with gender identity issues. She
wants to be a boy, so she crops her hair short and poses as a boy.
In those moments, where she has "passed" and tasted
affection from the vantage point of a male, the film works. We
see the fearful life Swank leads, how her surroundings and her
gender conspire against her desire to express what she feels and
who she thinks she is. Swank has you share her exhiliration as
she ends an evening with a kiss from a unknowing date. Her
performance is justly praised.
Swank soon falls in with a motley crew of losers, including an
ex-con, a self-mutilator who has burned his own family out of
house and home, and a girl who aspires to leave her job canning
broccoli so she can get paid as a karaoke singer (Chloe Sevigny).
Swank falls in love with Sevigny, and a white trash Romeo and
Juliet ensues.
Director Kimberly Peirce has a firm grip on the picture when
she is depicting Swank's acceptance into this group. It plays as
a more rough-hewn "American Graffiti" where the gang
eschews the strip for the highways of Nebraska, and malts become
beers and bong hits. Peirce shows a group moving fast (she uses
the effect of fast speed highway lights, super slow-motion shots
of the gang getting high in the back of a car, and a police chase
off-road in the dust) and going nowhere.
Unfortunately, in real life, the Swank character was murdered,
and the second half of the film grounds to the halt of numbing,
repeated brutalization of Swank. Director Peirce pours it on at
the end, with 4 scenes of debasement and cruelty. Swank is so
dehumanized that any emotional power is drained from the film. I
suppose the end is defensible on grounds of reality, but it saps
the early beauty of the film and worse, it blots out Swank's
singular character until she is just another unrecognizable
victim of senseless American violence.
