Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Released 2001
Reviewed February 10, 2002
Stars John Cameron Mitchell, Michael Pitt, Miriam Shor, Stephen Trask, Theodore Liscinski, Rob Campbell, Michael Aranov, Andrea Martin, Alberta Watson
Directed by John Cameron Mitchell

This film blew me away. It's based on an off-Broadway play of the same name that ran for two years, and it's about a drag queen who endures an unhappy, unloving childhood in East Berlin. As a young man, he falls in love with an American GI and finds himself in a trailer park in Kansas. There's a lot of story between those two points, but I don't want to spoil any surprises. The film opens with Hedwig and his band, The Angry Inch, playing at a Bilgewater's restaurant, which is a chain of fish (I wouldn't say "sea-food") restaurants that must barely be a step above Long John Silver's. The group is on a "world tour" of Bilgewater's restaurants across the U.S. What they're actually doing is following Tommy Gnosis, a rock "icon" who happened to steal Hedwig's music as well as his heart. While Tommy is playing stadiums, Hedwig is maneuvering around the salad bar. There's a lot of comedy here, but the comedy is a defense mechanism. It allows the audience to deal with the ever-present undercurrent of pain that permeates the film. That might make it sound like a downer, but it's not. It has an intense energy that blends the pain and comedy to let you take it seriously enough to care and empathize for Hedwig, but it never wants to break you down.

The story is mostly told through songs. The music is show-tunes played by a rock 'n roll band, and it reminded me of Ziggy Stardust. They're very catchy, aggressive, and provide narrative, but mostly they're very moving. In these songs, Hedwig bares his soul. We see his childhood, his love affairs with Luther and Tommy, and all of his heartbreak throughout. Hedwig is a broken person who was abused as a child and is adrift as an adult. The emotional pain is palpable during the songs, but Hedwig uses a sardonic wit to tell the audience to not pity him. He desperately wants to reclaim the love he had with Tommy, but even that was a warped love. Tommy couldn't kiss him or love him from the front, which was Tommy's way of using denial to deal with his religious guilt.

I absolutely adored this film, but I wish it had taken the time to tell Yitzhak's story. Hedwig is married to a woman who is also a crossdresser. What's going on here? A major theme in the film is the origin of love, which revolves around an Aristotle story about how creatures originally were both male and female with two faces and eight limbs. Zeus later separated the creatures into males and females, and love was created to reunite men and women. While watching the film, I was trying to figure out Hedwig and Yitzhak's relationship. I was thinking we had a man who wanted to be a woman and a woman who wanted to be a man, so together they would make a whole person. The movie never tells us anything, though. We see onstage rivalry in the opening song, tenderness in the motel that's broken by jealousy, a power struggle involving a passport, and finally freedom for Yitzhak. What we don't see is how or why Hedwig and Yitzhak are together or what their relationship is. The DVD contains a deleted scene that should never have been deleted, because it showed how they initially met. Yitzhak was a Czechoslovakian beauty queen that used Hedwig to flee her country, but she may also have been infatuated with him. If she only needed him to leave the country, why would they stay together on this emotional grinder of a tour? Was it a power trip on the part of Hedwig? We don't know.

Reviewed by Bill Alward 
February 10, 2002 
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I went to see the play, and now I know Yitzhak's secret. When Hedwig agreed to take Yitzhak with him, he forced her to "leave something behind." The condition was that she could never wear a wig. That explains Yitzhak's forlorn fascination with wigs throughout the movie, and it adds emotional impact to the climax. Oh, John Cameron Mitchell, why couldn't you have included 30 more seconds in the movie to explain this?