Politics
is the not the only arena that makes strange bedfellows. Those
with health problems inevitably encounter health providers
from very different backgrounds, as Flawless
director and writer Joel Schumacher discovered while witnessing
a close friend recover from a stroke (and Bruce Roberts, who
developed the movie's filmscore). So Walt Koontz (played by
Robert De Niro) also learns in the film Flawless.
Both the victim of the crime and health provider in Flawless
are drag queens. As a divorced middle-aged security guard
with medals for bravery and trophies for athletic endeavor,
Walt is at first annoyed by the loud music in his rundown
Lower East Side residential hotel as drag queens rehearse
songs for their evening performances, accompanied on the piano
by fellow apartment resident Rusty Zimmerman (played by Philip
Seymour Hoffman), who is both flamboyant and hardboiled. After
using his gun to stop mobsters during a shootout in the apartment
building that results in the death of Rusty's best friend,
Walt has a stroke, ends up in the hospital, leaves barely
able to talk and walk, and then drowns himself in alcohol.
Much of his self-pity is about his inability to enjoy his
one pleasure in life, dancing the tango at a dance hall with
his special girlfriend and then rewarding her after sex with
rent money. Encouraged by a social worker and his security
guard buddy Tommy Walsh (played by Skipp Sudduth) to start
physical therapy at home, he gradually learns how to walk
from an African American therapist named LeShaun (played by
Kyle Rivers), but his speech impediment continues and requires
additional help. Falling before he got into a taxi to go to
a speech therapist uptown one day, he retreats to his apartment
and receives an offer from Rusty to provide singing lessons,
as singing is proven to be the best therapy to revive more
normal speech. Walt ultimately accepts the invitation, goes
to Rusty's apartment, and ultimately graduates from do-re-mi
scales to sing "The Name Game," though Walt's speech appears
to improve most when he and Rusty engage in mutual namecalling
in fits of temporary rage at each other. The story also features
underworld characters who persist in collecting debts and
stolen money from transgendered performers, notably Mr. Z
(played by Luis Saguar), who was responsible for the death
of Rusty's friend. Drag queens cannot be portrayed on screen
without clever lines and raucous humor, and Flawless
does not disappoint. The title refers to a yearly contest
for the man who best dresses up as a woman, and the film shows
some of the preparations as well as the interaction among
the drag queens, reminiscent of Paris Is Burning
(1991), a film exposé that was nominated for an award by the
Political Film Society. The movie Flawless focuses on the
transformation of Walt and Tommy from mutual antipathy to
mutual acceptance. Walt learns that drag queens are females
trapped in men's bodies who cannot afford sex-change operations
and that drag queens often cope with more masculine challenges
than the most macho males, resulting in a hostile outlook
expressed in strong language directed at narrowminded straights.
Indeed, Walt comes to admire how Rusty has overcome obstacles
far worse than his own, and Rusty revels in acceptance from
the debilitated but proud macho man. At the end of the film,
Mr. Z returns to terrorize Rusty. When Walt comes to Rusty's
defense, he again lands in the hospital, whereupon Rusty uses
the stolen money (saved for a sex-change operation) so that
Walt will be ambulanced to an upscale hospital to receive
the finest of treatment. The tagline "Nobody's perfect. Everybody's
flawless." classifies the film as an effort to explain to
general audiences that the transgendered deserve more than
a break-they should be respected for their courage and their
contributions to our society. Underneath the exterior, humanity
knows no gender, race, nationality, disability, age, or sexual
preference. Those who are wedded to the superficial are the
problem. MH
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