Overall Rating
  Awesome: 83.47%
Worth A Look: 10.74%
Average: 1.65%
Pretty Bad: 3.31%
Total Crap: 0.83%
5 reviews, 91 user ratings
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| Hedwig and the Angry Inch |
by Collin Souter
"Put on some make-up, turn on the 8-track and have a ball! Beautiful fun"
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How can you know if/when you’ve truly found your other half? And if that person leaves you, does that make him/her not your other half anymore? Perhaps your so-called “other half” merely serves to bring out the inner you that has been pent up inside for so long, you never knew it existed.So goes the story of Hedwig, a glam-punk-semi-transsexual rock star trying to confront his long-lost love named Tommy Gnosis who ran off with his heart and his songs. Tommy’s face has all but taken over the covers of every magazine in the nation while Hedwig squanders with his band playing to disinterested patrons of seafood restaurants. Hedwig doesn’t want revenge or fame. He merely wants to win his life back and to know if these songs about wholeness still have meaning to Tommy. Words and music brought these two halves together, but who knows if they truly fit?
If all this sounds too weirdly melodramatic, let me just tell you that “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” has just the energy, fire, wisdom and charm this murky and sluggish film season so desperately needs. Unlike this summer’s “Moulin Rouge,” this musical has a story and protagonist you can latch onto. The songs (written by Angry Inch band member Stephen Trask) let us in on the psyche of Hedwig, a character so charming and sympathetic, I found his monologues and observations just as thrilling and poignant as some of the songs he uses to express them. The music never overshadows the story and the story never sinks to the level of dumbed-down sappiness or pretence. You’ll be humming the tunes to yourself on the way out of the theater while at the same time trying to remember when you laughed the hardest. And it won’t give you any headaches.
So, what does “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” mean anyway? Hedwig (John Cameron Mitchell) grew up as a boy in Germany under his birth name Hansel. Hedwig tells us that he has been touched by so many people in his life, but not in the way a boy is touched by an angel. No, Hedwig grew up as the victim of pedophilia. One day, his mother walked in on him and his father sleeping in bed together. His mother promptly threw the father out and Hansel never saw him again. Poverty stricken beyond belief, Hansel would sleep on the kitchen oven rack while listening and connecting to rock and roll music on a tiny one-speaker radio. He finds rockers such as David Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop taking over where his father left off.
In one of the movie’s more bizarre flashbacks, Hansel falls in love with a tall, black, muscular Army Sergeant named Luther (Maurice Dean Witt). Luther wants to marry Hansel and take him to America. But this being a still-divided Germany, Hansel must make sacrifices in order to obtain a passport to leave the country as Luther’s wife. With his mother’s approval, Hansel undergoes a sex change. However, the surgeon botches the operation leaving a small lump of flesh where Hansel’s manhood once hanged, hence the “Angry Inch.”
Luther and Hansel’s marriage in a trailer home doesn’t last too long, but just as Germany’s wall crumbles (circa 1990), Hansel realizes his true potential as a woman of rock and roll. In what will definitely be regarded as the catchiest of all the songs in this movie (so much so, Hedwig and his band invite the audience to sing along), Hansel dons the big blonde flip wig that will change his/her life. Hansel becomes Hedwig, a transsexual drag queen with a Divine attitude, a heart of gold lame’, and a bruised soul to bare.
While working as a nanny, Hedwig meets Tommy (Michael Pitt), a young, naïve Jesus follower “of surprising depth.” The two strike up a friendship through writing songs and practicing music, that which brings these two halves together. As expected, though, Tommy can’t cope with Hedwig’s deformity and the two halves split.
Hedwig’s band tours salad bars across the country as a shadow of Tommy’s North American stadium tour while Hedwig’s manager tries to get in touch with Tommy’s lawyers to file a suit against him for plagiarism. Now, I’m sure, this all sounds like the plot to a John Waters movie, but “Hedwig” tells its story from the heart and soul without a trace of camp or cheap gross-out gags (not that I have anything against John Waters, you understand).
John Cameron Mitchell gives one of the year’s most memorable performances as Hedwig. He also wrote and directed the movie, which he first conceived as an off-Broadway play (currently playing in Chicago, but on temporary hiatus). He wrote quite a juicy part for himself, but one never gets the sense that he did this out of pure ego. He clearly has affection for this character. He wrote the part and plays the part as though he has to cast out every side of every one of Hedwig’s demons as well as his own demons. It might be enough for you to want to read up on where the parallels between Hedwig and Mitchell lay, truly the mark of a great writer/actor.
Mitchell does just as well as director. Stage plays sometimes have a problem with working as movies especially when the director has little interest in altering the text, lacking a sense of adventure. They do nothing to give us a reason as to why a movie had to be made out of it (see “Hurly Burly” or “The Big Kahuna”). Mitchell jettisons the stage-play idea altogether by taking us from the dank horrors of his childhood in Germany to the open fields of a Lillith Fair-like music festival where Hedwig performs on Stage # 9 to an audience of one. The musical numbers leap off the screen with wonderful interspersions of simple almost stick-figure animation to help propel the story. As I said before, Mitchell doesn’t play it up as camp, but as high art.“Hedwig” has been compared to the all-time cult classic “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” but unlike that campy 1975 musical, “Hedwig” delves deeper into its subject. Sure, it has the make-up, the transsexuals, the kitsch and the rock and roll drama, but “Hedwig”’s conclusion, which stumbles slightly in the third act with an overly simplistic car crash scenario, will have you pondering many of the story’s philosophical issues. Perhaps the search for your other half and the struggle to hold onto it shouldn’t be as important as making peace with every aspect of your own personal self as it stands. Maybe, just maybe, a little bit of Hedwig exists in all of us.
If so…don’t dream it, be it.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=1760&reviewer=233
originally posted: 08/08/01 23:16:56
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 SXSW Film Festival. For more in the 2005 South By Southwest Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
20-Jul-2001 (R)
DVD: 11-Dec-2001
UK
17-Aug-2001 (15)
Australia
01-Nov-2001 (MA)
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