The first half of the film sets up some potentially really interesting and politically important ideas, and then entirely ruins it in the second.
If Howard is a straight man, incorrectly outed, the film could be funny and very interesting. When his job is threatened purely because of his 'homosexuality' he is apparently faced with a very interesting dilemma - be honest about his heterosexuality and keep his job, or go along with the fact that everyone thinks he is gay in order to expose the discrimination that he faces as a result. This is a very interesting scenario, and could be both very funny, and very serious.It critiques pervasive sterotypes of gay men and makes points about prejudice and disrimination.
By having Howard as actually gay, the film bolsters all the ridiculous sterotypes that it appears to be attacking throughout the first act, and completely destroys its message. Insted the film becomes the prejudiced and discriminatory entity that it seemed to set itself up to expose.
Another area for a very interesting development is the pupil of Howard's who seems to think of himself as gay, and in prompting the otherwise awful spartacus-ending this character becomes an unhappy gay youth who believes the paranoid heterosexist concern that gay teachers can make kids gay, and so blames Howard for making him so. When he stands up it is to side with the homophobic teachers/parents and attack Howard. It is very sad and very funny therefore that this turns into a spartacus moment that saves Howard's job.
This again could have been played with in a really interesting way, have maintained the film as a comedy, but also engaed with some really interesting ideas and statements on homosexuality and bigotry. Insterd, the film seems to have accidentally hit on some fascinating small nuggets that expose and critique stereotypes and (external and internal)homophobia, but either doesn't realise it has hit on them, or just doesn't know what to do with them, and instead reinforces everything it has the potential to question. And that is when, as others have noted, it simply stops being funny.
Thoroughly disappointing, especially becasue the seeds are there - it is so frustrating to think how good it COULD have been.
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fidelio1980
14 years ago
I don't think this movie is perfect in the way it handles the coming-out story, but the real "cop-out" would have been if Kevin Kline's character was revealed to be straight.
There's a long, ugly history of movies trying to make jokes about homosexuality without actually saying that any of the characters are gay. That lack of gay characters onscreen led to generations of gay men and lesbians growing up feeling like everyone was heterosexual but them.
And this movie is based on a true story about a gay teacher whose former student became famous and outed him at the Oscars, not realizing that the teacher wasn't out of the closet. To try to revise the story to make him straight would send the message that they needed to erase his gayness to "clean up" the story.
It would have been nice to see Hollywood acknowledge that there are straight men in the world who are cultured and sensitive and non-homophobic. But what would have been the actual plot if the teacher was straight? A guy is getting married, but people think he's gay because he isn't macho, and then...what? There would be no tension there, no real dilemma of any sort for the main character, and nowhere for the story to go - in other words, it would have none of the necessary ingredients for a comedy or a drama. The movie would last five minutes.
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