Cinematical

One of the few disappointing films I saw at Sundance was small town gay bar, a documentary about, well, gay bars in small towns in Mississippi. I was really interested in seeing this film; it's the first documentary effort by Malcolm Ingram, who previously directed a couple of comedies: Drawing Flies in 1996 (for which he and co-director Matthew Gissing were able to recruit their friend Kevin Smith and much of the cast of Mallrats, including Joey Lauren Adams and Jason Lee); and Tail Lights Fade, directed by Ingram and co-written by Gissing, with an uncredited exec-produce by Smith.

small town gay bar, exec produced by Smith, is Ingram's first foray out of the realm of comedy and into the more cerebral dominion of documentary, and he needs a bit more practice to get the knack of documentary filmmaking down. The topic itself is interesting: Ingram explores what it's like to be gay in small Southern towns and how gay bars serve as an oasis of tolerance amid a desert of ignorance and prejudice. Ingram explores his topic through a series of interviews with an array of small town subjects, and a look at two of small town gay bars in rural Mississippi: Rumors, in tiny Shannon, and Crossroads, a wild-and-crazy-anything-goes circus of an establishment (complete with a ring of buses around the place that served as "hotel rooms" for patrons), tucked away in the woods outside Meridian. Crossroads, we learn, was shut down two years ago.

The thing about documentary filmmaking, especially as the bar for the genre has been raised in recent years (see any of the films on this year's Oscar shortlist for documentary for examples of fantastic documentaries), is that audiences have come to expect documentary films to be engaging in the way narrative films are engaging. They want the filmmaker to draw them into a story. The difference with documentaries, of course, is that the characters are real, and are not always as engaging on film as the filmmaker might like them to be. Ingram presents us with a lot of characters in his film, but his interviews suffer from bad editing and mundane questions that seldom draw the audience into the heart of the matter.

Therein lies the rub of making a film like small town gay bar - to make the audience really care about the plight of gay people living in small towns, to make your audience feel more for them than the obvious, "Well, if it sucks so bad to live there, maybe you should consider moving someplace like New York, San Fran or Seattle", you have to show us both their pain and their joy; the things that cut deeply and make these people lie awake nights thinking of leaving; and the love and ties that bind them to a place where they are unwelcome by many of their neighbors, and often endangered just by their existence. Ingram, unfortunately, doesn't ever really engage his audience to that level.

The closest Ingram comes to achieving this level of emotional enthrallment is when he delves into the tragic case of Scotty Weaver, a 18-year-old gay man from Bay Minette, Alabama, who was stabbed, beaten, mutilated, partially decapitated and then set on fire, allegedly by his two roommates and a third man. Ingram interviews Weaver's brother and mother; their pain as they discuss the murder of brother and son is moving, but Ingram doesn't really delve any deeper than a local news interview might have gone.

We learn very little about Weaver as a person, other than he was a nice guy, liked by everyone; we learn even less about his killers, and less still about how this ties into the greater issue of persecution of homosexuals in the South. Is this an isolated case, or just an extreme example of the danger the LGBT community routinely faces in places like Alabama and Mississippi? Thus Weaver's tragic death feels less like an integral part of an overall message than a cut-and-pasted anecdote wedged into the film to illustrate a point.

In relation to the story of Scotty Weaver, Ingram introduces us to Fred Phelps, pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church, who preaches of God's hate rather than God's love, and who leads his followers to protest at the funerals of gay people killed in hate crimes - not to protest their murder, but to protest the existence of the victim with posters reading "God hates fags" and "Fags burn in hell". In the interview with the fanatical Phelps, and in some brief interviews about gay bar Rumors with people who toss about derogative terms for homosexuals and blacks with a chilling nonchalance, we come closest to seeing what life is like for gay people in the Deep South.

The thread of hope that ties everything together is the reopening of one of the bars by a lesbian couple determined not to let the one place for LGBT folk to congregate in their area disintegrate into oblivion. Their resilience as they pour their resources into preserving this safe haven makes an interesting story, but Ingram drags this last segment of the film out way too long. As a consequence, the film, which only clocks in at 81 minutes, feels at least 30 minutes too long, and by this point people all around me who had started out immersed in the film were shuffling in their seats, checking their watches, and even dozing off - not really the reaction a filmmaker aims for. That Ingram was losing his audience even in a film festival crowd of people who go out of their way to see films like this bodes ill for the likelihood of the film playing well to more mainstream audiences.

The heart of small town gay bar is in the right place; it's all too easy for those of us who live in the relatively diversified comfort zones of big cities with large LGBT populations to lose sight of the oppressive conditions under which their small town brethren live. Ingram turns his lens to the small town South to show his audience the tenacity and rebellious joy with which his subjects stand firmly entrenched in their hometowns, refusing to leave just because they aren't wanted; there is courage in their choice to stay, even if as viewers, we don't understand why they would. small town gay bar had all the pieces needed to make a truly moving and uplifting documentary, but Ingram just doesn't stitch his pieces together well enough for the message to resonate.

What this film needed was a central, inspiring character (or group of characters) to rally around, the way Favela Rising centered around Anderson Sa and the Afroreggae movement, with a tightly woven story that shows, rather than tells in a way that is intrinsically interesting to watch. Instead, Ingram takes the path of cobbling together interviews and footage of the bars in their heyday that fail to ever really draw the audience in and inspire. As a result, small town gay bar is merely an ersatz documentary instead of the truly inspiring film it should have been.