The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (13 page)

Happy, Texas
is a hard movie to define. Think
The Fugitive
if it had starred Tim Conway and Harvey Corman, or maybe
Tootsie
set in a small rural town. How about
Drop Dead Gorgeous
without the crazy mother? This much is for sure:
Happy, Texas
is a screwball comedy about two convicts on the lam who go to great lengths to avoid detection.

Mark Illsley and Ed Stone were old friends struggling to make it in the film business. After reading the Robert Rodriguez's how-to memoir on the making of
El Mariachi
called
Rebel Without a Crew
, the duo were inspired to make a film on a shoestring budget. They set out to write a film that they could shoot in their backyard using just a few friends as actors. As the script took shape both men realized they were writing something a little more ambitious than a patio epic that they could shoot over a long weekend. The script eventually fell into the hands of producer Rick Montgomery, who convinced the fledgling filmmakers to set their sights higher and shoot the story as a feature film. When Academy Award winner William H. Macy signed on to play the gay sheriff of Happy, Texas, the funding and the rest of the cast fell into place.

The story of Wayne Wayne Wayne Jr. (Steve Zahn) and his partner-in-crime Harry Sawyer (Jeremy Northam) begins as they escape from an overturned police van and steal an RV from a gas station to make their getaway. When the sheriff of Happy stops them they think they have been caught. “There's a lot of people looking for you,” says the cop with a smile. Busted.

Or are they? What they don't know is that the vehicle they took belongs to two gay men who travel through the small towns of Texas consulting on beauty pageants. They haven't been arrested, they've just been handed a new identity.

In town they pose as the pageant producers, coaching a group of small girls who dream of one day being Little Miss Fresh Squeezed. No one from Happy has even qualified in 25 years, so the pressure is on. The small-town folks take this pageant very seriously, something screenwriter Ed Stone learned through personal experience. He was a disc jockey at a radio station just a few miles from Happy, Texas. In his daily news reports he often had to read stories about the Happy High School sports teams and Happy pageants, and was always amused by the name.

“Like most every small town in Texas, Happy's citizens were just mad when it came to pageants,” he says. “As a disc jockey from another part of the world I'd sometimes go on the sir and poke a little fun at this obsession with pageants, and you wouldn't believe the angry calls that came in. It was really surprising to find out how seriously the Texas population takes their pageantry.”

Harry, the slicker of the two, coaxes the thickheaded Wayne into teaching the girls ballet and poise while he cases the bank. His plan to crack the safe is foiled, or at least sidelined when he falls for the bank manager Jo (Ally Walker). She thinks he is gay, a ruse he maintains to get closer to her. Meanwhile, love is in the air as Wayne develops a crush on a local schoolteacher Ms. Schaefer (Illeana Douglas), and Sheriff Chappy Dent (William H. Macy) eyes Harry. Despite living a lie and running from the police Wayne and Harry find happiness in the small town, a happiness neither of them has known before.

Happy, Texas
is supported by two great comic performances. As the kind-hearted dolt Wayne Wayne Wayne Jr., Steve Zahn is over-the-top hilarious. As he tends to the young pageant hopefuls he discovers that he really likes this work and cares about the kids, even if he's not sure how to behave with them (his idea of bonding with them is to offer them cigarettes or teach them to sing
99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall
). With his walrus moustache and hangdog expression, Zahn brings a manic energy to the movie but never crosses the line into sentimentality as Robin Williams has so many times in similar roles. Even when Zahn is being endearing — as in the scene where he wonders aloud about the best way to sew a sparkly heart on a costume — he still has an edge. The critics saw it too, and he picked up a special jury prize for Best Comedic Performance at the Sundance Film Festival.

William H. Macy's take on the gay sheriff of this small town isn't nearly as showy as Zahn's character, but is funny and touching at the same time. Macy can do more with a glance than many actors can with several pages of dialogue, and he demonstrates his talent here, rising above the farce aspects of the story and breathing real life into his role. Even though Chappy is a comic character being played for laughs, the audience still feels for him; you can't help but be saddened for Chappy when Harry doesn't return his affections.

“Chappy undergoes a transformation in this film,” says Macy. “At the start he's so protected that he couldn't be available to anyone. But eventually his heart gets big and vulnerable. For me this film is ultimately about love. Love is truly a rare thing. If you can find it, then go for it. Don't miss your chance.”

Romantic lead Jeremy Northam is strong. Until
Happy, Texas
Northam was best known for period dramas like
The Winslow Boy
and
Emma
. Here he drops his English accent in favor of a midwestern American drawl, and leaves the waistcoats in the dressing room. Northam breezes through the movie, coasting on his considerable charm and good looks.

Happy, Texas
is a funny little charmer that takes a sitcom-like plot and entertainingly stretches it to feature length. The screenwriters may use homosexuality as a plot device, but they never resort to homophobia as a source of humor.

If not for
The Harder They Come
, you might not have that copy of Bob Marley's
Legend
CD on your shelf wedged between Marilyn Manson and Martha and the Vandellas. In 1973 reggae music was virtually unknown outside of Jamaica, but when the low-budget, rags-to-riches gangster flick became a hit on the midnight movie circuit, it helped to introduce a whole new audience to the music's lilting island rhythms.

Shot on a shoestring budget of $400,000,
The Harder They Come
tells the story of Ivan Martin (Jimmy Cliff), a young man from rural Jamaica who comes to Kingston to seek his fortune. Hoping to find fame as a musician, he tries to peddle a handful of original reggae songs. Naive to the ways of the record business, he is conned by music industry sharpies and winds up penniless and disillusioned. With his dreams of stardom shattered, he takes a job working for a local minister, but trouble in the form of a relationship with a ward of the preacher, Elsa (Janet Barkley), forces him to flee. While on the run Martin auditions for a producer (Bobby Charlton) by singing the movie's title tune. Impressed, the producer offers $25 for the rights. He refuses the paltry offer, and soon finds work as a ganja dealer.

In the mean streets of Kingston, the marijuana traffic is under the dominion of the police. Martin double-crosses the local drug lord (Carl Bradshaw), and is attacked by several police officers. Then an interesting thing happens: while on the run he becomes a folk hero when a record company cashes in on his notoriety by releasing his old audition tapes. His records top the charts as he has one final showdown with the corrupt cops.

The first thing that stands out about
The Harder They Come
is the music, which accentuates and propels the film's action. Three decades since its release the soundtrack still stands as the perfect introduction to Jamaican pop music. With the notable exception of Bob Marley, most of Trenchtown's biggest stars are represented here — Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, the Melodians, the Slickers, Scotty, and Desmond Dekker. Culled from a selection of Jamaican singles from the late '60s and early '70s, these songs represent the birth of reggae, a point at which the music was finding its feet, adding a slower, more complex rhythm to the traditional sounds of ska and blue-beat.

There is a wide berth of reggae represented here. Toots and the Maytals' “Pressure Drop” provides the soul, while the socially conscious “Shanty Town” by Desmond Dekker is true to the origins of reggae. Cliff's four selections — including the title track and “You Can Get It If You Really Want” and the Melodians' “Rivers of Babylon” — add a dash of syncopated pop. The music's harder edge is present in the songs of the Slickers and Scotty. It's a superb compilation, a cornerstone of West Indian music that earned an international audience for reggae, paving the way for Bob Marley and others.

The film itself probably won't win any awards from Jamaica's tourist bureau. Grim and violent, it eschews any clichés of Kingston as a laid-back island paradise. This is a raw film that delves into the frenzied street world of Trenchtown. Director Perry Henzell places much of the action in the city's decaying black ghetto, an immense tableau of rusted corrugated tin roofs and filth where people pick through garbage for food. Corruption and ruthlessness are ubiquitous, with violence around every corner. It's a bleak vision of Jamaica's emerging identity, breaking ground in its honest portrayal of Kingston's urban existence. Life imitated art when two of the film's actors were violently killed in Kingston shortly after the movie's release.

Whatever Jimmy Cliff's deficiencies as an actor, he more than makes up for in charisma. His scenes crackle with energy and authenticity. It's hard to take your eyes off him, even when the going gets grim, as when he carves up a man's face while snarling the line, “Don't . . . fuck . . . wid . . . me.” It's a gory scene (too much fake blood seeped through the actor's fingers, but with no money in the budget for a second take, the grisly sequence was left in the completed film), but is made more gruesome by the intensity of Cliff's acting. He's a better singer than actor, to be sure, but as Ivan Martin he brings a spirited amateur screen performance to life.

After the film's completion director Perry Henzell found that his vision of life in urban Jamaica was a tough sell to theater owners. Popular in Jamaica,
The Harder They Come
took several years to catch on outside of the Caribbean. Henzell hawked his film around the world only to be told, “nobody here is interested in reggae.” It took six years for the film to be shown in Italy, but when it did, reggae took off immediately there. “Bob Marley came in a year later and played to 100,000 people,” he said. That same scenario happened many times before the film found its mainstream audience. Part of the sales problem may also have been cultural. Foreign buyers had a hard time understanding the dialogue. Although it is in English, the heavy Jamaican patois proved daunting for some audiences, so Henzell added English subtitles to certain parts of the film. It remains one of the very few English movies to have English subtitles.

To date
The Harder They Come
is the only film from Jamaica's burgeoning motion picture industry to find an international cult audience. “It's two different films really,” Henzell says, explaining its appeal. “In North America, Europe, and Japan, it's for college-educated people who want to glimpse the other side. In places like Brazil and South Africa, it plays like
Kung Fu
for illiterate audiences.”

A frumpy German woman divorced from her American GI husband was the inspiration for John Cameron Mitchell's best-known character. “She had a trailer we went to and she'd give us drinks,” he remembers. “She had a lot of dates and I couldn't figure out why she was so popular, because she was not overly attractive, although she did have a certain pose. In retrospect, I realized she was a prostitute.” Mitchell expanded on that woman's unhappy story when creating the “internationally ignored song stylist” title character for
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
.

Hedwig
creators Mitchell and Stephen Trask met because of a bad movie. They were seated next to one another on a plane and both hated the inflight film. Instead of watching the movie or falling asleep the strangers began to talk, hitting it off immediately as they traded work stories from their respective fields, theater and music. Post-flight the duo kept in touch and were soon collaborating on a project, a rock-and-roll musical. “I had become bored with doing the usual guest-star sitcom work and was interested in doing a solo piece incorporating rock music,” says Mitchell. “And then I met Stephen, who is an amazing composer.”

With Mitchell writing the monologues and Trask and his band Cheater providing the music, they soon whipped together an early version of
Hedwig
that played on drag nights at Squeezebox, a Manhattan rock-and-roll bar. Over the next few months the show changed and grew, as did its fan base. Soon they had to move to larger quarters, an actual theater in the West Village, and Mitchell's rowdy off-Broadway performances as the “girly-boy” Hedwig were garnering rave reviews and attracting attention from film companies.

Mitchell leapt at the chance to present
Hedwig
on the silver screen. “When I started writing for stage, I actually saw it more cinematically,” he says. “There were jokes or visual cuts I had in mind. And I thought, ‘Oh it would be so much easier if we could just show an image.' You know a picture is worth a thousand words.”

Killer Films, the company behind Todd Solondz's
Happiness
and the Academy Award-winning
Boys Don't Cry
, was chosen to produce the film, which was shot in Toronto.

The search for stardom and love begins with a German boy named Hansel who undergoes a sex change operation and switches his name to Hedwig, in order to marry an American GI and escape to the freedom of the United States. “To walk away,” he says, “you gotta leave something behind.” Unfortunately the operation is bungled, leaving only a small deformed lump between his legs, the “angry inch” of the movie's title. The marriage doesn't work out, and Hedwig finds herself divorced and living in a trailer in Kansas with dreams of rock and roll stardom. “I scraped by with babysitting gigs and odd jobs,” Hedwig explains in the movie, “mostly the jobs we call blow.” She forms a band, and begins a relationship with one of her fans, a young boy named Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt). Together they write songs and yearn for a better life, and Tommy becomes Hedwig's protégé.

Tommy begins to have doubt in the relationship and finally abandons her when he discovers that she was born a man. “What's that?” asks Tommy, feeling an ever so slight bulge in Hedwig's pants. “It's what I got to work with, honey,” she says. He forms his own band and becomes a big time rock star based on songs he has stolen from Hedwig. “From this milkless tit you have sucked the very business we call show,” she says.

We learn all this through flashbacks, animation, and songs. The film begins in the present with Hedwig performing behind the salad bar at a chain restaurant called Bilgewater's. She and her band, The Angry Inch, are shadowing Gnosis's tour; while he plays the stadium in town, Hedwig, bitter and a little worse for the wear and tear, can be found around the corner singing for dumbstruck restaurant patrons who don't know what to make of her. As she stumbles through her tour, trying to capitalize on the fame of her ex-lover, she discovers the true origins of love.

The whole film is about duality and healing. Hedwig is the product of a broken home in communist East Berlin, a divided city. He reluctantly agrees to a sex change operation that leaves him split once again — not fully male or female. Hedwig's search for love and acceptance is the result of feeling like a divided person her entire life, so she makes it her quest to heal herself and become whole. That philosophy — that everyone is looking for something — drives the movie but doesn't weigh it down.

“Everything Hedwig does is to gain some kind of wholeness,” says Mitchell. “Everyone is seeking something and trying to make him or herself whole, including Hedwig and Tommy Gnosis as well. In the end it is Tommy who gives Hedwig the knowledge she needs to move on, to realize that she is whole in a way she didn't expect.”

It's a strange and sometimes sordid story, but is brought to sparkling life by Mitchell in the lead role. His Hedwig is a tour de force performance that hits all the right notes — the style, the sound, the fury, and the pain. There isn't a hint of parody in Mitchell, even when he is wearing some of Hedwig's more outlandish costumes and wigs. He plays it straight (no pun intended), and that is the beauty of the performance: the audience must feel for Hedwig or the whole thing will fall apart. Mitchell makes her lovable and keeps her interesting. Hedwig is all heart, especially when she is being self-deprecating. “I had tried singing once and they threw tomatoes at me,” she says, “so after the show I had a nice salad.” She's part vaudeville, part heartbreak.

Overall,
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
works extremely well as a rock-and-roll musical. Mitchell, who doubled as director, injects a fast and furious energy to the musical numbers, particularly one glam rock tune performed in a trailer home that transforms into a stage. Rock-and-roll musicals are a bit of a minefield, and rarely ever work on the big screen, but Mitchell's in-your-face style of directing is the perfect complement to his “post-punk, neo-glam” material.
Hedwig
rocks out with a fierce power rarely found on the silver screen.