Director Joel Schumacher and actor Philip Seymour Hoffman discuss the new transgender film
Flawless
When Phillip Seymour Hoffman comes into the room early Sunday morning, his
eyes go immediately to my copy of the New York Post. The news of last
night's Hollyfield-Lewis fight flares from the back page. "Who won?"
Hoffman asks and beams when I tell him that Lewis is the new heavyweight
champion of the world. "I knew he was going to win."
Hoffman's performance alongside Robert DeNiro in Joel Schumacher's
Flawless is a heavyweight performance of its own. Rusty Zimmerman, the
transgendered queen that Hoffman plays, may not have the fistic skills that
either Lewis or Hollyfield have, but she has more heart than either of the
two fighters showed in their last two bouts.
Zimmerman is the kind of wide-hipped tobacco-scarred mother of all drag
queens who is always at the center of drama. Whether it's shouting down her
conservative working-class neighbor, Walter Koontz (De Niro), or telling her
gay Republican "sisters" where to take their plans for a homogenized Pride
parade or talking back to a pair of drug dealing goons trying to strong arm
her, Zimmerman comes from the take-no-shit school of drag. When the local
drug kingpin is robbed, he hunts the thief down to the residential hotel
where Zimmerman and Koontz live. Hearing the sound of gunfire coming from
upstairs, Koontz, a former security guard, goes to investigate and has a
stroke.
Koontz suffers partial paralysis and his doctor suggests that he take
singing lessons as a form of speech therapy. He reluctantly approaches
Zimmerman and the two enter into a fragile and sometimes volatile alliance.
"They're both willfull people and very masculine," says Hoffman. "This role
was not about getting in touch with your feminine side. These two are going
to fight to the death for their identities."
The charm of Flawless lies in the fragility that both these characters
come to expose to one another. Koontz is an aging emotional cripple whose
relationship with a local dance hall girl is painfully financial. Zimmerman
is an impoverished artiste with an abusive married boyfriend whose ambition
is to one day be a woman. Between Hoffman and director Schumacher, the word
"lonely" is deployed about thirty times in thirty minutes to describe the
qualities of both these characters.
"They're exactly the same person," says Schumacher. "They're tough guys,
capable of great courage and integrity. They're both shut down. Frightened,
really. They're very defended and defensive. They're the center of their
own worlds. Walt's got his guy thing and Rusty's got his drag queens. Walt
may be homophobic, but Rusty's heterophobic. They're both selfish and when
you're selfish, you rob yourself of your humanity."
Schumacher, the director of blockbusters like Batman Forever, The
Client and A Time to Kill, wrote Flawless before he made his last
film, the overwrought and sensationalist 8 Millimeter. He spent three
weeks writing up the notes he had made over a four year period. The genesis
of Flawless was a series of conversations he had with a friend who had
recently had a stroke. The friend had recovered some of his speech through
singing lessons and it struck Schumacher that such a relationship might be
interesting to explore. "Bob's character came pretty quickly," he says.
"But it took a while for the Rusty character." Schumacher toyed with
different possibilities for the dynamic between the two figures: the
singing teacher could be a woman and it would be a love story, the two
neighbors could be senior citizens, or two people with different political
views, or racial backgrounds. Schumacher eventually settled on two people
with different ideas about gender.
"One of my first jobs was as a busboy in the Village when I turned 16,"
says Schumacher. "One of the waiters had two friends, Miss Ronnie and Miss
Burma. When I worked at Vogue, Miss Diana Vreeland told me, 'You must
understand that there's a third sex on the planet.' Miss Ronnie and Miss
Burma lived in that female/male world."
Schumacher began writing the script with two quotes:
"When you meet a human being the first distinction you make is 'Male' or
'Female' and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating
certainty." --Sigmund Freud
"You're born naked and everything you put on afterward is drag." --RuPaul
Schumacher says that they saw hundreds of drag queens audition for the role
of Rusty. "We got tapes from San Francisco, Dallas, Toronto ... But they
weren't actors. They were performers and entertainers. This was someone who
was going to have to go toe to toe with DeNiro." He approached Hoffman who
he says understood implicitly that Rusty was a man who thinks he's a woman
trapped in the wrong body. "Philip is not playing a man or a woman," he
says. "He's playing a transgendered person."
"The transgender stuff is a whole different ball game," says Hoffman.
"Transvestites are just guys who dress up as women. They do it on the sly.
They're very happy to be men. A transgender is actually a man who believes
he's a woman. A drag queen is a job. They can't wait to get out of their
clothes. This guy has a real problem. He wakes up every morning wanting to
be something he is not."
That's not to say that Flawless is not without its share of drag queens.
Savvy viewers will recognize several legends prancing through the frame,
including Joey Arias, Raven-O and Nashom Benjamin (who has also appeared in
Tom Kalin's Swoon and Geoffrey Beene 30). Unfortunately, these
characters are never as fully fleshed out as Koontz and Zimmerman and often
the film degenerates into a low rent version of To Wong Foo...,
desperately whining, "Can't we all just get along?"
But the conflict between Koontz and Zimmerman outshadows any hackneyed
moments of sunshine. At the core of DeNiro's and Hoffman's performances is a
dialectic that seems to be about much more than retrenching familiar
notions of straight and gay. The two characters use each other to
interrogate themselves. "It is very un-politically correct because you have
this guy coming back to this guy who hates him for acceptance," says
Hoffman. "That's where he thinks the battle needs to be fought."
Hoffman brings an edge to the Zimmerman character that distinguishes her
from a mere entertainer. It is the kind of nerve that anyone familiar with
Hoffman's roles in Boogie Nights and Happiness might expect of the
skillful young actor. Hoffman himself is ambivalent about being seen solely
in the context of these three roles. "I've played three or four roles of
people dealing with sexuality, but I've played about twenty different
roles," he says. "But people want to talk about those roles because that's
what people think about all the time: sex. It's not that I'm scared people
will think something of me. I could give a crap about what people think of
me. But I want people to talk about everything I do, not just some
masturbating scene I did in Happiness."
It is a familiar complaint and one that Schumacher echoes. "I'm
anti-labelling," says the silver haired director. "I don't like labels on
people. When I read woman director or African American politician or gay
actor, does that mean our natural assumption is that everyone in the world
is a white, heterosexual male?"
One of the interesting things about Flawless is that it struggles with
monolithic ideas of identity. "My biggest beef in the whole world is that
after the heroic civil rights movement, we saw African Americans telling
other African Americans that they weren't acting the way African Americans
should act," says Schumacher. "We saw a whole part of history erased. We
saw it with the women's movement and I see it happening in the gay
community. It's Animal Farm. If you don't act like me, you're a bad person."
Schumacher describes Flawless as "a story about people who are invisible
to a lot of people." He cites the artist Nan Goldin's gritty photographs of
New York City's fiery 1980's bohemia as an influence on the look of the
film and speaks animatedly of a recent walk through "that great area
between Chinatown and SoHo." "In every doorway are the people from this
movie," he says. " I grew up with all those people."
Schumacher still speaks with the crisp imprimatur of the city in which he
was born and raised. He studied design and display at Parsons and began his
career in the entertainment industry as an art director for television
commercials. He later stepped into costume design but realized that he
could not become a director that way. He saw that writers were getting
directing jobs and so he turned to screenplays, penning films like
Sparkle and Car Wash. The first feature film he directed was The
Incredible Shrinking Woman with Lily Tomlin. His future projects include a
film version of the hit British television series Queer as Folk.
He laughs recalling studio executives asking him who they are supposed to
like in his movies. "I try to do humanity," he says. "We're all cliches
with our own eccentricities. We all try to fit into categories and we all
have our individuality. We're unpredictable. We're flawed. I try to keep it
real."
* Read the PopcornQ review and view the trailer for Flawless!
Lawrence Chua is the author of the novel Gold by the Inch (recently
re-issued in paperback by Grove Press) and editor of the anthology
Collapsing New Buildings (Kaya).
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