HOLDING THE MAN
MA, 130 minutes, opens Thursday, August 27
Director: Neil Armfield
Stars: Ryan Corr, Craig Stott, Anthony LaPaglia, Guy Pearce, Sarah Snook
Holding the Man, starring Craig Stott (left), Sarah Snook and Ryan Corr, depicts young gay men who simply want safety and acceptance.Credit: Simon Cardwell
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★★★
Arriving in Australian cinemas as a minority try to stave off marriage equality, Holding the Man is a historical text from the recent, still powerful, past. A bittersweet adaptation of Timothy Conigrave's posthumous 1995 memoir about growing up gay in the 1970s and falling in love with a schoolmate, Neil Armfield's film depicts people who simply want safety, recognition and acceptance.
The romance between Conigrave (Ryan Corr) and John Caleo (Craig Stott), students at a Melbourne Catholic high school, must contend with not only their youthful uncertainty, but widespread disapproval and misunderstanding. John's father, Bob (Anthony LaPaglia), threatens to sue Tim and his father (Guy Pearce), when he learns of the pair's passionate, furtive relationship, and plans to send his football-star son to a psychologist to get his sexuality fixed.
The romance between Tim Conigrave (Ryan Corr) and John Caleo? (Craig Stott) endures despite widespread disapproval.
It is not easy coming out in such an environment and staying true to yourself, but Holding the Man is a distinctly Australian take on the reality of being gay in a straight world. The book's tone is brisk, and the memories conversational – sports day, for Tim, is a chance "to perve on spunks". It's the opposite of a polemic such as Larry Kramer's landmark 1985 American play, The Normal Heart, which was adapted for television with an all-star cast last year.
Even as university students, the young men hide from John's family. "Get in the closet," John literally urges Tim when his parents arrive home unexpectedly. Their life together, however, endures and grows, whether they're faced with casual violence from strangers in a pub or are both diagnosed as HIV-positive when they're tested in 1985, a probable death sentence in the initial age of AIDS.
The story jumps backwards from that heartbreaking moment and the subsequent recrimination to 1979, when the pair are carefree university students, so that the spectre of HIV hangs over their youthful pleasure. Armfield, one of Australia's leading theatre directors, puts the sizeable loss from AIDS among gay men in that era closer to the forefront of the film, whereas the book was mainly focused on how it affected John and then Tim on an intimately physical and personal level.
Holding the Man is a tragedy that tends to the optimistic, while being unequivocal about the sexual desire and medical struggles of Tim and John – the sex and the suffering are both frank. The effort required to maintain that balance is initially dissipated by Corr and Stott simply being too old to play schoolboys, especially the latter. However, Corr, last seen in The Water Diviner, does fine work in the lead role, playing someone struggling to make sense of their burdens.
Armfield's last film was Candy (2006), with Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish playing lovers dragged low, and his filmmaking here is more instinctive and engaging. He's better able to marshal his actors physically, particularly in a distinctly Australian shot, in which Tim is outside John's open bedroom window one night and their faces are pressed to each other so that the flywire screen leaves a pattern of indentations.
At points, however, John is lost to the narrative, because Tommy Murphy's screenplay, based on his successful 2006 stage-play adaptation, focuses on Tim's experiences away from his partner, whether as an actor (briefly taught by Geoffrey Rush, whose sonorous voice leaves us hoping for more) or an activist. One of the fascinating but underexplored elements of the story is John's innate conservatism, and the pair joke about being an "old married couple" even as Tim strays from monogamy.
Holding the Man is an attempt to tell a secret history, recreating the totems and trials of the homosexual subculture, whether it's the predatory glances at dance clubs or Sydney's hedonistic gay saunas, which disappoint Tim on the page but are shown in the film as pleasure zones bathed in hot orange light. That lineage extends to the hospital ward with gaunt AIDS sufferers, their faces marked by lesions.
When Bob walks through one, with another objection to acknowledging John and Tim's life together, it's too confronting for him, but then a male nurse yells out, "You all right there, darling?" and the humour springs back to the story. If the structure is complex and the themes ambitious, what endures here is the accumulation of human moments, imperfect but loving, that define these two men beyond any label.