FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| FILM TWILIGHT OF THE GOLDS Suzanne Stein (Jennifer Beals) and her husband Rob (Jon Tenney) learn that they are going to have a baby. Rob, a doctor doing research in genetics, involves Suzanne in his work and they discover that their son has the genetic makeup for homosexuality. Gayness is already a sensitive issue in Suzanne's family because her younger brother, David (Brendan Fraser) is gay. Years of underlying feelings surface when Suzanne reveals her situation to her parents, the upper middle class Jewish homophobes Faye Dunaway and Garry (father of Laverne and Shirley) Marshall. Sound like a movie of the week? Indeed, Twilight of the Golds is so steeped in melodrama it makes the Young and the Restless seem like a Mr. Bean spin-off. Everything is done absolutely perfectly in this second effort from young director Ross Marks, working with a debut screenplay from writing team Seth Beass and Jonathan Tolins. The dialogue, delivery and scenes are completely believable. The actors are committed (even Beals), the character arcs play out as perfectly as Uma Thurman's curves, and the obligatory confrontations occur every five minutes throughout the film. The real problem here is the characters at the heart of this story. Are we to assume that our perfect middle-class family can even consider abortion as a viable alternative to having another gay offspring? Burdening our protagonists with such a provocative crisis leads this film to a resolution that could not be any more than one notch above the superficial. Twilight of the Golds presents a well intended message from the politically correct right of Hollywood's new kids on the block, but their vision of what they believe to be high stakes seems relegated behind the closed doors of America's so-called moral majority. In the arena of the less pristine, ticket-paying, popcorn-munching public, this conflict cannot carry the film from beginning to end. For example, I'd hate to see the Stein's reaction if the prenatal prognosis was that the baby would have two heads, one of which wasn't kosher. |