Review: Stonewall (2015)

Danny (Jeremy Irvine) flees his small town Indiana home after he’s publically outed as a gay man and heads to New York City and eventually Greenwich Village where he joins the gay subculture of Christopher Street in 1969. However, as tensions on the street rise and Danny adjusts to life as an openly gay man in the big city, violence breaks out, culminating in the historic Stonewall riots that kicked off the Gay Rights Movement and is still commemorated today with Gay Pride Marches.

Roland Emmerich is a curious choice to make a stirring historical epic about the Stonewall riots. While a story about Stonewall deserves intimacy and a sharp sense of cultural context, Emmerich trades in bombast and corn syrup. You wouldn’t think he’d be the right man for the job—and you’d be right. He’s not. Stonewall proves it.

From Jeremy Irvine’s whitebread protagonist whose motivations wildly vacilate scene to scene to the underwritten (and fictional) hustlers that dominate the film’s focus to the weak portrayal of the violently homophobic police, Stonewall is a dreadful miscalculation. It’s as uncontentious and non-confrontational as you can make a movie about civil rights. The fictional characters embody nothing more than vague stereotypes about homosexuals while pushing the actual historical figures who led the movement in real life to the peripheries. Why the filmmakers chose to insert fictional protagonists into a narrative filled with fascinating, important historical figures is baffling.

As well, the film’s attitude towards homosexual displays of affection, and specifically gay sex, is curiously prudish. For instance, a love scene between Irvine and Jonathan Rhys Meyers is about as sensual as a commercial for shampoo—all sexless torsos and soft lighting. There’s nothing real or passionate or honest here—nothing genuinely sexual. It’s as if the film is uncomfortable with its characters’ openly displaying their sexuality, while at the same time purporting to champion the same. The narrative’s aggressively judgmental attitude towards prostitution only goes to bolster its puritan nature.

With Stonewall, Emmerich is wanting to galvanize progressive viewers. While his intentions are admirable, he ends up with a whitewashed, soap opera version of a milestone in American civil rights. If you’re looking to understand the importance of the Stonewall riots in American history, look elsewhere because Emmerich’s Stonewall will confound instead of illuminate its significance.

3 out of 10

Stonewall (2015, USA)

Directed by Roland Emmerich; written by Jon Robin Baitz; starring Jeremy Irvine, Jonny Beauchamp, Joey King, Caleb Landry Jones, Matt Craven, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Ron Perlman.

This article was originally published on the now-defunct Toronto Film Scene.