We first see Henry Gamble (Cole Doman) on the eve of his
seventeenth birthday having a sleepover with Gabe (Joe Keery), a best friend.
They’re two handsome young men talking about girls, though it’s clear Henry has
unrequited and unspoken feelings for Gabe. “What would you do if she was here?”
Henry asks, getting his buddy to describe a sexy fantasy, deriving far more
pleasure from the boy speaking than the images he’s conjuring. After flushed
with adolescent urges jerked around, Gabe, unaware of his friend’s crush, turns
and recommends he try listening to more Christian rock. Then Henry prays before
falling asleep. Immediately Henry
Gamble’s Birthday Party sets itself up to sit squarely in liminal spaces, in
the quiet compromises and contradictions in its characters lives. And yet it
does so without judging or condescending. Here’s a wholly emphatic, beautifully
contained drama about Christianity and sexuality that doesn’t fall into easy moralizing
or obvious stereotypes. It’s too quiet and tender to hit any loud false notes.
Writer-director Stephen Cone views his characters through
clear, compassionate eyes, creating tangles of identity that are believably
drawn and subtly explored over the course of a suburban pool party. Henry and
his parents, mother (Elizabeth Laidlaw) and pastor father (Pat Healy), have
invited some people from their megachurch to join a few worldlier high school
friends at his birthday party. His older sister (Nina Ganet), home from college
for the big day, has a pal or two on the way as well. It’s an interesting mix
of people, a variety of characters with various beliefs and personalities
casually hanging out in the backyard, eating, swimming, dancing, and so on.
Cone floats through various conversations, finding everyone has their own ideas
about appropriateness (of bathing suits, music, wine, teaching evolution), but
quietly strain to keep the good times rolling, the sense of community warm and
supportive. The characters are treated with remarkable nuance, each with their
own tensions between repression and expression, currents of unspoken desire and
pain.
Cone maps out the relationships amongst the characters with
low-key Altman-esque flair. There are youth group kids and secular teens, some
awkwardly in between (Daniel Kyri), and adult congregants both older (Meg
Thalken, Francis Guinan) and young (Kelly O’Sullivan, Travis A. Knight).
There’s some talk about politics and religion, fleeting and glancing references
to sex, but it bubbles naturally out of softly coded conversations. Whether a closeted
gay kid quietly wrestling with a crush, a student at a Christian college
struggling with feelings of spiritual lapse, a middle-aged woman torn about the
state of society (“You aren’t going Democrat on us, are you?”), or a mother
softly nursing a strained marriage, these are real people subtly feeling out
those around them, looking for likeminded compatriots. They just want someone
to understand them, to connect with them without judgment. Cone treats cultural
tensions and pressures as simply normal, and the tincture of gentle melodrama
simmering underneath is humane.
It’s a movie that avoids broad satire and easy targets,
instead treating faith seriously and finding a sympathetic lens through which
to view people with perfectly natural secrets held in: attractions, doubts,
vices. Some of these are slowly teased out in scenes of intimate one-on-one
confessions and revelations. Others remain buried, flickering in the faces of
the talented cast, but remaining unsaid. The camera is as fluid as identity,
floating through varying combinations and groupings of characters, allowing
their subtle differences to bounce off each other and reveal new shadings and
aspects to personalities. Hardly anyone – aside from one tortured young man who
threatens to become an obvious metaphor – is exactly who you’d think they are.
Cone allows the characters room to breathe and develop, for us to discover new
complexities as the film goes along. The uniformly excellent ensemble generates
the feeling of a real party, full of criss-crossing communication, half-buried
grievances, and little shifts in behavior depending on who is around.
A generous film, each person allowed a revealing moment of
some sort (suppressed impulses) or another (throwaway lines), it nonetheless
revolves around Henry. Doman makes an impressive debut, playing a good kid
whose religious upbringing leaves him not quite ready to speak his truth out
loud, but cautiously signaling his desire to act on his desires. He’s cute and charming,
engaged in a variety of interests (like podcasts, records, and Gregg Araki
movies), and it’s easy to see why he’s so loved by his friends and family. But
Cone’s screenplay resists easy dichotomies and culture clash conflict. It’s
warm and kindhearted, allowing his Christ-centered family to be genuine and
nurturing, and his sexual curiosities natural and sweet. Both aspects of
Henry’s life have a valuable place in his growth. The film is lit with sparks
of compassion for each character, meeting them where they are on their journeys.
“You’re always becoming,” Henry’s mother says at one point, confiding in her
daughter about the difficulties of adulthood. “You never actually arrive.”
With a lovely pulsing soundtrack and bright imagery, Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party captures a
dreamily full summer night – the kind that stretches out before you with
possibility and incident – spiked with the seriousness of adolescence – in
which every moment is lent outsized weight. It doesn’t build to artificial
crisis or loud farce. It develops patiently into modest and moving loose ends,
grasping at the happy endings of small steps and cautiously evolving
relationships. Cone, whose films are frequently about performance growing out
of and informing interior conflict (In
Memoriam finds a man obsessed with a news item driven to research and
reenact it; The Wise Kids is set
around an Easter pageant, while Black Box
is with a theater group), here finds an intergenerational gathering of people,
all wrestling the person, the identity they try to present, softly calibrating
their moral compasses between their beliefs and their desires. There’s no grand
coming out parties to be found in this film, but a subtler, quieter, achingly sensitive
intimacy of expression and connection. This is a special movie.
