Posted: 12/06/1999

Flawless

(1999)

by Hank Yuloff

What’s dis? Bobby D in some movie about him sidin’ up wit’ da faggots? What kind of cockamamie kind of film is dis for a tough guy? Hank sez: “Put yer bias’ aside, bub, this one’s gonna change yer mind. Well, what there is of it.”

It takes a lot of guts to name a movie Flawless. You can just see some hack reviewer like me taking a pot shot and saying “Flawless isn’t.” Well, Joel Schumacher has those guts and let me tell you… Flawless IS. I want you to go see this movie with high expectations of seeing a well told story with wonderful actors playing sensational parts. You will not be disappointed.

Flawless is the education of an ex-hero security officer (Robert De Niro as Walter Koonz) who, while trying to help a woman being attacked in his building, has a stroke. This might not be as tragic as it could be except this man’s total self-worth is tied to a physical “wise-guy” self-image built through years of denial and closing a blind eye to the world that has become his: like going to a private “dance club” where his “special girl” tells him after they’re done having sex—that she’s having a hard time making the rent—but who ISN’T a whore because he doesn’t pay for sex.

Walter’s physical therapist tells him that he has seen many people recovering from strokes learn to speak again by taking singing lessons. Enter Busty Rusty Zimmerman, a singer/ humorist / drag queen who lives upstairs.

In the past, Rusty and Walter have not seen things eye to eye. Walter is a redneck, faggot hating, “I-got-your-dick-right-here,” asshole kind of guy and Rusty and his friends are, well, flaming and flaunting it. But Walter needs to learn to speak and Rusty needs the money so they agree to get along and Walter becomes the pupil. He chooses Rusty because the gay man is the only one he isn’t ashamed to be around while he can’t talk as he used to.

Forgetting the whole rest of the plot which revolves around who has a drug lord’s stolen money, the best parts of this movie are around Rusty’s piano while he is giving lessons to Walter. You see the walls come down and get put back as the two men try and find a way to admit to themselves that they really could become friends.

Attention Academy: a couple of years ago you screwed Ed Norton out of a Best Supporting Oscar. Don’t do it again, this time to Philip Seymour Hoffman. His performance is quite simply… touching. It would have been easy for him to play the entire movie as the one dimensional over-the-top gay blade (see Nathan Lane in The Birdcage) but he also opens the soul of his character and allows us to see what being gay has done to and for his life. And while he is not altogether comfortable in his skin (he’s waiting for an operation, snip snip), he?s doing the best he can in it and is trying to come to terms with who he is in this world.

As for DeNiro, I feel there is a certain constant: any movie he is in is always made better because of his contributions. This is one more stellar performance, one more gift he has given those of us who love what movies can be. But I gush!

So the real story of Flawless is how two people who, like all of us, have self-doubts and feelings of low self worth, or thoughts that someone might find out how perfect we’re not, come to find that it really is OK to have a life. There are some predictabilities, but that’s part of the fun. You know some of what’s coming, let them take you for the stroll.

Flawless is well photographed, taking us inside many of the apartments in this flea-bag hotel from the door jams—using wide angle when it helps, and shades of light and dark to highlight the seedy but inescapable place these characters have fallen into.

Hank Yuloff lives in Los Angeles, where he can be close to the heart of all that Hollywood madness.

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