Written by Jon Robin Baitz
Directed by Roland Emmerich
Bob Kohler (to Danny): "Every guy has to get over falling in love with someone who can't love him back."
It's coming up to the tenth anniversary of this particular movie. It's a movie that has such a bad reputation and after watching it for the first time, it's more than justified. Yikes.
I get that history pieces can often play around with the truth but when you have a movie that so shamelessly distorted it like this one, it's not hard to see why it's so loathed. This movie literally chose to whitewash a vital part of gay history.
With this movie, a lot of the focus was on a young white man named Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine). Coming from a small town, he was an outcast. A sexual liaison with football star, Joe (Karl Glusman) saw him at odds with his father (David Cubitt) with his mother (Andrea Frankle) and sister (Joey King) bring unable to help him.
Anyways Danny headed to New York and while his college dreams were dying, it didn't take long for him to find a gay community to befriend. The community did have a diverse enough group with Ray (Jonny Beauchamp), Little Orphan Annie (Caleb Landry Jones), Queen Ong (Vladimir Alexis) and Quiet Paul (Ben Sullivan) and of course, Marsha P. Johnson (Otoja Abit) herself.
Danny stood out for being white and not into drag or genderfluid. However he did get to first hand witness the abuse that his new family had to experience underneath the cops. It also didn't help that Stonewall bar owner, Ed Murphy (Ron Perlman) was running a prostitutiion ring or that older boyfriend Trevor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) was an ineffectual activist. Oh and then Danny had his own white privilege to deal with.
Where this movie fell apart was universally horrible creative decision to have Danny be the instigator of the Stonewall Riots by throwing the first brick and yelling "Gay Power". It's a genuinely embarrassing scene, right down from acting and directing that it soured what was already a bad movie.
If this movie had stuck to being a coming of age story where Danny befriended a queer community and got closure with his family and Joe, it would've been passable. It's inclusion of the riots and rewriting of history completed annihilated any good will that could've been bestowed on it.
- Roland Emmerich hired Jon Robin Baitz after seeing his play, Other Desert Cities to write the script for this.
- The epilogue did provide updates for Marsha P. Johnson, Bob Kohler, Seymour Pine, Ed Murphy, Frank Kameny and the Mattachine Society.
- Standout music: Stingray Music I Say A Little Prayer.
- Chronology: 1960s Indiana and New York for this movie. The riots took place in 1969.
Stonewall is a genuine embarrassment of a movie. I try to be fair with reviews but I cannot in good conscience give this anything other than a negative review. The fact the talent involved knew better but doubled down on the justified criticism only made it worse.
Rating: 4 out of 10
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