Hard Pill (2005)

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HARD PILL

Reviewed by Heather Picker

Written and Directed by John Baumgartner, from a story by Baumgartner and K. Dayton Mesher. Starring Jonathan Slavin, with Scotch Ellis Loring, Susan Slome and Jennifer Elise Cox. 2005, 94 minutes, Not Rated.

Say you're gay. (I know a lot of you are. I mean, hell, I've probably had sex with most of you. And if I haven't called you since then, I apologize. I've been meaning to, I swear, but I've been busy with work and probation meetings, and for a while there whenever I'd try to get in touch with you I'd get your answering machine and I suck at talking to machines and I over-analyze everything and thought maybe I kept getting the machine because you were blowing me off, which totally messed with my confidence. The thing beeps, you know, telling me to talk, and I get all self-conscious and start to stammer and stutter and lapse into awkward, protracted silences punctuated by nervous coughs and strangled cries of despair that sound like something Harriet Andersson's dying Agnes might produce in "Cries and Whispers." I mean, yeah, I get flustered and then I feel bad about getting flustered because the whole time I'm doing it I'm wasting your tape or taking up too much space on the chip in your digital recorder or whatever and I feel like an idiot. Then, realizing the mess I've created, I feel obligated to provide some kind of entertainment and that has a way of making things worse. Half the time I burst into song, performing selections from "Gypsy" or "West Side Story," though there are days I'm in a darker mood and dip into Leonard Cohen's songbook instead, or I attempt to be playful by donning a blond wig and impersonating Dusty Springfield circa "Dusty in Memphis." That, like the sex that gets me into these messes to start with, has a tendency to end in humiliation, so sometimes I eschew music altogether in favor of a risqué Pat O'Brien impression, using transcripts of his booze-fueled adventures in illicit voicemail as my script. The FCC, believe it or not, has fined me for messages I've left on answering machines, which is another reason I'm reluctant to pick up the phone.) Say you read all the way through that obnoxious, masturbatory parenthetical monstrosity to get to this part of the paragraph and now you've forgotten what was going on. I'll refresh your memory: say you're gay. Now that you've announced your homosexuality, real or imagined, twice in five minutes, causing your coworkers to look at you funny since you're reading this when you're supposed to be working (I see all the traffic stats, there's no fooling me), say something else. Say a pharmaceutical company announces it is about to test a drug that could make you straight. Say you're so depressed and mired in self-pity you think about trying it.

That's what Tim (Jonathan Slavin) does in John Baumgartner's "Hard Pill." Tim's a low-key guy with a steady job and nice enough friends, but there is something sad about him, something bitter, unfulfilled and potentially explosive that isn't so far from the surface. He can't escape his loneliness, even when he's spending time with pals Sally (Susan Slome) and Joey (Scotch Ellis Loring). He posts an online dating profile hoping to find a boyfriend, but gets sex offers instead. In his unhappiness Tim consumes untold quantities of antacids and masturbates in front of his computer monitor. We can sense that he's a troubled individual (not that there's anything wrong with TUMS® and masturbation), but we don't know much about our protagonist, other than he has a fondness for Auden and giving blowjobs to his ostensibly heterosexual best friend Don (Mike Begovich).

A quirky feature of "Hard Pill" is the handy-dandy Homo Meter that pops up with the introduction of each character to tell us his or her sexuality. From this meter we learn that Tim is almost completely gay and Don is almost completely straight. Their casual arrangement, which involves Tim plying Don with straight porn before reaching for his zipper, appears to work out a lot better for Don than Tim, who takes inventory of his personal life and tells promiscuous party boy Joey that he's through with the bar scene after years of rejection. In his misery, Tim volunteers to take part in a trial study of a pill meant to turn homosexuals straight. (A radio newscaster mentions something about "corrective chemical stimuli," angering Joey, who calls the "medication" an attack on the gay community.) During a consultation with the pharmaceutical company he confesses, "The currency in the gay world is being attractive or hot and I'm just... broke. Gay guys just don't think I'm attractive. And I've had 18 years to discern that. Women like me. I get asked out."

In a movie so loaded with political implications, Tim's reasons for wanting to be straight might seem strange or overly simple. He lives in a society that isn't sure whether gays should be allowed to marry or adopt or teach in schools and all he seems to think about is his empty social calendar. But "Hard Pill" is far from shallow. A no-frills, low-budget feature with a look as clutter-free as Baumgartner's screenplay, the movie has an eerie, hypnotic, "War of the Worlds" or "1984" quality. Baumgartner practices careful restraint where other directors might not be able to mask their hysteria, and it makes for an interesting, at times acutely uncomfortable viewing experience. This isn't the first time a movie has explored the sinister threat science can pose to sexuality. In 1997, years before becoming home to "Queer as Folk" and "The L Word," Showtime produced an adaptation of "The Twilight of the Golds," the Jonathan Tolins play about expectant parents who consider abortion when genetic testing concludes their child is probably gay. "Hard Pill" tackles a similar subject matter from a different perspective and isn't as hand-wringing and melodramatic as the earlier film. What makes it so effective and, in the end, suspenseful, is how calmly Baumgartner tells a plainly horrifying story. Whatever doubts Tim might have about the study, he is determined to take the pill. After spending weeks under medical observation he is returned to his old life, newly heterosexual, and in short order gains a new girlfriend, Tanya (Jennifer Elise Cox), and finds himself estranged from his old friends – and, he begins to think, himself.

Enough rehashing the plot. This is where I admit that when I first read about "Hard Pill," I didn't want to see it. I thought it sounded depressing. The idea that a pill could turn a gay person straight should sound patently absurd, the kind of lame sexual gimmick Blake Edwards might have enjoyed exploiting in between making "Victor/Victoria" and "Switch." That it's instead a plausible concept for a movie as serious and in some ways nightmare-ish as "Hard Pill" makes me viscerally angry. I know I might sound cynical and paranoid, but of course when you read the news these days it is easy to understand why some of us aren't feeling particularly secure. My other great fear about "Hard Pill" was that it would massively suck the way so many gay movies do, with their horrible screenplays and hapless direction and awful acting (and terrible sets and ugly costumes and laughable editing, and, well, you get the picture). I am pleased, then, to report that neither the content nor craftsmanship of "Hard Pill" will make you want to slit your wrists.

Lest I sound too ass-kissy here, I'll cop to some issues with the film. First, the minor stuff. There's a half-baked subplot that finds bipolar Don going off his medication, and while it plays an important part in the film's climax, it does nothing to compliment anything in the movie. And Tim is given a possible love interest, a sexually ambiguous new coworker, who falls quite a bit short of the appealing mark with his homophobic girlfriend and disparaging comments to Tim about Joey's flamboyance. Those things I can deal with. My bigger problem concerns the screenplay, period. It is written in a kind of gay shorthand that assumes we're familiar with the harsh realities of the bar scene and the impersonal yet very personal world of anonymous online hookups. That's fine for some of us, but what about straight audiences? I suppose my big fear is that a certain class of viewers, the kind that regularly votes against gay rights but never missed a Thursday night appointment with their favorite dancing homo monkeys on NBC, could continue their tradition of willful ignorance by watching "Hard Pill" and not questioning why Tim might take part in such a radical experiment. After all, who would want to be gay? Of course, the likelihood that such a crowd would ever watch the movie is slim to none, but we've been over this already in other reviews. I'm the same one who complained about use of the word "faggot" in "Bring It On," and it has been suggested I'm overly sensitive about these things. (Full disclosure: I'm the type of high-strung, glass half-empty wacko who looks at the success of "Brokeback Mountain" and thinks, "Yeah, fine, let's see a gay art-house movie with a happy ending find that kind of audience." Call it "The Children's Hour" syndrome. Call it growing up with a grandfather who liked to point out, "Listen, your father may be a goy, but Hitler would have wanted you dead anyway." Call it whatever you want, just please, whatever you do, don't send me impassioned defenses of the artistry of "Brokeback Mountain," because I didn't say a word about that.) At the same time, I realize how silly it is to blame the movie for the collective stupidity of people who'd never rent it in the first place.

Re-reading this attempt at a review, I'm not sure I accomplished what I set out to do. It has been about two weeks since I saw "Hard Pill," and as I was watching it I didn't think I'd have much to say about it. It was a well-intentioned, thought-provoking movie with some amazing work from lead actor Jonathan Slavin, and I was impressed with how confidently Baumgartner was able to tell a story of great emotional scope on a very small budget, but it left me feeling sad and disquieted despite the emotionally cathartic ending. I questioned who would want to watch it, who could call it a favorite and revisit it with fondness over the years. It is on DVD now, released by Wellspring in a nice package that includes an extended interview with Baumgartner and Slavin (who is more political than Baumgartner when discussing the film and his own ambivalence about playing a self-loathing character), and it regularly airs on Logo TV. When I ask friends about it, friends who are quick to see every crappy gay movie that finds its way to DVD, they turn up their noses if they've heard of it at all. They say they don't want to watch something that will bring them down. I can't watch happy-go-lucky films like "But I'm a Cheerleader" and "Trick" for the same reason.

You find yourself in a strange position, recommending "Hard Pill" to to viewers. I must admit I'm not sure who its audience is. Reasonable people, both gay and straight, will not see it and learn things about human nature they didn't know already. Unreasonable people are unlikely to see it at all, unless they accidentally tune into Logo some night when they're airing "Showgirls" for the 800th time and "Hard Pill" follows it. Yet I feel it performs a valuable service, giving us a glimpse into a future that doesn't seem so farfetched. Watch the fantastic interview snippets that appear towards the beginning of the film, when an unseen camera crew approaches people on the street to ask what they think of the study. There is a preacher who supports it, and another man who compares it to genocide. There is a smiling mother playing with her child, comparing the pill to anti-depressants, and a man who smugly reasons that if you're pro-choice, you must certainly support this new drug. These scenes were so realistic they made me do a double-take. I squinted to make sure my DVD player was still on. I worried maybe someone had broken into my house earlier that day and switched the station to Fox News.

"Hard Pill" is available on DVD.

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