DIFF ’03: The Event

*½/****
screenplay by Tim Marback, Steven Hillyer and Thom Fitzgerald
directed by Thom Fitzgerald

by Walter Chaw Thom Fitzgerald's rip-off of–of all things–It's My Party miscasts Parker Posey as a hard-nosed prosecutor intent on exposing the assisted suicide of a terminally AIDS-ridden man by his well-meaning coterie of family and quirky friends. While Olympia Dukakis doesn't entirely embarrass herself as the dead guy's mother, the same is impossible to say for Fitzgerald, who, by trying to ultimately equate the AIDS holocaust with the 9/11 atrocity, manages to be both distasteful and ideologically suspect. Tragedy aside, the equation, however tenuous, of a virus with Arab fundamentalists with a grudge strikes at the heart of the problem of a self-important filmmaker with an axe to grind and limited tools with which to do it. The number of casualties doesn't equate phenomena–9/11 has as much symbolic value to the AIDS epidemic as either does to car accidents. The film is redolent with this sense of smugness: proclamations of "never fuck with a drag queen" punctuated by a rabbit-kick to the nads are only ever vaguely successful in a John Waters film; playing camp as high opera, after all, rarely breeds happy results. The death party ritual itself is mawkish and seen, for the bulk of the film, twice-removed as snippets here and again of an illicit videotape, circulated in some murky queer underworld just waiting for a straight-guy mole to ferret out and use against the well-meaning felons. The conversation about merciful euthanasia is a good one to have, no argument here. So go have it instead.