Guidance - QUEERGURU

David Gold is a thirty-something year old man who is still trying to cling to his past when he was a successful child actor in a hit TV series. Now he is closeted gay alcoholic in total denial of so much more than his sexuality, including stage 3 skin cancer. The only work he can get these days is doing voice-overs for new age mood enhancing tapes but he gets fired from that job for being drunk and ‘sounding too gay’.

Now totally broke and about to be evicted from his shabby apartment where he hangs out all day watching VHS tapes of his old shows, he talks his way into a job doing the one thing he may be good at i.e. helping young people. To date that has just consisted of him being the means for them to get liquor from stores that won’t sell it to them, but now he espies an advertisement for a vacancy as a High School Guidance Counsellor. Having absolutely no qualifications for the job he ‘borrows’ them from a real Counsellor whom he discovers through Google. With a deft piece of identity theft he uses his acting skill to ape the man’s mantras about helping teenagers which he successfully repeats to a harried School Principal who is desperate to give him the job as he is about to leave on vacation the next day.

Complete in a creased corduroy suit and now wearing geeky glasses Roland Brown aka David Gold descends on the school ostensibly to do a job that he has not got the faintest idea of how to go about. The other staff are very wary of him except for the gay gym teacher who refuses to believe that Roland is straight as he claims, and immediately starts to aggressively flirt with him. The students however soon take a shine to ‘Roland’ and his unconventional advice. When shy Rhonda comes to discuss the fact that she has no friends, he gives her a few vodka shots and implores her to just hit on the dumbest boy in her class. When Brett the school ‘pot’ dealer comes for a session Roland quickly discovers that his problem is that his potential is not being recognized by anyone in the school. That, and the fact he is selling the pot too cheap, but Roland fixes both of these things.

Jabrielle who plays truant regularly is however a much more serious case as Roland quickly realises that she is being abused at home. This unlikely pair of misfits bond and when eventually Roland is uncovered for being a fraud and is on the lam from the Law, its Jabrielle who hooks up with him as she has finally run away from home.

This rather wonderful oddball comedy is the work of Canadian filmmaker Pat Mills who wrote, directed and starred in it. Mills was once a child star, and in fact he had to pay 10 years of back Union dues to be eligible to act in his own movie. He has a remarkable delightful droll sense of humor that is quite black, totally politically incorrect but never ever mean. He has written himself some real corkers of lines like ‘Everybody knows that teenagers are going to drink and smoke drugs. If you do it with them, everybody has fun!” In a performance that has some animated camp touches that seem to be inspired in part to Pee Wee Herman he simply shines and is a real joy to watch.

If this really is what the path to self-destruction actually looks like, then I think more of us would give it a spin. With a shot (or two) of vodka in hand of course.