Since his award winning debut movie The Hanging Garden in 1998, the queer Canadian/American filmmaker THOM FITZGERALD has had a very prolific and completely diverse output. It includes BEEFCAKE (1999) the story of cult queer muscle magazine photographer Bob Mizer; THE EVENT (2003) the tale of D..A district attorney investigating several deaths of AIDS sufferers in the gay community of New York City’s Chelsea District as he suspects assisted suicide; 3 Needles (2005) a look at the AIDS Pandemic; CLOUDBURST (2011) a delightful dramedy about a lesbian couple escape from their nursing home and head up to Canada to get married.
Now he turns his hand to a frothy crowd pleaser of a movie that has two-time Academy Award nominee Australian actress Jacki Weaver playing Maybelline a small town Texan Choir Mistress in the title roll of Stage Mother. Her regular routine is completely shattered when she gets a phone call from San Francisco that informs her that Rickey her estranged gay son has died of an overdose.
She has had no contact with him for some years since her conservative husband Jeb (Hugh Thompson) had thrown him out of the house the moment he had discovered he was gay. Now for the first time in her life Maybelline refuses to obey Jeb’s demands not to go to the funeral and so she hops on a plane by herself.
In San Francisco she encounters hostility from Nathan (Adrian Grenier) Rickey’s boyfriend and also wariness from all his friends. Except from Sienna (wonderfully played by Lucy Liu) s a single mother often mistaken for being a drag queen as she hung around with Rickey all the time.
AS Rickey had never got around to writing a Will the rather shabby drag bar he owned and ran with Nathan was now legally Maybelline’s. The news horrified her and angered Nathan who was also having to leave the apartment that he and Rickey had shared as he could no longer afford the rent on his own.
Its very obvious to us what is going to happen even if takes Maybelline herself a little longer. She persuades Jeb to send her her $5000 for ‘funeral expenses’ which she uses to pay Nathan’s rent and the failing club’s debts. Then using her best church choir skills she sets about improving the acts, the cast of which includes Mya Taylor as Cherry and drag queen Jackie Beat as Dusty Muffin/
Not content with that she adopts a motherly role tackling all the problems Rickey’s friends are dealing with. Drug addiction, sexual abuse, low self-esteem, parental abandonment and the feeling of non-acceptance, We see through a whole series of flash backs that show how she and Rickey where extremely close until Jeb forced the exile . In this story which is very much about second chances, she feels a need to give his friends the support she had always wanted to give Rickey
It’s cute and schmaltzy with a few cracker one lines particularly for Sienna to constantly trot one. It is however the central force of Maybelline with a superbly nuanced performance from Weaver that is an absolutely joy to watch. She is so authentic as the bereaved mother who regrets the way things had turned out but knows that she can be empowered to become a substitute mother for everyone else in the way that Rickey would have wanted.
It maybe a tad cliched and even heavy-handed in part but its both engaging and entertaining and if the wonderfully big finale in the now very successful Club doesn’t get you reaching for the Kleenex, then nothing ever will.
P.S. Stage Mother will be screened June 28th 2020 at https://www.frameline.org/festival/film-guide/stage-motherfor future screenings ask http://filmmodeentertainment.com
