New Zealand, 1986 Director: Stewart Main, Peter Wells
Stars: Nigel Harbrow, Derek Hardwick, Nancy Flyger
Hollywaids makes a surprise appearance in this bargain-bin TV movie from New Zealand, which throws a conservative farming family into an extremely difficult situation (their estranged gay son has returned home from Sydney to die of AIDS) and then sits back and tongue-clucks about how awkwardly they deal with things.
Andy’s last-minute AIDS treatments across the Tasman have failed, and he’s returned home to the palliative care of friends. Though Andy's suffering is high and his death is approaching, the film is concerned with something it finds far more horrible – the appearance of Andy’s Bible-toting, sheep-shearing family at the front door. As Andy expires, his actual family and his adopted one selfishly slug it out in the kitchen.
One guess which team the film is behind. Though there’s the obligatory scared gay friend who washes his hands with infection paranoia and timidly approaches the dramatic dying bed, Andy’s group of friends are, predictably, an emotionally evolved, close-knit bunch who seem to have just the knack of caring for their dying pal. They spend time in the kitchen and at the bedside, preternaturally gifted as both mothers and nurses, and all connected together with a golden thread of true friendship.
There’s a teasing hint of balance when they begin to panic over the arrival of Andy’s relatives. The gay friends are just as awkward, and just as nervous about coming into contact with the other side, but the film quickly sides with them, showing us their emoting faces and privileging them with explanatory monologues and romantic nostalgia scenes, empathy generating things that Andy’s family are denied. Andy’s family just get to come in and out the door, look kind of out of place and cold and dumb, then flee as soon as possible.
Apart from a teary scene from Mum, who laments the whole situation over a tin of home-baked biscuits (sob), we don’t get any insights into why Dad’s so gruff, or why Andy’s brother Colin and his wife are so fearful/judgemental. They’re all just “the enemy”, and the pressure is on them to overcome their ignorance and cross over, halos glowing, to the side of caring, tolerance, and understanding. Every second they fail in this impossible mission makes them increasingly horrible – interfering rednecks out to make their son miserable from cradle to grave, literally.
As usual in AIDS films, drama is junked in favour of histrionic melodrama, with the usual suspects of p.c. brainlessness out in force. These include:
- Seeing your estranged son/brother in the final days of a ravaging, sexually-transmitted plague type disease is the perfect opportunity for you to finally understand his strange lifestyle and foster that last minute bond.
- Gay guys that die of AIDS are angels, and those that aren’t mourning their impending death(s) are ignoramuses, or anti-Christs.
- Gay friendship “families” are far more resonant and productive than nuclear families.
- All the others.
What if the main reason Andy’s family rejected his homosexuality was because they were worried it might land him in danger or unenviable situations, which is precisely what it has done? What if they felt his lifestyle was a kind of slight against them, a statement of difference taken as insult and dismissal? These guys are farmers: big-city multi-sexual mores are as foreign to them as space aliens, actually, more foreign really, as at least space aliens are reported to favour landing in rural areas. It doesn’t matter that some of these realities are regrettable, sad or unfair – they’re the key themes of this material and they require some kind of exploration. Cut them out and any chance of dramatic tension is cut out with them.
Instead, a bunch of contradictory ideas and malformed themes clog around like mouldy jelly blobs. For example, Colin’s religious devotion is spat on, dismissed and made Exhibit A in the case against the family. Yet the film and its gay friends’ nun-like trance of loving and insistence that people put aside their judgements, become like children, and just accept everyone and love them despite their flaws, is textbook Christianity. The film is fundamentally Christian, even if it doesn’t realise it, replete with a iconic skinny man in distress, wrapped in sheets and attended by a group of disciples, and an ignorant spiritually backward culture that has pushed said sacrificial hero and his followers to the outer rings of ostracism and punishment.
There’s one good basic idea in A Death In The Family: gay guys died of AIDS in the 1980’s and many of their families were forced to confront their sons' horrible deaths and suspicious lifestyles simultaneously. Cultures and belief systems collided. But you have to think through this idea yourself – the film does nothing but knead its hankie about how tragic gay-AIDS deaths were, especially with all those nasty uncaring nuclear families buzzing about with their Bibles and biscuits.
