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School Ties
Directed by Robert Mandel; starring Brendan Fraser
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Directed by Bill Condon, based on the book by Christopher Bram; with Brendan Fraser, Ian McKellen, Lynn Redgrave.
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Directed by Sam Weisman; starring Brendan Fraser
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Starring Brendan Fraser
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Directed by Hugh Wilson; starring Brendan Fraser
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Readers of Christopher Bram's novel Father of Frankenstein had reason to be puzzled when they heard Brendan Fraser was cast as Clayton Boone in Bill Condon's film Gods and Monsters-- based on Bram's book. Based loosely on fact, Bram's book is a fictional re-creation of the last days of James Whale, a veteran Hollywood director of such masterpieces as Show Boat (1936), Frankenstein (1931), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). In Bram's novel, set in 1950s Hollywood, Whale is mostly forgotten, debilitated by a series of minor strokes, and plagued by memories of World War I trench warfare. He eagerly wishes his own death. Fixating on Clayton Boone, his lawn-man, Whale imagines creating a new Frankenstein monster, a beautiful young man-- and angel of death-- who will grant his final wish and kill him.

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In the book, Boone is a tough, heterosexual, working-class guy with only a vague idea of Whale's former career. He is put off by homosexuality. Whale's plan is to come on to Boone and provoke him to murder. The are a myriad of tensions in the novel-- Whale and Boone have ironic parallels in their lives-- but what joins them together is the erotic tension pushed by Whale and programmed to end in violence. Surely the part called for someone like Mark Wahlberg, with his dangerous reservoir of incipient rage. We have to believe that Clay will actually flip out and kill James Whale-- the threat of violence has to be visceral and ominous. But most of the time Fraser looks as if he would roll right over after half a beer and some sweet words.

Ian McKellen's performance as James Whale is astonishing, as is Lynn Redgrave's deeply moving and deadly funny portrayal of Hannah, his faithful if scandalized housekeeper. And Condon's script and direction is sensitive to Bram's novel while staking out some new ideas that embroider and enrich it. But the success of the film is due in no small part to Brendan Fraser's detailed and wrenching portrayal of Clayton Boone. Mark Wahlberg could have whittled an edge of fateful violence and confused, homophobic anger to the part that Fraser has infused with a quiet, desperate need to be heard and understood. When Whale offers to draw his portrait we can see Fraser's Boone being not just flattered, but also pleasured by Whale's doting.

It would have been easy for Fraser to have brought up a homoerotic subtext here-- is he flirting with Whale? Is he "really" gay? Is he a cocktease? But Fraser has the good acting sense and emotional grounding to make us see that Boone's emotional need to be recognized coexists with a wealth of other feelings: his vanity, his desire for a loving father, his insecurities about his heterosexuality, his fears of aging, his incipient understanding that Whale's famous monster is a study in loneliness. Fraser, with his beefy body and his little-boy smile, his looming presence and aching to be liked, is perfect for the role. Several reviewers noted that Gods and Monsters was released after Fraser had scored a huge hit a year earlier with George of the Jungle, which was daffy, but ironic and playful. Displaying a well-wrought body and finely tuned comic sensibility, Fraser managed here to turn an essentially parodic role into one with emotional and psychological weight.

Ironically, George of the Jungle, with its innocent-little-boy-in-a-big-man's-body routine, was good prep work for Clayton Boone. One of Fraser's first starring roles was as a Jewish student in a 1940s anti-Semitic prep-school, in the well-meaning but inept School Ties. Though the film was limp, Fraser managed to make his character wholly sympathetic. (The most important scenes seem to take place in the school showers, which keeps raising the unspoken question of Fraser's foreskin, or lack thereof.) Even in his newest film, Blast From the Past, Fraser plays obvious and tired comic situations with genius and charm. Here he plays a 35-year-old man raised in a fallout shelter who has to negotiate 1998 Los Angeles without a clue or a sense of history. (No surprise that in Dudley DoRight, his film version of TV's Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon, you can't imagine a more Dudley Dudley always doing right, no matter what his intellectual limitations.)

It is this ingenuousness-- completely honest and unassuming, and totally un-ironic-- that makes Brendan Fraser's performance in Gods and Monsters so perfect. A more vicious or guarded Boone might have turned Bram's delicate cat-and-mouse game into too much of a simulated queer bashing. With Fraser as Boone, the odds are not so much softened as heightened. Boone, as Whale's new monster, becomes less a vengeful killer than a beautiful but deadly angel of mercy. At a time in Hollywood when male stars seem divided between the hulking Stallones and Schwarzeneggers or the ever-and-ever pliant Leonardo diCaprios, Brendan Fraser stands out as a bolt of emotional realism the way that James Dean and Montgomery Clift did in the 1950s. If he is a creation of Hollywood-- and what star isn't?-- he is the personification of a new sensitive man who is butch without being violent, emotional without being adolescent, and sexy without being particularly heterosexual. As the presentation of gender and sex changes in popular culture, this may not be perfect, but it's a start. **

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com