Hedwig Transcends...

Rating: 9/10 (16 August 2001)

As many of you may have, I heard my first bit of Hedwig buzz out of Sundance where the film was honored multiple times including the Audience Choice award for best film. I had the opportunity to view the Sundance awards show aired live from the Eccles Center in Park City on the Sundance Channel. In receiving the award for best director for the film "Hedwig and the Angry Inch", John Cameron Mitchell didn't appear outwardly to have a very powerful presence. This may have been due to shock or discomfort with the praise, but Mitchell wasn't striking or thoughtful in his acceptance. I went into the local art film house with this impression of the writer/director/lead actor of "Hedwig" on my mind.
To say Hedwig was funny would be an understatement. To say the script was insightful, delivered what appeared to be somewhat independently of its off-Broadway birth, would be grossly misrepresentative. To say the performance of Hedwig by Mitchell was strong, would be like saying "Schindler's List" was moving. My first impression of John Cameron Mitchell was intensely wrong, as first impressions tend to be, and my premeditated intent on seeing "Hedwig" to smash the generally over-hyped Sundance film reputation was in vain.
Mitchell delivers a genuinely deep character from the opening lines. One who is openly cynical about, but indebted to, his past. One who's wisdom comes from the very parts of her psychological past and geographical history. Born from the belly of East Berlin in pre-unified Germany, Hedwig leaves her unwitting country after a botched sex change operation that was conceived from her will to find the Americana that so enraptured her youth as a boy. Married to an American soldier in Germany, she leaves to settle in the center of the United States to be a trailer-wife to, and soon to be abandoned by, her new American husband just before the wall fell in Berlin. Her life is sent into a haze as she forces herself to make her way with "babysitting gigs" and various other recreation. Her life is only perpetuated by her talent in music, where she excels as both performer and writer. And soon this German's strangely American life meets its center when she finds true love in a young man who becomes her greatest enemy in the movie's present.
In this insightful, truthful, painful look at humanity, we jump between American-past and German-past, Present and future, success and struggle, and even live-action and animation. The themes are not so buried in what some might consider a "homosexual film", and in fact, Hedwig's true identity as either a male or female, gay or straight, doesn't resonate as a theme at all but merely plot. The themes and values of the film are in its understanding of the human condition and how even at the extremes of that condition, the drama of our lives does not differ so greatly as we may think. Love, friendship, loyalty, betrayal, self-discovery, self-hatred, excess, comedy, drama, laughter and tears are Hedwig's life; they are our life. And in the center of the film's focus, Hedwig cries to her love interest, Tommy Gnosis, "Love the front of me!" Perhaps the transcendence of that desire is the heart of the human comedy.
As I said, most of what can be told of this film will be an understatement. But in my attempt to shed light on the brilliance of this film, I can bid you one sentence. Mitchell's performance of his screenplay so thoughtful and innovative in its direction is what Webster's dictionary defines as "perfect".