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Boys Don't Cry |
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By David N. Butterworth Hilary Swank's breakthrough, Oscar®-winning performance as Teena Brandon dominates Boys Don't Cry, a harrowing, true-life tale about a 20-year-old Nebraskan native who chose to live her life as a boy until her grisly end at the hands of her so-called friends. Kimberly Peirce's film is a difficult one to watch, a study of small-town ignorance and the prejudice it breeds, with Swank truly remarkable as the self-destructive youth who drifts from bar brawl to bar brawl before descending on the depressed rural hamlet of Falls City. With little more to do than lie, cheat, and steal the days away, "Brandon" hooks up with a pickup-full of beer-guzzling degenerates, one of whom (played by Chloë Sevigny in an Oscar®-nominated turn) he falls for. Swank's distinction is not just her ability to play a boy convincingly–her deep-set cheekbones and angular jaw give Swank a discrete physical advantage–it's the emotional depth she injects into the role of a juvenile struggling with a self-confessed sexual identity crisis. Sevigny, while not required to compete with Swank in the complexity department, is nonetheless crucial as the naïve Lana, whose unenlightened friends finally discover Brandon's true identity and, fueled by alcohol, hate, and pathological fear, brutally rape and murder her. Teena Brandon's downfall was not that she chose the wrong identity but that she opted to hang out with the wrong group of people. And in Boys Don't Cry, a film that rarely pulls its punches, Hilary Swank masterfully realizes the emotionally disturbing ambiguities which governed that final, fatal decision. |
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