Two from Stephen Cone

Stephen Cone's The Wise Kids (2012) is, indeed, wise. This is a nuanced, careful, and generous exploration of three religious high schoolers during the summer before they go off to college. One is dealing with being gay, one with losing her faith in Christianity, and the other with the fact that she has none of these problems. Cone himself plays the church's music director, who has his own issues. As much as I have no time for Christianity, this film is a very kind, very smart exploration of this world without the usual sensational gay conversion therapy plot. The film's central actress, Molly Kunz, is especially lovely.

Oddly enough, Cone's second feature, which I also recently watched, covers much of the same ground (albeit with several more hard-bodied shirtless actors and an absence of cargo shorts). Henry Gamble's Birthday (2016) is in many ways a retread of The Wise Kids, which is, I think a much better film. It's set in a much wealthier megachurch scenario, and the family is much, much richer. This second movie is fine, and it's occasionally pretty sexy, but the territory it wants to cover doesn't feel very new at all. This movie made a bit of a splash when it came out, and it was apparently rather polarizing with gay audience, and I don't know. I was happy to see Jack Ball in something, but Henry Gamble's Birthday really paled in comparison to The Wise Kids. 

Another thing that I guess is worth saying here is that now that I'm almost forty years old I'm much more interested in the adults in these films. I think I liked Wise Kids better than Henry Gamble is that the former film is so much more interested in what is going on with its adults. The grown-ups in Henry Gamble are mostly messes.

I watched both of these films on the Criterion Channel, where they were paired with Cone's (excellent) film Princess Cyd in a little collection there. They were about to leave the Channel on January 31st so I got in under the wire, although I think you can probably find them on Amazon Prime.