Love! Valour! Compassion!

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

Eight friends spend three weekends in the country over the course of a summer as they explore their sometimes conflicting attitudes about love, sex, friendship, life, and death in this screen adaptation of Terrence McNally's award-winning play. Gregory Mitchell (Stephen Bogardus) is a successful choreographer whose skills as a dancer have begun to decay as he slips into middle age. He has a handsome summer home in Upstate New York which he shares with his lover Bobby Brahms (Justin Kirk). Gregory and Bobby often invite several of their friends to join them for holiday weekends: Perry Sellars (Stephen Spinella) and Arthur Rape (John Benjamin Hickey) are a pair of yuppies (complete with a Volvo) who have been a couple for 14 years (as Perry jokes, "We're role models -- it's very stressful"). John Jeckyll (John Glover), a musician and composer with a short temper and a witheringly bitter sense of humor, arrives with his latest boyfriend, Ramon Fornos (Randy Becker), a good-looking dancer who often suffers the wrath of John's foul mood. Buzz Hauser (Jason Alexander) is a witty and flamboyant enthusiast of the Broadway theater who describes his greatest fear as a production of The King and I starring Tommy Tune and Elaine Stritch; he's also HIV-positive, though he stubbornly refuses to discuss his condition with his friends. And John's twin brother James Jeckyll (also played by John Glover) is his brother's polar opposite, a kind and forgiving soul who is now living with AIDS. Love! Valour! Compassion! was directed by Joe Mantello, who also directed the original New York stage production; this film also reunites the show's New York cast, with the exception of Jason Alexander, who stepped into the role created by Nathan Lane. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: 1
• Number of Discs: 1
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 (Theatre Wide Screen)
• Audio: Dolby Digital Surround, Dolby Digital 5.1
• Screen: Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV
• Subtitle: Spanish, English
• Features:
  • • cc [None specified]

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Director:

  Joe Mantello

• Producer:

  Doug Chapin, Barry Krost

• Screenwriter:

  Terrence McNally

• Play Author:

  Terrence McNally

• Cinematographer:

  Alik Sakharov

• Songwriter:

  Harold Wheeler

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Jamie Krost

• Editor:

  Colleen Sharp

• Production Designer:

  François Séguin

• Executive Producer:

  Ruth Vitale, Amy Labowitz, Jonathan Veisgal

• Costume Designer:

  Jess Goldstein

• Choreography:

  John Carrafa

• Line Producer:

  Diane Conn

REVIEW:

• It's amazing how quickly the gay zeitgeist changes. By the time this Terrence McNally adaptation hit theaters in 1997, the reality of the AIDS epidemic had been forever altered by the advent of the triple cocktail. And a mere five years later, in the the post-Ellen, post-Will & Grace, gays-everywhere era, even the film's low-key political subtext seems like an '80s anachronism. Yet the enduring strength of Love! Valour! Compassion! is its attention to character, to the complexities of a social set, and to the ways in which chance events can ripple across them, changing everything. Full of fine performances from the well-oiled Broadway cast (with Jason Alexander ably subbing for the absent Nathan Lane), the film doesn't exactly break free from its stage incarnation. But, boxed-in as it is, the film's characters seem real, and the simple push and pull of their interlocking friendships keeps the action moving. A willfully affirming answer to the self-hatred of The Boys in the Band a few decades earlier, the film does tend to wear its heart on its sleeve. But its fine performances, economical setting, and mournful warmth mark it as a superior effort -- superior not only to all those endless, by-the-books coming-out stories, but also to the slew of comedies that followed it in the separate subgenre of scripts that deal with the complexities of gay middle age. ~ Brian J. Dillard, Rovi