But I'm a Cheerleader (1999, Jamie Babbit) (Patreon)

40/100

Just what the world needs: A middle-aged straight dude checking in with this film nearly 25 years later and affirming its contemporaneous critical dismissal. Believe me, I'd hoped to discover that everyone really had missed the boat back then, uncomfortable with a razor-sharp satire that was paradoxically too blunt for its era; last thing I wanted was to be John Mulaney's recollection of Mick Jagger during an SNL pitch meeting, bellowing "Not funny!" at everything. But I gotta say, Cheerleader is not, in my who-cares? opinion, funny. Nor clever. Nor anything much else in the way of positive attributes beyond "well-intentioned." The basic idea's solid; the execution of that idea, on every level save for art direction and production design (which are in all senses fabulous), lackluster. Part of the problem, perhaps, is that mocking something as dumb as conversion therapy inevitably feels like shooting fish in a barrel—you can layer in cute irony by casting, say, Mink Stole as the protagonist's homophobic mom, or RuPaul-not-in-drag as the counselor in charge of teaching stereotypical masculinity, but that sort of wink-nudge humor takes you only so far. And the best that screenwriter Brian Wayne Peterson can otherwise manage is gags along the lines of a hunky gardener distracting the camp's gay guys during a football game by sticking his rake handle between his legs and doing a jerkoff motion. For all its ostensible button-pushing, But I'm a Cheerleader is fundamentally the sort of rote comedy in which, when True Directions shows up to collect Megan and she announces "There is no way I'm going!," you know with 100% certainty that the film will immediately CUT TO: Megan either at the camp or unhappily en route. (It's the latter.) There's nothing remotely sophisticated about Cheerleader, and it's subversive only in the broadest sense, by dint of tackling this subject at all.

As far as I can tell, these are basically the same criticisms that were made in 2000 (which is why I skipped it back then). People also apparently took issue with the garish color scheme, and there I do part company with Original Conventional Wisdom (OCW)—pushing that element so far over the top provides a demented kick that the movie desperately needs and mostly lacks. My particular form of colorblindness, in which red is diminished, has trouble with pink, so if even I can see that every single surface on the girls' side of True Directions is screaming hot pink, mission very much accomplished. The film also obviously benefits from a strong cast, even if nobody's given anything very interesting to say or do; it's a bit wasteful to trap a firebrand like Lyonne in the role of a meek young woman who's initially (and none too persuasively) oblivious to her lesbian desire, even though she doesn't enjoy makeout sessions with her boyfriend and has festooned the inner door of her school locker with hot bikini photos, but she and DuVall sell the burgeoning romance well enough that I can understand how others might find it deeply moving. (Still, they really should've swapped parts. DuVall's more or less playing a teenage Nicky Nichols.) Only Melanie Lynskey truly seems to have grasped what kind of satire Cheerleader theoretically seeks to be, and created an appropriately outlandish character; my single favorite moment in the film, barely noticeable in the background of one shot, is the way that Lynskey peers over her glasses with keen interest when Mrs. Brown instructs Graham to spread her legs wide for a simulation of hetero intercourse. (I also love that she gets to use her own accent here, without any dialogue needlessly explaining that Hilary's originally from New Zealand.) Bonus points for beating Tarantino to "Chick Habit." I'm grasping at straws, honestly—in the end, this is still a movie in which director Jamie Babbit can't think of anything to do as a final shot other than tilt up to the sky. (Both she and Peterson went on to be very successful in TV, which makes sense. The other Babbit film I've seen, Breaking the Girls, was truly awful.) More power to those who've embraced it in the years since, but as is often the case, the OCW seems exactly right to me.