So I watched Sundance '03 audience favorite Camp over the weekend, and it's stuck with me. Not just because the cinetrix is a sucker for "Hey, kids. Let's put on a show!" narratives [she is], or musicals [guilty], or summer camp movies [two words, Little Darlings], or the improbable triumph of misfit, smart-mouthed kids in the charge of surly alcoholics [see also, Bad News Bears]. Or even because I've had the opening number, "How Shall I See You Through My Tears?" from the Gospel at Colonnus riccocheting around my teeming brain ever since [you see, the girl who sings it has a voice like Lauryn Hill if she'd never lost her shit. Click on the title and hear for yourself].
The thing is, Camp, like its characters, is deeply flawed. There's too much muchness crammed in there, and the sense of a writer-director shoehorning in all the stuff he's been wanting to film for so long is ever present. But somehow every overdetermined thing about it--the biracial drag queen, the real-sized girls, an appearance by Stephen Sondheim as himself [he's mobbed]--coheres in such a way that you just feel good about forgiving its manifold sins. It's the cinematic equivalent of buying your overpriced produce from a CSA. There's no nice way to say it: You, the viewer, root.
And, for a movie set at a musical theatre camp, it makes truly jarring nondiegetic soundtrack choices. I mean, would you expect a film that prominently features a bunch of pubescent musical theatre geeks belting out "The Ladies Who Lunch" to set its two male leads' earnest discussion about one's homosexuality to the Replacements' "Skyway?" A film made in this decade? Me neither. And I'm not even going to touch the inclusion of the freakin' Wonder Stuff....
Here's the weirdest thing, and it took me a while to put my finger on it. The plot, such as it is, pivots on the effect that flirtatious, people-pleasing Vlad, the all-too-rare straight boy at camp, has on the fragile drag queens and nascent fag hags alike. Which is to say, it's the first movie I've ever seen where the magical negro is a straight, white, pretty boy.
Don't look so shocked. You know what I'm talking about. Like The Green Mile?
The WaPo ran a great article about the tired trope in 2003.
"[Filmmakers] give the black character special powers and underlying mysticism," says Todd Boyd, author of "Am I Black Enough for You?" and co-writer of the 1999 film "The Wood." "This goes all the way back to 'Gone with the Wind.' Hattie McDaniel is the emotional center, but she is just a pawn. Pawns help white people figure out what's going wrong and fix it, like Whoopi Goldberg's psychic in 'Ghost.' "It isn't that the actors or the roles aren't likable, valuable or redemptive, but they are without interior lives. For the most part, they materialize only to rescue the better-drawn white characters. Sometimes they walk out of the mists like Will Smith's angelic caddy in "The Legend of Bagger Vance." Thanks to Vance, the pride of Savannah (Matt Damon) gets his "authentic swing" back.
Seriously, that's exactly what happens. Still, if you're looking for a little more narrative arc and a lot less melisma than "American Idol" has on offer, watch Camp. I bet you tear up.