The year’s most emotionally powerful and politically brave movie
It’s good fortune that Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers avoids political fashion to get at the elusive truth of his hero Adam (Andrew Scott), resulting in the year’s most emotionally astute movie. After his 2011 tryst-film debut Weekend (not to be confused with Godard’s masterwork Weekend), British Haigh had lost his way climbing the reward ladder with the ill-suited 45 Years and TV series Looking, a show that reduced gay male behavior to the habit of scopophilia, per HBO’s prurience. But now Haigh goes inside the mess that clouds the heads of young men struggling to realize themselves through instinct, emotional drive, and society’s uncertainties.
What cinches this daring perspective is actor Andrew Scott’s phenomenal characterization as a weakling who grapples with gradual self-awareness. He’s blandly attractive like Jonathan Groff in Looking, giving the chinless effect of someone always scared of something: “nuclear war, rabies . . .” Yet he describes “a new feeling — terror solidified and got balled up with being gay, that life doesn’t mean anything.” Scott’s blinking, stuttering, no-longer-shy self-assertion is absolutely recognizable and absorbing.
Set in 1987, All of Us Strangers is certainly AIDS-haunted, but it’s so erotically and memory-charged — and far from special-pleading propaganda — that Adam seems like the screen’s first fully actualized male homosexual: neither radical, nor standard-bearer, nor victim. In Benediction, Terence Davies had to split Siegfried Sassoon into two (Jack Lowden, Peter Capaldi) to create a comparably complex personality, but Scott’s Adam is all the more moving for being less refined, a performance of sustained fragility and unmanly truth. His struggle is recognizable — not about gender (that fiendishly exploited mind bomb) but the difficulty of self-acceptance.
When Adam dates his loutish but seductive neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal), they enter a gay disco to the herald of “I Want A Dog,” the peerlessly insouciant, plain-stated confession by Pet Shop Boys (from the album Introspective), where — suddenly — Adam’s lonely desire is multiplied exponentially.
All of Us Strangers is one of the great modern movies rooted in how pop music articulates hidden desires and makes them well known. This private-to-public expression is not liberation (that already happened in 1969), but Haigh’s ’80s pop mementos — from the high drama of Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Alison Moyet’s “Is This Love?” to Erasure and the Housemartins’ dulcet “Build” — recover a specific era and its complexities. That’s the foundation for Haigh’s unusual time-jumping narrative structure where every pulse of the confusion, regret, sadness, and longing in Adam’s head (and ours) makes sense.
Thornton Wilder would surely approve Haigh’s Our Town–style mixing of past and present, yet it’s quite sensual, musical. The concept of Adam seeing his parents when they were young — at the age they would discover and struggle with new emotions — and their parental love tested by the reality of family individuality cuts through the smugness of every coming-out movie yet made. Adam’s memories (seeing his own experience in a little boy sitting next to his masculine, role-model father) give his state of consciousness bold, moving lucidity. A bedroom pajamas scene, snuggled between mother and father, combines recall with a complicated range of emotions that Adam feels for every person in his intimate life. The reveal is visually astonishing.
Some reviewers explain away All of Us Strangers as a ghost story, but such ten-foot-pole distancing doesn’t account for Haigh’s profound insights: The consistent slipping into childhood-self that gave Dreamin’ Wild momentary wonder and the thorough interweave of emotional bonding from family to friend eventually makes Adam’s involvement with Harry breathtaking — something the architects of Obergefell left out. Dad (Jamie Bell) calls Harry “Handsome lad,” and Mom (Claire Foy) says, “He has such a sad face,” seeing through his sexy hint of danger.
It all connects (including the presence of adult Bell, the original Billy Elliot) to the homosocial reality that’s been distorted by today’s gender-ideology hacks. Bell and Foy’s absolute candor (a vivid, magical twist on Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay’s tour de force in 45 Years) conveys genuine familiness that’s been scrubbed out of politicized mainstream gay movies, as has the gamble of sexual longing or abandonment which Mescal embodies uncannily. To explain his loneliness, Adam rationalizes, “It’s not because I’m gay, really.” But Harry gives a funnier, baser retort. During a club cocaine experiment, Adam pleads, “Will you take care of me?” and Harry’s response is what haunts the movie.
Most contemporary films lack Haigh’s emotional intimacy. All of Us Strangers, adapted from Japanese novelist Taichi Yamada’s Strangers, has the memorable impact that was needed when Hollywood traduced Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” with The Last Time I Saw Paris. It owns up to gay history without showing off the now off-putting political self-righteousness of Angels in America. I think the brilliance of Pet Shop Boys’ Introspective album raised Haigh’s game. Introspection, after all, is most longed for in our heedless culture.