Stonewall (2015 film)

Stonewall
File:Stonewall (2015 film) poster.jpg Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Roland Emmerich
Produced by	Roland Emmerich Michael Fossat Marc Frydman Carsten Lorenz
Written by	Jon Robin Baitz
Starring	Jeremy Irvine Jonny Beauchamp Joey King Caleb Landry Jones Matt Craven Jonathan Rhys Meyers Ron Perlman
Music by	Rob Simonsen
Cinematography	Markus Förderer
Edited by	Adam Wolfe
Production company	Centropolis Entertainment
Distributed by	Roadside Attractions
Release dates	September 18, 2015 (2015-09-18) (TIFF) September 25, 2015 (2015-09-25) (United States)
Running time	129 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Box office	$174,289

Stonewall is a 2015 American drama film directed by Roland Emmerich and written by Jon Robin Baitz. The film stars Jeremy Irvine, Ron Perlman, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Joey King, Caleb Landry Jones, Matt Craven, Atticus Mitchell and Mark Camacho. The film was released on September 25, 2015, by Roadside Attractions.

The drama is set in and around the 1969 Stonewall riots, the violent clash with police that kicked off the gay liberation movement in New York City.

Plot

The drama is a coming-of-age genre film, and centers on fictional Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine), a young gay white man from Indiana, who flees the conservative countryside in the late 1960s and moves to New York City. Before leaving, he is discovered by friends while making love with his boyfriend. His father is horrified, his mother is ambiguous as she feels for her son, but also does not want to stand up to her husband. His father then refuses to sign the scholarship application for Columbia University where Danny is supposed to attend.

Danny leaves for New York anyway, leaving behind his younger sister. After reaching Greenwich Village, he is befriended by a multiracial group of young, gay and genderfluid street kids and drag queens. He meets an older man Trevor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who soon becomes his lover and roommate, and Ed Murphy (Ron Perlman), the manager of the Mafia-owned Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in the Village. Ed colludes with corrupt policemen and exploits homeless gay youth to his own advantage. Danny gradually learns about gay culture from his new friends and becomes involved in the struggle for gay liberation.

Cast

• Jeremy Irvine as Danny Winters
• Jonny Beauchamp as Ray/Ramona
• Joey King as Phoebe Winters
• Caleb Landry Jones as Orphan Annie
• Matt Craven as Seymour Pine
• Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Trevor
• Ron Perlman as Ed Murphy
• Atticus Mitchell as Matthew
• Otoja Abit as Marsha P. Johnson
• Mark Camacho as Fat Tony
• Joanne Vannicola as Sam
• Yan England as Terry
• Arthur Holden as Frank Kameny
• Ben Sullivan as Quiet Paul
• Veronika Vernadskaya
• Karl Glusman
• Andrea Frankle
• Richard Jutras as Queen Tooey

Production

In April 2013, Roland Emmerich spoke about the film, saying: "I may want to do a little movie—about $12–14 million—about the Stonewall riots in New York. It’s about these crazy kids in New York, and a country bumpkin who gets into their gang, and at the end they start this riot and change the world." On March 31, 2014, the producers announced it would film in Montreal. On April 9, 2014, Jeremy Irvine joined the cast of the film. On June 3, 2014, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Ron Perlman and Joey King joined the cast. Principal photography began on June 3, 2014, in Montreal. Emmerich initially wanted to shoot in New York; however, he changed the venue after finding it too expensive.

Release

On March 25, 2015, Roadside Attractions acquired distribution rights to the film. In July 2015, Roadside Attractions scheduled the film for a September 25, 2015, release.

Critical reception

Critical reception for Stonewall has been negative. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 9% rating based on 57 reviews, with an average rating of 3.6/10. The site's consensus states: "As an ordinary coming-of-age drama, Stonewall is merely dull and scattered—but as an attempt to depict a pivotal moment in American history, it's offensively bad." Metacritic reports that, out of 26 critics, the film has a 30 out of 100 rating, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Writing for Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson described the film as "maddeningly, stultifyingly bungled", the script as "alarmingly clunky" and featuring "production design that makes late 1960s Christopher Street look like Sesame Street". Lawson faults the director for taking "one of the most politically charged periods of the last century" and making it into "a bland, facile coming-of-age story", and says that the role of Marsha P. Johnson was "played as comic relief, flatly". According to Lawson, the treatment of Johnson is part of a wider lack of respect for non-white and "non-butch" characters in the movie; he believes they are treated with "only a minimal, pat-on-the-head kind of attention", showing the riots through a "white, bizarrely heteronormative lens".

In The New York Times, Stephen Holden said that the film "does a reasonably good job of evoking the heady mixture of wildness and dread that permeated Greenwich Village street life" but that "its invention of a generic white knight who prompted the riots by hurling the first brick into a window is tantamount to stealing history from the people who made it".

Stonewall veteran Mark Segal, writing for the PBS NewsHour said,

"Stonewall is uninterested in any history that doesn’t revolve around its white, male, stereotypically attractive protagonist. It almost entirely leaves out the women who participated in the riots and helped create the Gay Liberation Front, which included youth, trans people, lesbian separatists and people from all other parts of the spectrum of our community."

The movie made $112,414 from 127 locations.

Controversy

Prior to the film's release, the promotional trailer was criticized by many for its lack of representation of minorities, whom activists say were prominently involved in the historical event, in particular people of color, drag queens, butch lesbians and trans women. Emmerich responded to the controversy, saying, "I think we represented it very well... We have drag queens, lesbians; we have everything in the film because we wanted to portray a broader image of what 'gay' means."

Jeremy Irvine, who plays the lead role in the film, denied that key historical figures have been omitted, or whitewashed. "To anyone with concerns about the diversity of the #StonewallMovie, I saw the movie for the 1st time last week and can assure you all that it represents almost every race and division of society that was so fundamental to one of the most noteworthy civil rights movements in living history,” Irvine wrote on his Instagram account. “Marsha P. Johnson is a major part of the movie, and although 1st hand accounts of who threw the 1st brick in the riots vary wildly, it is a fictional black transvestite character, played by the very talented Vladimir Alexis, who pulls out the 1st brick in the riot scene,” he continued.

Later in 2015, those who protested the movie were listed as one of the nine runners-up for The Advocate's Person of the Year.

See also

• Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community (1984), a documentary of the decades leading up to the Stonewall uprising
• Stonewall (1995), another fictional presentation of the events leading up to the riots
• After Stonewall (1999), a documentary of the years from Stonewall to century's end
• Stonewall Uprising (2010), a documentary presentation using archival footage, photographs, documents and witness statements
• List of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender-related films of 2015
• White savior narrative in film
• Whitewashing in film

External links

• Stonewall at IMDb
• Stonewall at Box Office Mojo
• Stonewall at Rotten Tomatoes
• Stonewall at Metacritic