Where Pride Ended
By 
OK, the movie is actually a vanity project mostly financed by the director’s own production company. But I would prefer to think of the decision being made by hack production executives in Armani suits:
“We really need a new idea.”
“I’m thinking it’s time to reboot the Green Lantern franchise. Can we get one of the guys from Twilight?”
“No, no, no. I want a prestige project. Something real classy. Redeeming social value. A Cry Freedom or On the Beach for the 21st century.”
“Hmm. What about the Stonewall riots?”
“That’s brilliant! Gay people are very hot these days. What a story.”
“Do we have a writer?”
“Yup. We have a TV guy who will work cheap. Oh, and surely you remember that Al Pacino/Tea Leoni vehicle from 2003?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Don’t worry, he’ll be fine. Who cares about the writing anyway?”
“Fair enough. Who do we want to direct it?”
“Stephen Daldry? His version of Johnathan Safron Foer’s 9/11 novel captured it perfectly.”
“Hmm. I like the cynical manipulation of his work, but he seems a little subtle for our purposes. We want anvils dropped on the head of the audience in the crudest way possible. And I’m looking to get a little more whitebread than Safran Foer.”
“Joel Schumacher?”
“I dunno, seems a little too highbrow. We don’t want this to be too complicated. It’s got to sell to the dumbest person we encounter at a mall test screening. I’m thinking Michael Bay, only with a little less wit and artistry.”
[Execs look at each other]
“Roland Emmerich!“
Stonewall, a twelfth-rate hack — what could possibly go wrong? Apparently, everything:
Turns out, Stonewall is perhaps even worse than some feared it would be—more offensive, more white-washed, even more hackishly made. It’s so bad that it’s hard to know where to begin a catalogue of the film’s sins. Maybe you start with its leering, bizarrely sex-shaming tone, which has poor cherubic baby-hunk Danny (Irvine)—kicked out of his house by his football-coach father after he’s caught giving the quarterback, yes the quarterback, a blow job—being preyed upon by gross, sweaty, teen-hungry older men upon arriving in New York. In two different scenes, Danny cries pitifully as one of these horrible, horrible men (one of them in grotesque drag) fellate him. (He needs the money, and is then turned out against his will.) Danny shuns the advances of any younger man who isn’t strapping and white, particularly those of Jonny Beauchamp’s Ray/Ramona, a queer Latino street kid who has a big crush on pretty-boy Danny.
Rather horrifically, it’s taken as a given, an implicit fact, that Danny could never, ever fall in love with, or have sex with, someone like swishy, gender-fluid Ray. No, no, people like Ray are meant to forever pine in the shadows for American godlings like Danny. But when Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s character successfully seduces Danny, while playing “A Whiter Shade of Pale” on a jukebox no less, it’s understood to be O.K., because he’s at least a somewhat masculine white guy. In that scene, Emmerich keeps cutting back to Ray’s sad expression as he watches the seduction happen, and though Danny is largely meant to be the audience’s safe, easy stand-in, in that scene I think Emmerich wants us to sympathize with Ray.
Because surely we all wish we could be with a Bel-Ami certified twunk like Danny, right? Well some of us do, sure, but of course plenty of other people are instead into what Ray is selling, or any of the other non-white or non-butch hustlers who populate Stonewall but get only a minimal, pat-on-the-head kind of attention. The movie could never even consider such a possibility, though. Here is a startlingly direct exercising of entitlement: “Yeah, I know in real life it happened to those people, but wouldn’t it be better if it happened to someone like this?”
The historical drama, which nominally chronicles the gay liberation riots outside New York’s Stonewall bar in the summer of 1969, is so big, broad, and dumb, it doesn’t feel so much like Oscarbait as it does a Broadway adaptation of Oscarbait. It is formally inconsistent (it’s a history lesson, no it’s a romance, no it’s group therapy, no it’s an ensemble comedy, no it’s a police procedural) and uniformly miserable. The acting is so pronounced and deliberate it pairs woefully well with the ersatz backdrops, which always look like they were shot on a soundstage (they were—for financial reasons, Emmerich shot in Montreal, not New York). The script has the subtlety of a sledgehammer, telling instead of showing each teachable moment in a movie-long series of teachable moments. “I take whatever I want and can, ‘cause if I didn’t, I’d have nothing at all,” says a black character at one point. “Nobody wants me. Not even you. I don’t have anything,” says a Latin sex worker character at another. “These kids have nothing to lose,” says an onlooker during the far-too-brief climactic rioting scene.
“I’m too mad to love anyone right now,” says Stonewall’s protagonist during the denouement. Well that makes two of us.
As a connoisseur of hatchet jobs, I would be grateful for this movie if it wasn’t such a missed opportunity and it wasn’t so insulting on every level. And if Emmerich wasn’t such a clueless asshole.