“Lavender Men” is an ambitious but meandering and indulgent indie film failure.
It’s not the subject matter that does it in, as it’s another film (“Lover of Men”) and play (“Oh, Mary!”) that dives into the notion that Abraham Lincoln was bisexual.
It’s not the structure that derails it, although the fact that it’s a film and a play makes it myopic, theatrical, stagebound and neither real nor sufficiently surreal to quite come off.
Starring and co-written by Roger Q. Mason, “Lavender Men” indulges in gay “fantasia” storytelling to connect Lincoln the man and his last same sex love affair (historians debate a couple of possible romances) to Generation Grindr and “swipe right” sexual freedom. The “love connection” never quite clicks.
Even the widely-accepted history is kind of bungled as our protagonist (Mason), the stage manager of a Life of Lincoln play, is drawn back into the 1860s to imagine queer identity back then and to lecture “our greatest president” on that, true love and to remind Abe and viewers that Lincoln wanted to “free the slaves” and “send them back to Africa,” the ultimate act of “erasure.”
Re-pronouned Taffeta has to “work harder than anybody else in this theater” on this somewhat goofy and under-budgeted Lincoln play. Stage Manager Taffeta notes which actress blows her cues, resets the stage after every performance and launders the costumes, pausing only to scroll through the latest hook-up offerings on the Backdoor Baby app, dreaming of what might have been.
Half “black Irish” and half-Filipino, Taffeta is plus-sized and romantically rejected, with body image issues that outlasted sexual identity and racial identity ones. Identifying as female/”they,” Taffeta has crushes. One of them isn’t the actor playing Abe (Ted Rooney), who makes a crude come-on and tops that with insults when he’s rejected.
Surviving that and the humiliation of walking in on a couple of crushes hooking-up back-stage triggers something in the stage manager. Taffeta procedes to dream up the alleged 1860 affair between pre-candidate Lincoln and the much younger “greatest little man (he was short) I ever met,” Elmer Ellsworth.
Taffeta is both witness to and hostess for the viewer’s experience of Abe (Pete Ploszek) flirting with the frustrated soldier turned law clerk, Elmer (Alex Esola). Taffeta also participates in history, playing a recruit training under Ellsworth, an army officer and even the angry, suspicious and controlling Mary Todd Lincoln, who works to separate the two men before the presidential campaign heats up.
All these characters were real historical figures, even if you’ve never heard of them. So any liberties taken with facts or assumptions made when the facts run out are excused by the phrase “It’s a fantasia, say whatever you want.”
Taffeta argues that “Everybody believes in a little revisionist history these days,” and if Taffeta has to endure being racially “erased,” mis-pronouned and fat-shamed, so will the “Republicans” “smearing Lincoln’s legacy” with every racist, misogynistic and homophobic act.
“I read the book,” she hisses. “I saw the damned movie.” Taffeta’s history will have to do.
That’s probably not good enough for most. Historically, this film falls closer to “Drunk History” than Ken Burns, Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough.
Director Lovell Holder (“Loserville”), expanding the short film he and Mason made about “Taffeta,” wrings as much visual variety out of a small theater and stage sets as he can even if “Lavender Men” never sheds the “filmed play” pejorative.
The narrative plays like an historic soap opera with on-stage commentary by Taffeta, who has issues they want to get off their chest. The dialogue and monologues by Taffeta can be sharp and “memory play” poetic. But the script introduces more ideas than it can resolve, and lapses into the personal as a way of reaching for pathos that often isn’t there.
“Lavender Men” might work better as a play. Even if it’s not as “historical” as a “Drunk History” take on the subject and not remotely as amusing as that show or the widely-acclaimed stage comedy “Oh, Mary!” which is still running as of this writing, there’s always room for another “gay fantasia” on the 16th president, if only to watch conservatives’ heads explode at the thought.
Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity
Cast: Roger Q. Mason, Pete Ploszek, Alex Esola, Ted Rooney, Phillipe Bowgen, Gillian Williams and Mia Ellis.
Credits: Directed by Lovell Holder, scripted by Roger Q. Mason and Lovell Holder. A Pride Flix release.
Running time: 1:42
