Excellent performances enhance this awkwardly structured film about the friendship between three very different women. BOYS ON THE SIDE starts out as a road movie, then incorporates elements of the three-hankie melodrama, disease-of-the-week picture and courtroom drama. Though BOYS ON THE
SIDE recalls THELMA & LOUISE, FRIED GREEN TOMATOES, TERMS OF ENDEARMENT and STEEL MAGNOLIAS, it has a heart all its own.
Struggling rock singer Jane DeLuca (Whoopi Goldberg) wants to leave Manhattan for brighter career prospects in Los Angeles. Robin (Mary-Louise Parker), a yuppie real estate agent, is heading for a new start in San Diego and advertises for someone to share the ride. They agree to make the trip
together despite their differences in background, attitude, musical taste, and sexual orientation. ("Jane is a black lesbian!" Robin's mother later gasps in horror.)
They make a stop in Pittsburgh to visit Jane's friend Holly (Drew Barrymore), arriving just as her drug-dealing boyfriend Nick (Billy Wirth) is beating her up. Nick turns on Jane and Holly beans him with a baseball bat. Leaving Nick tied to a chair--but very much alive--Holly joins Jane and Robin
on the road. When the women learn that Nick is dead and Holly is wanted for his murder, they decide to continue as though they never found out. The trip ends unexpectedly in Tucson when Robin is suddenly taken ill: She has been hiding the fact that she has AIDS.
Three months later, the women are sharing a house in Tucson. Jane sings at a local gay bar. Robin, her health stabilized, enjoys a dalliance with bartender Alex (James Remar), which causes a rift in her relationship with Jane. Pregnant Holly, now a waitress, is dating a cop named Abraham Lincoln
(Matthew McConaughey) to whom she divulges her past. Abe loves Holly and wants to marry her, but also feels it's his duty to turn her in. Jane and Robin rally to help Holly, who receives a light sentence thanks to Robin's heartfelt testimony. She returns home with her husband and newborn daughter,
in time to share Robin's final days.
Director Herbert Ross's credits include two other films focusing on female relationships, THE TURNING POINT and STEEL MAGNOLIAS. Like them, BOYS ON THE SIDE gives all the choice roles to the women and relegates men to the sidelines. Powerhouse performer Goldberg could have dominated the
proceedings, but shares the screen gracefully with her two co-stars. Her scenes with Mary-Louise Parker are the film's most compelling. Jane and Robin start out as odd couple traveling companions, bickering and grating on each other's nerves, and end up family, inextricably linked by shared
experience. The actresses play off one another beautifully, their scenes together charged with an unexpressed undercurrent of love and longing. Parker, who starved herself to shocking thinness for the film's later sequences, displays an amazing versatility and depth. The film's biggest surprise is
Drew Barrymore, not because of the saucy flesh she bares but because she shows real acting weight. Flighty, flirty and forthright, Holly is the perfect counterweight to her serious-minded friends.
Don Roos's screenplay is loaded with melodrama, but a healthy dose of humor helps lighten the load. The film's occasional jarring shifts in tone are a liability, but not a fatal one: It's a character-driven piece and the beautifully-crafted characters mask the narrative flaws. (Violence, nudity,
sexual situations, adult situations, profanity.) leave a comment