Director: Vincent Gagliostro
Runtime: 100 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
This year marks the 36th anniversary of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention renaming the deficiency disease plaguing the gay community from the originally stigmatizing GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) to the now common Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS, back in 1982.
To be a gay man in this time when the epidemic was taking hold of your community and institutionalized homophobia stalled direct action or concern from the Reagan Administration was akin to being on a battlefield, marching for justice and your right to live while your compatriots fell around you. The archival footage of protesters that Vincent Gagliostro – himself deeply connected to this movement as an archival cinematographer for How to Survive a Plague, the documentary on AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACTUP) and Treatment Action Group (TAG) – utilises as a tone setter for his first feature demonstrates the immediate need for action in that trying period for the queer community and this attitude is what he attempts to mine for dramatic tension in After Louie.
Thirty-six years since that sobering footage was taken comes this film, which probes the idea that a generational schism in ideology and ethics exists unnoticed between the surviving activists of that period and the present day gay community that their crucial work helped foster.
Viewing that archived footage is one such activist-turned-artist, Sam Cooper (Alan Cumming), who is revelling in this bleak history to complete a film project/tribute to fellow demonstrator William (David Drake), who’s only seen through faked archive footage shot by Sam to chronicle his final days before succumbing to the disease.
Sam positions himself as a relic of this radical era in how the film suggests that, in the 20+ years since he took to the streets, he has not “moved on,” so to speak, as his walls remain plastered with protest posters bearing chantable slogans and grim reminders of his former fight as he digs through old photos and footage to reconstruct his lost loved one. Cumming and Gagliostro play off the character as a guarded obsessive who, in the confines of his apartment, never laid down his arms in his war and thus acquired an acute resentment for the current generation who, in his eyes, had no equivalent in their own personal history.
From After Louie‘s conceptual standpoint there exists the foundation for a highly intriguing character study about this human artifact from the AIDS crisis coming to terms with the his generational succession by his community. We shall chalk it up to Gagliostro’s inexperience as a filmmaker that this idea fails to bloom and mature into a workable film premise.
Aiding this generational resentment is his attraction and relationship with Braeden (Zachary Booth), who, being 30 years his junior in the film, is used as a stand-in for the state of his community and who is passive-aggressively derided over the course of the film for ostensibly not appreciating what Sam’s generation did for Braeden’s. Their relationship is defined by Sam paying him off to dissuade emotional attachment and Braeden returning to his own open relationship, now fraught by the inclusion of Sam, and them rarely seeing or thinking of each other outside of this context.
The dynamic between the two is poorly communicated by Gagliostro, whose script is riddled with clunky attempts at snappy romantic banter and a disappointing lack of screen time for the pair to compare their outlooks. Cumming is the kind of talent who can work his way around subpar dialogue, but placed opposite to the milquetoast Booth, he’s effectively cut off from cultivating his character. The lead up to Braeden finally confronting Sam’s stubborn insistence to live in the past is sparse with engaging drama, leaving his resolution to change feeling unearned (or at the very least not inspired by Braeden).
Yet this seems more the fault of how Sam is written because, in his other interactions with members of his own generation, this short-fused resentment remains oddly inconsistent. The intent I assume is to show how he is exclusively the catalyst for his bitterness, but After Louie never puts in the time to effectively interrogate its protagonist on his worldview. He shows signs of wanting to rediscover the camaraderie he once felt in his community by reaching to younger gay men, but he equally remains resistant to progress as he throws his best friend’s wedding announcement back in his face, claiming that marriage is a “straight construct” and that he is forgetting all they fought for.
The result is that Sam is impenetrable to an audience and Gagliostro’s attempts to supply him with an arc fail to pan out. The coda’s insistence that he is a changed man as underlined by the multi-generational party he throws to honor William’s last wishes never feels genuine and feels more like a hollow resolution to a character with a lot of lost potential.
I still commend Gagliostro for attempting to film this unique perspective of history and imagine that, as a member of Sam’s generation who was an original member of ACTUP, he felt deeply about the need for this generational rectifying to be dramatized. What fails his vision is his lacking skills as a dramatist, one who writes characters superficially and plans emotional scenes flatly, making After Louie an interesting miss of the mark.
Elements such as Cumming’s subdued performance or Gagliostro’s way of making the history of the AIDS crisis loom over his film with repeated callbacks to the William footage give the film something to prop itself up with and inspires expectations for the director’s next project, whenever that will come about. As it stands though, After Louie never leaves that conceptual starting point that first hooks you in.
