Flawless is a freak show: a campy "Birdcage" view of the gay world, or the bit of it that cohabits with homophobes in a Lower East Side "heartbreak hotel".
Chief homophobe is Robert De Niro, an exsecurity guard fallen on hard times, and soon to fall on worse ones when he has a stroke trying to save an upstairs hooker who's made off with her pimp's wad. De Niro's performance sort of ends there: as the foul-mouthed stroke victim he can scarcely articulate a word, although, as the happy transvestite who's his neighbour lisps: "Having no trouble with the 'F' sound, are you?"
This engaging fellow with his hair nets, false bosoms, a glitzy cocoon of a nightclub gown and an apartment bursting with powders and paints is played by gravel-voiced Philip Seymour Hoffman.
He is the saving of director Joel Schumacher's twohander, opposing his total absence of self-pity to De Niro's moody - and, to be truthful, monotone - sorrowing semi-invalid. Soon they are shacked up together as the recycled Odd Couple, with Hoffman teaching De Niro to sing the music scales and exercise "the muscle you call your voice". The lines he's given contain a plethora of self-reflexive quotations from other movies: "You have a My Left Foot thing going for you, haven't you?" he cracks at De Niro, and, when summoning up his courage to face invading punks searching for the money, armed only with his stiletto-heeled slipper, he reminds himself: "Think of Grace Kelly in Rear Window."
Hoffman is now a gay icon off screen and his performance here can only burnish that role. Otherwise, the film is a parody of gayness with friendly neighbourhood homos looking like refugees from the Rio carnival. What shelters these condescending stereotypes from attack by Gay Pride must be their unremitting good humour and wisecracking temperament. The same tolerance is not shown to Republicans, members of the Christian Right or indeed anyone in a suit and tie.
Flawless
Cert: cert12
