This holiday season has just begun and it already has me teary-eyed at the thought of a friend and how much friendships mean to me.
This is partly due to the deaths of several precious friends whom I miss terribly right about now, and not only because they are no longer around to complain to about the holidays this year.
It is also due to a pair of screen stories I’ve seen in the last week where the friend in the story touched me deeply and, well, meant everything.
The first is the uncluttered, focused honesty of Jodie Foster as Bonnie Stoll, “best friend” to iconic marathon swimming champion Diana Nyad in the just released Netflix biopic, Nyad.
Annette Bening is more than convincing in the title role (Note: She brutally trained a full year as a swimmer and it shows) but it is Foster’s performance that gives the film its true heart and meaning.
Nyad is the star (Note: In this case, athlete), a difficult, unsentimental and tunnel-visioned success story that makes the headlines and gets the lion share of the credit. Yet what we get to see in this movie is just how much her best friend and briefly former “girlfriend” enabled the impossibly obstinate Nyad to live the kind of life she longed for both professionally and personally.
As her coach and closest confidante for decades, it is Bonnie’s loving, no-fuss determined dedication that allows Nyad, then in her early sixties, to actually fulfill her lifelong dream to become the first person in the world to swim from Cuba to Florida.
This, of course, makes it sound like a typical inspiration sports film and, in some ways, it is. Except, by the end, when it isn’t that at all.
See, at most Nyad is a well-structured, competent sports drama that hits the requisite beats one would expect.
But what makes it truly worth watching is the often-unexplored relationship between two people, in this case two gay women, who briefly dated years ago and have now become family.
They introduce themselves to others as mere best friends, a phrase that means quite a bit on its own but is woefully lacking when it comes to these two. And yet this is true and has also been said for many close friendships we have all seen over the years and/or perhaps have experienced for ourselves.
Still, without Bonnie there would be no Nyad and without Diana Nyad there would be no way Bonnie would likely have ever experienced the adventurous highs and intense emotional peaks and even valleys that gave her life meaning and made her feel most alive.
It’s not the typical paradigm of athlete-trainer, mentor-star. It is the unnaturally natural connection of two people that society still doesn’t have the proper term for that is the real story, the one that provides this film its principle drive and certainly that which gives it its primary power.
Not surprisingly, it is the relationship between two gay men over thirty plus years in the Showtime limited series, Fellow Travelers, that also touches me so deep to my core that at times I need to either look away, put it on pause to do some laundry or simply stick it out and let the feelings unshake memories I’ve chosen to keep pretty deeply buried for fear of the pain they would unleash (Note: Except, of course, with a therapist present).
Based on the best-selling novel, the eight, hour-long episodes of Fellow Travelers (Note: At this writing just the first five have aired) expands the scope of the fictional Hawk and Tim (aka Skippy) “love” story beyond the lavender scare of the 1950s, when gay people in Washington, D.C. were hunted down, outed and, in turn, had their lives destroyed, through the gay liberation of the late 1960s and 1970s and well into the AIDS-era death march radicalism of the mid-1980s.
In so many ways the slightly older, certainly more experienced and handsomely sophisticated Hawk is the love of his younger, at one time lover Tim’s life. Nevertheless, what they have is not so much a messy, decades-long, on and off again affair, but an epic, non-traditional, boundary-crossing friendship that explodes far beyond the limitations of romance.
Again, it seems to sell their relationship short to call it a mere friendship but it also sells it even shorter to classify it as a long-term functionally dysfunctional tragic love story. Instead, what they have is a messy, magnetic, invisible to the naked eye connection that seems to have no restrictions and yet far too many limits.
In that way, Fellow Travelers succeeds not so much as a historical chronicle of gay history and the gay people that lived it (Note: Though it has its moments) but as the uncomfortable, deeply human representation of how much and how little two people can bring to each other despite, or because, of how much they feel.
This is in no small part due to the on-screen chemistry between out actors Matt Bomer (Hawk) and Jonathan Bailey (Tim). No, you don’t have to be gay in real life to play gay men over these four key decades but, my gosh, it helps. This is especially the case when it comes to the frankly provocative and always quite truthful sex scenes. Not to mention what is not said in the moments right before and right after.
Full confession: I saw so much of my younger self in the naïve, trusting Tim and too much of the impossibly charismatic, seductive Hawk in any number of dear, long gone lovers, crushes and closely observed acquaintances. This has made me mostly adore the characters, frequently hate their actions and yet allowed me to always deeply understand how they do so much that is right and just as much that is always and utterly just so hopelessly wrong.
It’s a relationship that creates its own rules and then defies them. So much more than friends, and yet, they sometimes don’t even seem to be that. Certainly, they are not the equivalent of any long-term married or unmarried couple we’ve ever seen.
But what they are to me, and I suspect many others, is a touchstone to every wrong move we’ve ever made, every right move that didn’t work out and every random act any of us ever took that provided an unexpected, perfect outcome we could never have anticipated.
In short, a couple that you can’t help but feel, in more ways than you can count.
notes from a chair 