Small Town Gay Bar: Exactly that, for better and worse

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **½

It's commendable that Kevin Smith and his View Askew production group (yes, the ones responsible for the Clerks movies, Chasing Amy and Dogma) helped produce and distribute Small Town Gay Bar, a documentary explores two gay bars in small Mississippi towns. Unless we've grown up in or--less likely--moved to a small town as an adult, we have little knowledge of what it's like to be "other" in a place where almost everybody knows your business. And the movie does give us entry into that somewhat creepy and inauspicious realm. While many of the straight denizens interviewed here are quick to point out their live-and-let-live philosophy, they let us know, just the same, that they don't much care for "that type." But then we learn about one young gay man, who was murdered while still in his late teens, who obviously was not the beneficiary of this "kindly and informed" philosophy.

Director/writer Malcolm Ingram interviews a number of gay men and women who go on at length about small town life and what it has meant to have a welcoming place in which to congregate. He also talks with hate monger and "reverend" Fred Phelps, who gives us his sermon on why gays will burn in hell. Considering that the movie comes in well short of feature length, there is a good deal more repetition than its 81 minutes (including a long credit roll) can tolerate. People say something, say it again, and then other people appear who basically say the same thing. And, forgive me for sounding like a big-city "sophisticate," but nobody here is particularly well-spoken. Consequently, you may grow a little weary--while still feeling sorrow and pain for many of the folk you meet--well before the film comes to its close. By the end, one owner has sold his establishment to someone who, it appears, will not allow the bar to keep its gay identity. But then the other bar in a different town (the history of which we've heard all about) reopens for business--though how far away it is from the former bar, I could not ascertain. Perhaps, in the end, things will even out for all concerned.

Small Town Gay Bar is rarely uninteresting and, God knows, its subject is important. But this ought to have been a better film: tighter, more probing. The questions asked ought to have produced more intelligence, spontaneity, more drama. Only at the end, as several people we've spent some time with ride in the back of a limousine, does the conversation become more spirited, friskier, more genuine. Too many interviews end up sounding as though the interviewee is saying what is expected of him or her and trying to be politically correct. Even a little of this sort of thing--and there's a lot of it here--can be deadly.