Boys Don't Cry (1999 film)

Boys Don't Cry is a 1999 American biographical drama film directed by Kimberly Peirce, and co-written by Peirce and Andy Bienen. The film is a dramatization of the real-life story of Brandon Teena (played by Hilary Swank), an American trans man who attempts to find himself and love in Nebraska but falls victim to a brutal hate crime perpetrated by two male acquaintances. The film co-stars Chloë Sevigny as Brandon's girlfriend, Lana Tisdel.

After reading about the case while in college, Peirce conducted extensive research for a screenplay, which she worked on for almost five years. The film focuses on the relationship between Brandon and Lana. The script took dialogue directly from archive footage in the 1998 documentary The Brandon Teena Story. Many actresses sought the lead role during a three-year casting process before Swank was cast. Swank was chosen because her personality seemed similar to Brandon's. Most of the film's characters were based on real-life people; others were composites.

Filming occurred during October and November 1998 in the Dallas, Texas area. The producers initially wanted to film in Falls City, Nebraska, where the real-life events had taken place; however, budget constraints meant that principal photography had to occur in Texas. The film's cinematography uses dim and artificial lighting throughout and was influenced by a variety of styles, including neorealism and the films of Martin Scorsese, while the soundtrack consisted primarily of country, blues, and rock music. The film's themes include the nature of romantic and platonic relationships, the causes of violence against LGBTQ people, especially transgender people, and the relationship among social class, race, and gender.

The film premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 8, 1999, before appearing at various other film festivals. Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, the film received a limited release in the United States on October 22, 1999, and it performed well at the North American box office, gaining three times its production budget by May 2000. The film was acclaimed by critics, with many ranking it as one of the best films of the year; praise focused on the lead performances by Swank and Sevigny as well as the film's depiction of its subject matter. However, some people who had been involved with Brandon in real life criticized the film for not portraying the events accurately.

Boys Don't Cry was nominated for multiple awards; at the 72nd Academy Awards in 2000, Swank was awarded the Academy Award for Best Actress and Sevigny was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. The pair were also nominated at the 57th Golden Globe Awards, with Swank winning the Best Actress – Drama award. Boys Don't Cry, which dealt with controversial issues, was initially assigned an NC-17 rating but was later reclassified to an R rating. It was released on home video in September 2000. In 2019, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Plot

Brandon Teena is a young trans man living in rural Nebraska. When Brandon is discovered to be transgender by a former girlfriend's brother, he receives death threats. Soon after, he is involved in a bar fight and is evicted from his cousin's trailer. Brandon moves to Falls City, Nebraska, where he befriends ex-convicts John Lotter and Tom Nissen,  and their friends Candace and Lana Tisdel. Brandon becomes romantically involved with Lana, who is initially unaware both of his anatomy and his troubled past. The two make plans to move to Memphis, where Brandon will manage Lana's karaoke singing career. Eventually, they kiss during a date night which ends with them having sex.

The police detain Brandon on charges that arose before his relocation; they place him in the women's section of the Falls City jail. Lana bails Brandon out and asks why he was placed in a women's jail. Brandon attempts to lie to her, saying he was born intersex and will soon receive genital reconstruction surgery, but Lana stops him, declaring her love for him regardless of his gender. However, while Brandon is in jail, Candace finds a number of documents listing Brandon's birth name, and she and her friends react to this news with shock and disgust. They enter Brandon's room, search among Brandon's things, and discover transgender pamphlets that confirm their suspicions. When Brandon and Lana return, Tom and John violently confront Brandon and take him into the bathroom, forcibly removing his pants and revealing his genitals. They try to make Lana look, but she shields her eyes and turns away. After this confrontation, Tom and John drag Brandon into John's car and drive to an isolated location, where they brutally beat and gang rape him.

Afterward, they take Brandon to Tom's house, where Brandon escapes through a bathroom window. Although his assailants threaten Brandon and warn him not to report the attack to the police, Lana convinces him to do so. However, the police chief proves to be less concerned with the crime and interrogates Brandon about his sexual identity.

Later, John and Tom get drunk and drive to Candace's house. Lana attempts to stop them, but they find Brandon and kill him along with Candace before fleeing the scene, while Lana lies with Brandon's body. The next morning, Lana awakens next to Brandon's corpse. Her mother arrives and takes her away from the scene. As Lana leaves Falls City, a letter to her from Brandon that she found on his body, is heard in a voiceover, saying that in Memphis "I'll be waiting for you, love always and forever".

Cast

Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena
Chloë Sevigny as Lana Tisdel|group=nb

The project drew interest from various production companies. Diane Keaton's production company, Blue Relief, showed interest in the screenplay in the mid-1990s. Initially, the film was to be largely based on Aphrodite Jones' 1996 true crime book All She Wanted, which told the story of Brandon's final few weeks. Peirce co-wrote the screenplay with Andy Bienen. They worked together for 18 months on the final drafts and were careful not to "mythologize" Brandon; the aim was to keep him as human as possible. Peirce also interviewed Tisdel's mother and Brandon's acquaintances. However, she was unable to interview Brandon's mother or any of his biological family.

Casting

thumb|left|upright|alt=Hilary Swank, the lead actress of the film, in 2010|[[Hilary Swank]]

The filmmakers retained the names of most of the case's real-life protagonists, but the names of several supporting characters were altered. For example, the character of Candace was named Lisa Lambert in real life. During her audition, Swank, who was 22, lied to Peirce about her age. Swank said that, like Brandon, she was 21 years of age. When Peirce later confronted her about her lie, Swank responded, "But that's what Brandon would do." Her earnings were so low that she did not qualify for health insurance. Peirce ultimately decided to cast Chloë Sevigny based on her performance in The Last Days of Disco (1998). Sarsgaard recalled watching footage of and reading about Lotter to prepare for the role. Peirce cast Alicia Goranson, known for playing Becky on the sitcom Roseanne, as Candace because of her likeness to Lisa Lambert.

Music

Because the film is set in the rural Midwestern United States, the Boys Don't Cry soundtrack album features a compilation of country, blues and rock music. Nathan Larson and Nina Persson of The Cardigans composed an instrumental version of Restless Heart's 1988 country-pop song "The Bluest Eyes in Texas", a variation of which was used as the film's love theme and score. An American cover of the song, sung by Nathan Larson, plays in the background in the scene in which Lana bails Brandon out of jail and during one of their sex scenes. However, the song is not included in the released soundtrack. Songs by Lynyrd Skynyrd ("Tuesday's Gone"), Paisley Underground band Opal ("She's a Diamond") and The Charlatans ("Codine Blues") also appear in the film, as do cover versions of other songs. The soundtrack was released on November 23, 1999, by Koch Records. "The Bluest Eyes in Texas" was played when Hilary Swank went onstage to receive her Academy Award for Best Actress in 2000. The song also plays over the film's end credits. Journalist Janet Maslin said the film is about accepting identity, which in turn means accepting the fate predisposed for that identity. Along with other turn-of-the-millennium films such as In the Company of Men (1997), American Beauty (1999), Fight Club (1999), and American Psycho (2000), Vincent Hausmann said Boys Don't Cry "raises the broader, widely explored issue of masculinity in crisis". Jason Wood said the film, together with Patty Jenkins's Monster (2003), is an exploration of "social problems".

Romantic and platonic relationships

thumb|upright=1|alt=Roger Ebert, one of the film's positive reviewers and commentators, in 2006.|Roger Ebert praised the film and called it "Romeo and Juliet set in a Nebraska trailer park."

Several scholars commented on the relationship between Brandon and Lana as well as Brandon's relationship with John and Tom. Carol Siegel regarded the film as a thematically rich love story between two ill-fated lovers, similar to Romeo and Juliet. In the Journal for Creativity in Mental Health, Jinnelle Veronique Aguilar discussed Brandon's ability to create interpersonal relationships in the film. She opined that Brandon wanted to create close relationships, but he could not due to his transgender status until he became close with Lana. "Although Brandon can make a brief but authentic connection with Lana, he continues to experience a sense of aloneness in the world. He consistently faces a sense of fear related to the power-over dynamics that he and others who are transsexual face…Brandon experiences the central relational paradox, in which he yearns for connection; however, due to the real threat he faces, he is unable to make that connection."

Myra Hird, in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, argued that John and Brandon exemplify two different and contrasting types of masculinity, and that Brandon's version is preferred by the film's female characters, comparing them to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jimmy Stewart, respectively. "Throughout the film, John offers the viewer a typified narrative of heteronormative masculinity. […] Against this hegemonic masculinity, Brandon offers a masculinity reminiscent of a by-gone era of chivalry." Furthermore, she contended that John was threatened by Brandon's version of masculinity. "Gender boundaries are taken extremely seriously in Western society, and Boys Don't Cry depicts how intensely threatened John and Tom are by Brandon's superior portrayal of a masculinity 'schedule'. John cannot abide Brandon's desire, and clear ability, to access male privilege, and his reaction is to force Brandon to be female through the act of rape."

Causes of violence against LGBT people

thumb|left|upright=1.1|alt=Jack Halberstam, one of the film's main commentators.|Jack Halberstam believed that Brandon's murder as depicted in the film partly arose from [[homophobia, not just transphobia.]]

Other commentators discussed the more complex psychological causes of Brandon's murder. Halberstam commented on the complicated causes of the murder, and whether it was due to transphobia or homophobia: "Ultimately in Boys [Don't Cry], the double vision of the transgender subject gives way to the universal vision of humanism, the transgender man and his lover become lesbians and the murder seems instead to be the outcome of vicious homophobic rage." Ebert called the film a "sad song about a free spirit who tried to fly a little too close to the flame".

Self and transgender identity

Many scholars addressed the various performances of gender by the characters in the film; Moss and Lynne Zeavin offered a psychoanalytic analysis, calling the film a "case report" that "presents [Brandon's] transsexual inclinations as a series of euphoric conquests" and "focuses on a range of anxious reactions to her transsexuality. […] or a case not for what they might reveal about female hysteria, but for what they might reveal about misogyny". Elaborating on the themes of the film, they wrote:

<blockquote>In her film, Pierce [sic] inserts the unconventional problems of transsexuality into a conventional narrative structure. Throughout the film Brandon is presented as a doomed, though beguiling and beautiful rascal, recognizably located in the lineage of well-known cinematic bad-boys like James Dean, Steve McQueen, and Paul Newman. Like these predecessors, Brandon's heroic stature derives from her [sic] unwillingness to compromise her [sic] identity … Pierce [sic] presents Brandon's struggles against biological determinism as the struggles of a dignified renegade.</blockquote>

Brenda Cooper, in Critical Studies in Media Communication, argued that the film "can be read as a liberatory narrative that queers the centers of heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity by privileging female masculinity and celebrating its differences from heterosexual norms." She argued that the film challenged heteronormativity by criticizing the concept of the American Heartland, by presenting problems with heterosexual masculinity and its internalised aggression, by "centering female masculinity", and blurring gender boundaries. Michele Aaron, in Screen, claimed that the film was primarily centered on "the spectacle of transvestism" and that the film as a whole was "a tale of passing".

Jennifer Esposito wrote that "We watch onscreen as Brandon binds his breasts, packs a dildo, fixes his hair in a mirror. His masculinity is carefully scripted. John and Tom…are never shown preparing for masculinity. They are already masculine." Melissa Rigney argued that the film defied traditional portrayals of transgender characters by not confining Brandon to certain stereotypes. "On the surface, Boys Don't Cry appears to hold the potential of rendering gender in excess: the figure of Brandon Teena can be read variously as butch, male, lesbian, transgender, transsexual, and heterosexual. […] Although female masculinity comes to the forefront in this film, I argue that the film attempts to subsume the transgressive potential of the gender outlaw within a lesbian framework and narrative, one that reduces and, ultimately, nullifies Brandon's gender and sexual excess."

In contrast, Annabelle Wilcox opined that the film primarily reinforced the gender binary by showing that "Brandon's body is branded by such rhetoric and representation, and is assumed to be a site of 'truth' that closes the question that being transgender poses for subjectivity, gender, and sexuality." She also went on to note that many film critics either disregarded Brandon's male identity or used female pronouns when referring to him. Rachel Swan, writing for Film Quarterly, wrote that Brandon's masculinity was often contrasted with Lana's femininity as a means of illustrating the two sides of the gender binary. In addition, she regarded John and Tom's rape of Brandon as an attempt to psychologically castrate him.

In another piece, Halberstam compared the media portrayal of Brandon to that of Billy Tipton, a jazz musician who no one knew was transgender until the post-mortem discovery that he was assigned female at birth. He wrote, "On some level Brandon's story, while cleaving to its own specificity, needs to remain an open narrative—not a stable narrative of FTM transsexual identity nor a singular tale of queer bashing, not a cautionary fable about the violence of rural America nor an advertisement for urban organizations of queer community; like the narrative of Billy Tipton, Brandon's story permits a dream of transformation." Christine Dando argued that "masculinity is associated with outside and femininity with interior spaces."

Jennifer Devere Brody commented on the film's exclusion of Philip DeVine, a disabled African-American man who was another victim of the shooting. "Perhaps one can only speculate about the motivations behind this decision. But the effects are familiar ones in the history of racist representations. The erasure of DeVine from the narrative places the white female bodies as the only true victims of crime; and the film's inability to show DeVine as violated rather than violator perpetuates the myth of the black man as always already a perpetrator of crime." Regarding DeVine, Halberstam wrote, "Peirce perhaps thought that her film, already running close to two hours, could not handle another subplot, but the story of Philip DeVine is important and it is a crucial part of the drama of gender, race, sexuality, and class that was enacted in the heartland. Race is not incidental to this narrative of mostly white, Midwestern small towns and by omitting DeVine's story from Boys Don't Cry, Peirce contributes to the detachment of transgender narratives from narratives about race, consigning the memory of DeVine to oblivion."

She went on to argue that the setting is not only conveyed visually, but also through the characters' homes. "While there is no trailer park in Falls City, Brandon's community there occupies the margin: Candace and Lana's homes appear to be on the outskirts of town, or even outside of town. There are no complete families, only the family that that has been created. The men appear to have no homes, relationally or physically: none are shown to have a family.

Release and reception

Premiere and commercial performance

Boys Don't Cry aired in Canada at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in September 1999. It premiered in the U.S. at the New York Film Festival on October 8, 1999, to critical acclaim. Boys Don't Cry was given a special screening in snippets at the Sundance Film Festival. At that time, the film was still called Take It Like a Man. The film received a limited release theatrically on October 22, 1999, in the U.S., where it was distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, a subsidiary of Twentieth Century Fox that specializes in independent films. Initially, many viewers complained via email to Peirce that the film was not being shown near them, as the film was only being shown on 25 screens across the country. However, this number increased to nearly 200 by March 2000. The film grossed $73,720 in its opening week. By December 5, the film had grossed in excess of $2 million. By May 2000, it had a U.S. total gross of $11,540,607—more than three times its production budget. Internationally, the film was released on March 2, 2000, in Australia and on April 9, 2000, in the United Kingdom.

Critical response

Critics lauded Boys Don't Cry upon its release, with many calling it one of the best films of 1999. One reviewer said the film was a "critical knockout". and The Film Stage termed Swank's performance "one of the greatest" Best Actress Oscar-winning performances. Peter Stack of the San Francisco Chronicle lauded the lead acting performances of Swank, Sevigny, Saarsgard, and Sexton III, writing, "It may be the best-acted film of the year". Online film reviewer James Berardinelli gave the film three and a half stars out of four; he highlighted the performances of Swank and Sevigny as the film's greatest success and likened the film's intensity to that of a train wreck. Berardinelli wrote that Swank "gives the performance of her career" and that "Sevigny's performance is more conventional than Swank's, but no less effective. She provides the counterbalance to the tide of hatred that drowns the last act of the film." Premiere listed Swank's performance as one of the "100 Greatest Performances of All Time".

The film was not without detractors, who focused on the film's portrayal of Brandon and his actions. Richard Corliss of Time magazine was one of the film's negative reviewers; he wrote, "the film lets down the material. It's too cool: all attitude, no sizzle". In 2007, Premiere ranked the film on its list of "The 25 Most Dangerous Movies". Cooper wrote that Boys Don't Cry "is perhaps the only film addressing the issue of female masculinity by a self-described queer filmmaker to reach mainstream audiences and to receive critical acclaim and prestigious awards." However, Noelle Howey, writing for Mother Jones, wrote that despite the critical acclaim, relatively few critics understood what she perceived as the main point of the film—Brandon being a victim of trans bashing. Howey said, "Even a cursory glance at reviews of Boys Don't Cry reveals that while most critics admired the film, few absorbed its main point: that Brandon Teena was a biological girl who felt innately that she was a man. Most of the media instead cast Teena as a Yentl for the new millennium, rather than a victim of anti-transgender bigotry." In 2019, Swank stated in an interview for IndieWire: "I’m happy that times are evolving and changing and that people are getting the opportunity to tell their own stories.”

Factual accuracy

The accuracy of Boys Don't Cry was disputed by real-life people involved in the murder. The real Lana Tisdel declared her dislike for the film; she said Brandon never proposed to her and that when she discovered Brandon was transgender, she ended the relationship. Tisdel disliked the way she was portrayed in the film, and called the film the "second murder of Brandon Teena". Before the film's theatrical release, Lana Tisdel sued the film's producers, claiming that the film depicted her as "lazy, white trash and a skanky snake" Tisdel settled her lawsuit against Fox Searchlight for an undisclosed sum. Leslie Tisdel, Lana's sister, called the film "a lie of a movie".

Awards and nominations

The film won a variety of awards, most of which went to Swank for her performance. Swank won a Best Actress Oscar while Sevigny received a nomination in the category of Best Supporting Actress. Despite the criticism, Kevin O'Keeffe, writing for Out, defended Swank's acceptance speech; he said, "Swank deserves a place in the great acceptance speech canon for being bold, not only as an actress, but as an award winner".

Rating and home media

Boys Don't Cry garnered significant attention for its graphic rape scene. The DVD's special features included a commentary by Kimberly Peirce and a behind-the-scenes featurette containing interviews with Peirce, Swank and Sevigny; there was also a theatrical trailer and three television trailers. This same edition was re-released in 2009 with different cover art. The film was released on Blu-ray on February 16, 2011, by 20th Century Fox Entertainment in conjunction with Fox Pathé Europa.

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