TO WONG FOO, THANKS FOR EVERYTHING - JULIE NEWMAR: Blu-ray (Universal/Amblin, 1995) Shout! Factory

Three little girls went out to find themselves…no wait, that isn’t quite right. Three men in drag teach a whole town how to wear a dress…maybe. Oh, hell, director, Beeban Kidron’s To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything – Julie Newmar (1995) is what you might expect when Hollywood gets its hooks into a glossy knock-off of the indie-made, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) – an infinitely more worthwhile excursion because it treats its drag hags as people. Kidron’s flick cannot rightly be called a ‘cult’ classic, seeing as how it has two of the biggest box office draws at the time – Wesley Snipes and Patrick Swayze – as men who pass for exotic glamazons on route to…well…we’re never entirely sure. The third wheel here is played to the hilt as pure camp by John Leguizamo, whom Kidron greatly admired for his breakout performance in Carlito’s Way (1993). But the impetus for this movie was actually a screenplay by virtual unknown, Douglas Carter Beane and his inexperience then occasionally shows up in painful transitions that take place throughout this disposable fluff piece of super kitsch and coo. While Beane is most eager to write about one’s individuality and mode of self-expression as a liberating experience for both men in drag and the battered, bemused and otherwise disenfranchised women who barely exist until their arrival in the no-nothing backwater of Syndersville, the final film remains something of a diluted and delusional wish-fulfillment at best, fractured further by Andrew Mondshein’s brutal editing, intermittently to fade to interminable bouts of black, occasionally, right in the middle of a scene, only to indiscriminately advance to some other undisclosed point in the narrative timeline without ever tying up the loose ends from the previous scene.

To Wong Foo…is about as unprepossessing as ‘men in drag’ dramedies get. Frankly, it is more than a trifle baffling how a first-time screenwriter, and virtual unknown BBC docu-TV-feature director made the leap almost simultaneously to Hollywood royalty overnight; their project co-funded by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and Universal Pictures. Starting at the top has its advantages, chiefly in production values. Impressively shot by Steve Mason, whose photographic style is typified in his plush cinematography for 1992’s Strictly Ballroom, To Wong Foo…bathes in a sumptuous palette of preening, prancing, dancing colors. It really is a drag show par excellence, further enhanced by Marlene Stewart’s magnificently over-the-top costuming for the three principals. Alas, all is for not as Kidron’s desire to cast ‘big names’ in the leads, padded by a cavalcade of cameos, to include everyone from the late Robin Williams (supremely memorable as the affected pseudo-gay nightclub owner, John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt), Stockard Channing and Blithe Danner, to legit drag queen, Ru Paul and Julie Newmar – as herself, in a thankless non-verbal appearance at the very end of the movie, immediately submarines our ability to suspend our disbelief in any of these famous faces as actual characters for whom we can stand up and cheer. Patrick Swayze and Wesley Snipes are buff guys and no amount of gaudy camouflage can disguise their innate musculature. So, what we have are two hulking men in heels. Interestingly, Leguizamo, Golden Globe-nominated no less, and – a virtual unknown then – fairs considerably better, perhaps because unlike his cohorts, we rarely see him out of drag.   

Leguizamo and Snipes were first to be cast. Only after an A-list roster of Hollywood’s he-men said ‘no’ to the part of Vida Boheme, including Robert Downey Jr., William Baldwin, Gary Oldman, Matthew Broderick, James Spader, John Cusack, Mel Gibson, Robert Sean Leonard, Willem Dafoe, John Turturro, Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, Johnny Depp, and Tom Cruise, did Patrick Swayze’s name come under consideration. Kidron would later concur, it was Swayze’s determination that won her over, arriving at her home already made up in drag by his own makeup staff and insisting the two take a stroll around town to prove to the director he could pass as a woman.  Despite the seemingly relaxed and highly sanitized humor to eventually make it to the screen, the making of To Wong Foo… tried both the good humor and patience of its stars, particularly as their hours-long transformations, in a remote location and in some stifling heat, resulted in 4 ½ months of considerable reshoots. Point blank: it was not a happy set, even as production moved from New York to New Jersey, and finally, Loma, Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska. During post-production, the picture also came under a lawsuit from professional golfer, Chi Chi Rodriguez who did not appreciate his name being pilfered wholesale for Leguizamo’s impish Latina.

To Wong Foo…begins in the Big Apple with the crowning of a new ‘Drag Queen of the Year’. Alas, this year’s competition yields to a tie between butch beauty, Noxeema Jackson (Snipes) and glamazon, Vida Boheme (Swayze). As each is bequeathed an all-expenses paid trip to Hollywood to partake of the ‘Miss Drag Queen of America’ beauty pageant, these oft’ feuding femmes first encounter ‘drag princess’ Chi-Chi Rodriguez, bawling her eyes out backstage. Chi-Chi confesses her entire life as a failure, a declaration dispelled by the more compassionate Vida who persuades Noxeema to take Chi-Chi under their wing as their protégé – the ultimate goal, to take this ‘boy in a dress’ and transform him into a fully-formed drag queen. Cashing their plane tickets in with John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, the girls buy a beat-up yellow convertible 1967 Cadillac DeVille and set off for Los Angeles. Along for the ride is an iconic autographed photo of Julie Newmar, signed ‘To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar’ that Vida stole off a restaurant wall.  The trip, alas, proves bittersweet, when Vida decides to make a pitstop at her home town, encountering her mother (Martha Flynn) on the front porch of their stately Tudor manor, only to be shunned by her yet again. More determined than ever to get to Hollywood, Vida shreds and tosses away their road map, insisting all that is needed is a woman’s intuition to get to where they are going. Unhappy circumstance, this trio is derailed in their travels by Sheriff Dollard (Chris Penn) who, pulling them over for a defective tail light, insults Noxeema and Chi-Chi with his racial epitaphs, then attempts to rape Vida. Discovering she is not all she appears; Dollard is subdued by Vida who knocks him unconscious. Unfortunately, Chi-Chi misdiagnoses Dollard’s condition as ‘dead’. The girls flee to a nearby station to change their clothes, only to discover their car will not start.

Disgusted by this latest derailment in their journey, Chi-Chi hails a congenial young buck, Bobby Ray (Jason London) from the nearby town of Snydersville. Bobby is immediately smitten with Chi-Chi and sets the girls up at Carol Ann’s (Stockard Channing) rundown B&B. We soon discover, Carol Ann is wed to an abusive car repairman, Virgil (Arliss Howard). Informed by Virgil it will take three days to order the necessary part to repair their Caddy, Vida, Noxeema and Chi-Chi attempt to make the best of their situation. Much to the town’s amazement, the new arrivals redecorate their room, then set about to befriend the disenfranchised women who, collectively roam about these vacant streets of Snydersville with an almost zombie-like affliction. Noxeema make friends with Clara (Alice Drummond), an aged frump, presumed deaf, who along with her deceased husband, once ran the local Bijou and is a huge movie fan.  We are also briefly introduced to some other women in the town, Merna (Melinda Dillon), Loretta (Beth Grant), who run the local beauty parlor, and Carol Ann’s daughter, Bobby Lee (Jennifer Milmore), desperately in love with Bobby Ray and destined to briefly have her romantic bubble burst when he shows more interest in Chi-Chi than her. In short order, Noxeema, Vida and Chi-Chi set about to reform the town’s morale, beginning with the attitude of some of its men – particularly, tough guy, Tommy (unconvincingly played by Michael Vartan), whom Noxeema seizes by his family jewels to teach him some social etiquette when addressing ‘ladies’, and Virgil, given his just deserts by Vida, tossed on his ass after he tries yet again to beat on his wife.

Chi-Chi narrowly averts being raped by some of Tommy’s roughnecks, rescued by Bobby Ray, whom she now begins to consider as her knight in shining armor.  Vida is motivated to unite the town’s women for their annual Strawberry Social, while Noxeema, having discovered a surplus of sixties’ fashion at the local general store, proceeds to transform the women of Snydersville into a sumptuous parade of drag-like princesses. She even finds it in her heart to cure the stutter of the shy shopkeeper, Billy Budd (Jamie Harrold). Meanwhile, discovered still alive and very much humiliated by his assault, Sheriff Dollard makes it his life’s ambition to hunt down Vida and her cohorts. To this end, he stalks all the ‘known’ hangouts for drag queens, coming up empty on his quest until a chance meeting with Virgil at a local watering hole reveals the whereabouts of the girls. Virgil and the Sheriff return to Snydersville at the dawn of the town’s strawberry festival. However, despite his demands the town give up the queens, Dollard is defeated by the fine folks who, seemingly, and incongruously en masse transformed in their collective outlook, now feign to being drag queens themselves, chasing Dollard and Virgil out of town. At show’s end, Carol Ann confides in Vida, she has known all along she was not a woman, owing to her prominent Adam’s apple. It made no difference to Carol Ann, as she considers Vida her friend regardless of her sex or sexual orientation.  In the final moments of our story, we learn Vida, Noxeema and Chi-Chi made it to compete in the Miss Drag Queen U.S.A. in Hollywood, the crown and title bestowed upon Chi-Chi by none other than Julie Newmar!

The plot of To Wong Foo…is so full of holes it makes Swiss Cheese look homogenized by comparison. No attempt has been made to explain any of the town’s transformative attitudes towards these queens in their midst. So, Tommy and his motley crew of punks, trolling the streets and out to take what they can from any young girl unlucky enough to cross their paths, are suddenly made over as pink and tie-dye wearing softies who respect women. There are superficial references to a bi-racial romance between the town’s community organizer, Beatrice (Blithe Danner) and Jimmy Jo (Mike Hodges) – the token black man/proprietor of the town’s greasy spoon, and, hints at Carol Ann’s liberation from Virgil’s life-long abuse. But these deeper issues get pussy-footed about to the point where they almost cease to exist at all.  Bobby Ray and Bobby Lee’s burgeoning romance is also dealt with in a sort of matter-of-fact way. After pining for Chi-Chi, Bobby Ray suddenly falls for Bobby Lee, and Chi-Chi- realizing it could never work out between them, as they both share the same ‘tool’ box, moves on. Kidron and Beane’s modus operandi for bringing all the ‘feel good’ to this forgotten enclave is rendered down to the movie’s tagline, “Sometimes it just takes a fairy.” And then, there are those two unexplained moments where the screen suddenly goes dark right in the middle of a scene, with a lengthy stretch of darkness followed by another scene providing no ‘cause and effect’ correlation between them. Vida confronts Carol Ann about Virgil’s abuse but this suddenly fades to black, followed by a scene where Bobby Lee is humiliated in her puppy love for Bobby Ray after discovering he harbors emotions for Chi-Chi. This, itself makes no sense, as there are virtually no scenes in the picture where Bobby Ray’s burgeoning affections for Chi-Chi are established. Instead, after giving the girls a lift into town on the night of their car failure, we cut almost immediately to the scene early the next day where Chi-chi is nearly raped by Tommy’s teenage goons before being rescued by Bobby Ray, and then being immediately taken in his pick-up to a billboard outside of town where he has whited out an advertisement for Coca-Cola to read, “Enjoy Chi-Chi” instead.

Best not to analyze any of this in any great detail as it all virtually falls apart upon even the most casual inspection. Douglas Carter Beane’s inexperience as a screenwriter is blatantly on display. This isn’t a plot, per say, but a series of very loosely strung together vignettes. In and of themselves, each is amusedly diverting. But collectively, they never crystalize into a story that is anything better or goes beyond its weak-kneed premise of following three men in skirts and heavy make-up on their odyssey of superficial self-discovery. Yet, even here, our tale is disingenuous. There are no character arcs. Wesley Snipes’ Noxeema starts out as the loud-mouth cynic of this troop and remains stuck in that abysmal cliché to the end. Patrick Swayze’s Vida Boheme is the congenial deus ex machina, but that is about as far as she goes. On a very cartoon level, John Leguizamo’s Chi-Chi Rodriguez experiences some upward mobility in her transformation from just a Latina ‘boy in a dress’ to the bona fide queen of the realm. But here too, it is a sudden, almost unanticipated conversion – Leguizamo stuck in third-string support, and holding his own, but not until the final scene, to emerge, arguably, ‘fully formed’ as the diva he always wished to become. In the final analysis, To Wong Foo…is a fractured hot mess of a movie whose primary selling feature is seeing two of Hollywood’s then hunk du jours feign at being glamor gals. The illusion, alas, never sticks. So, the picture falls flat as a farce, with only a few lines of Beane’s otherwise occasionally clever dialogue to recommend any of it as anything better than ultra-camp on an A-list budget.

To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything – Julie Newmar has been available from Shout! Factory for a while. The elements provided them by Universal Home Video are about what you would expect for Universal – a studio, showing virtually no signs of updating their video masters beyond what is already available. So, here too we have a print master instead of an OCN, further marred by Uni’s affinity to ‘enhance’ film elements with video tinkering to artificially sharpen the image. Colors are the most impressive and really pop as they ought. Flesh tones are nicely nuanced too. Fine detail is occasionally wanting and there are a few intermittent age-related artifacts to consider. But it is the edge-sharpening that sinks this presentation. While we get no egregious halos, there is undue sharpening here. So, occasionally, minor hints of chroma bleeding seep in and film grain looks nothing like it ought, either homogenized all out of proportion, or otherwise gritty and video-based rather than film-like. We get two audio options – the original 2.0 DTS and a new 5.1 DTS remix. As this is a primarily dialogue-driven movie, subtler nuances are not noticed between the two. Extras include an almost hour-long making of with reflections from Beane, Kidron and Leguizamo. We also get deleted scenes that are pretty funny but still do not explain away the two ‘black outs’ in the picture.  There is also a theatrical trailer. Bottom line: To Wong Foo…is a movie you likely won’t treasure either for its premise or performances. It is, however, a strangely diverting entertainment that effortlessly fills the time as well as the vacancies between our ears when, on occasion, we would prefer to simply tune out of the world at large and simply choose to bury our heads in the sand like an ostrich. Want a better ‘drag queen’ movie to fill this void? Run, The Adventures of Priscilla… in its stead, and be very glad that you did! Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

2

VIDEO/AUDIO

3.5

EXTRAS

3.5