Perfectly Flawless

By Lawrence Chua
November 19, 1999

Director Joel Schumacher and actor Philip Seymour Hoffman discuss the new transgender film Flawless

When Phillip Seymour Hoffman comes into the room early Sunday morning, his eyes go immediately to my copy of the New York Post. The news of last night's Hollyfield-Lewis fight flares from the back page. "Who won?" Hoffman asks and beams when I tell him that Lewis is the new heavyweight champion of the world. "I knew he was going to win."

Hoffman's performance alongside Robert DeNiro in Joel Schumacher's Flawless is a heavyweight performance of its own. Rusty Zimmerman, the transgendered queen that Hoffman plays, may not have the fistic skills that either Lewis or Hollyfield have, but she has more heart than either of the two fighters showed in their last two bouts.

Zimmerman is the kind of wide-hipped tobacco-scarred mother of all drag queens who is always at the center of drama. Whether it's shouting down her conservative working-class neighbor, Walter Koontz (De Niro), or telling her gay Republican "sisters" where to take their plans for a homogenized Pride parade or talking back to a pair of drug dealing goons trying to strong arm her, Zimmerman comes from the take-no-shit school of drag. When the local drug kingpin is robbed, he hunts the thief down to the residential hotel where Zimmerman and Koontz live. Hearing the sound of gunfire coming from upstairs, Koontz, a former security guard, goes to investigate and has a stroke.

Koontz suffers partial paralysis and his doctor suggests that he take singing lessons as a form of speech therapy. He reluctantly approaches Zimmerman and the two enter into a fragile and sometimes volatile alliance. "They're both willfull people and very masculine," says Hoffman. "This role was not about getting in touch with your feminine side. These two are going to fight to the death for their identities."

The charm of Flawless lies in the fragility that both these characters come to expose to one another. Koontz is an aging emotional cripple whose relationship with a local dance hall girl is painfully financial. Zimmerman is an impoverished artiste with an abusive married boyfriend whose ambition is to one day be a woman. Between Hoffman and director Schumacher, the word "lonely" is deployed about thirty times in thirty minutes to describe the qualities of both these characters.

"They're exactly the same person," says Schumacher. "They're tough guys, capable of great courage and integrity. They're both shut down. Frightened, really. They're very defended and defensive. They're the center of their own worlds. Walt's got his guy thing and Rusty's got his drag queens. Walt may be homophobic, but Rusty's heterophobic. They're both selfish and when you're selfish, you rob yourself of your humanity."

Schumacher, the director of blockbusters like Batman Forever, The Client and A Time to Kill, wrote Flawless before he made his last film, the overwrought and sensationalist 8 Millimeter. He spent three weeks writing up the notes he had made over a four year period. The genesis of Flawless was a series of conversations he had with a friend who had recently had a stroke. The friend had recovered some of his speech through singing lessons and it struck Schumacher that such a relationship might be interesting to explore. "Bob's character came pretty quickly," he says. "But it took a while for the Rusty character." Schumacher toyed with different possibilities for the dynamic between the two figures: the singing teacher could be a woman and it would be a love story, the two neighbors could be senior citizens, or two people with different political views, or racial backgrounds. Schumacher eventually settled on two people with different ideas about gender.

"One of my first jobs was as a busboy in the Village when I turned 16," says Schumacher. "One of the waiters had two friends, Miss Ronnie and Miss Burma. When I worked at Vogue, Miss Diana Vreeland told me, 'You must understand that there's a third sex on the planet.' Miss Ronnie and Miss Burma lived in that female/male world."

Schumacher began writing the script with two quotes:

Schumacher says that they saw hundreds of drag queens audition for the role of Rusty. "We got tapes from San Francisco, Dallas, Toronto ... But they weren't actors. They were performers and entertainers. This was someone who was going to have to go toe to toe with DeNiro." He approached Hoffman who he says understood implicitly that Rusty was a man who thinks he's a woman trapped in the wrong body. "Philip is not playing a man or a woman," he says. "He's playing a transgendered person."

"The transgender stuff is a whole different ball game," says Hoffman. "Transvestites are just guys who dress up as women. They do it on the sly. They're very happy to be men. A transgender is actually a man who believes he's a woman. A drag queen is a job. They can't wait to get out of their clothes. This guy has a real problem. He wakes up every morning wanting to be something he is not."

That's not to say that Flawless is not without its share of drag queens. Savvy viewers will recognize several legends prancing through the frame, including Joey Arias, Raven-O and Nashom Benjamin (who has also appeared in Tom Kalin's Swoon and Geoffrey Beene 30). Unfortunately, these characters are never as fully fleshed out as Koontz and Zimmerman and often the film degenerates into a low rent version of To Wong Foo..., desperately whining, "Can't we all just get along?"

But the conflict between Koontz and Zimmerman outshadows any hackneyed moments of sunshine. At the core of DeNiro's and Hoffman's performances is a dialectic that seems to be about much more than retrenching familiar notions of straight and gay. The two characters use each other to interrogate themselves. "It is very un-politically correct because you have this guy coming back to this guy who hates him for acceptance," says Hoffman. "That's where he thinks the battle needs to be fought."

Hoffman brings an edge to the Zimmerman character that distinguishes her from a mere entertainer. It is the kind of nerve that anyone familiar with Hoffman's roles in Boogie Nights and Happiness might expect of the skillful young actor. Hoffman himself is ambivalent about being seen solely in the context of these three roles. "I've played three or four roles of people dealing with sexuality, but I've played about twenty different roles," he says. "But people want to talk about those roles because that's what people think about all the time: sex. It's not that I'm scared people will think something of me. I could give a crap about what people think of me. But I want people to talk about everything I do, not just some masturbating scene I did in Happiness."

It is a familiar complaint and one that Schumacher echoes. "I'm anti-labelling," says the silver haired director. "I don't like labels on people. When I read woman director or African American politician or gay actor, does that mean our natural assumption is that everyone in the world is a white, heterosexual male?"

One of the interesting things about Flawless is that it struggles with monolithic ideas of identity. "My biggest beef in the whole world is that after the heroic civil rights movement, we saw African Americans telling other African Americans that they weren't acting the way African Americans should act," says Schumacher. "We saw a whole part of history erased. We saw it with the women's movement and I see it happening in the gay community. It's Animal Farm. If you don't act like me, you're a bad person."

Schumacher describes Flawless as "a story about people who are invisible to a lot of people." He cites the artist Nan Goldin's gritty photographs of New York City's fiery 1980's bohemia as an influence on the look of the film and speaks animatedly of a recent walk through "that great area between Chinatown and SoHo." "In every doorway are the people from this movie," he says. " I grew up with all those people."

Schumacher still speaks with the crisp imprimatur of the city in which he was born and raised. He studied design and display at Parsons and began his career in the entertainment industry as an art director for television commercials. He later stepped into costume design but realized that he could not become a director that way. He saw that writers were getting directing jobs and so he turned to screenplays, penning films like Sparkle and Car Wash. The first feature film he directed was The Incredible Shrinking Woman with Lily Tomlin. His future projects include a film version of the hit British television series Queer as Folk. He laughs recalling studio executives asking him who they are supposed to like in his movies. "I try to do humanity," he says. "We're all cliches with our own eccentricities. We all try to fit into categories and we all have our individuality. We're unpredictable. We're flawed. I try to keep it real."

* Read the PopcornQ review and view the trailer for Flawless!

Lawrence Chua is the author of the novel Gold by the Inch (recently re-issued in paperback by Grove Press) and editor of the anthology Collapsing New Buildings (Kaya).

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