'Soldier's Girl' -- a tragic love story / Intense, honest film about lead-up to anti-gay murder (original) (raw)

THIS IS A HANDOUT IMAGE. PLEASE VERIFY RIGHTS. SOLDIER'S GIRL-C-28MAY03-DD-HO SOLDIER'S GIRL is the true story of Barry Winchell, a soldier at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, who in 1999 fell in love with Calpernia Addams, a beautiful trans-gendered nightclub performer from Nashville. In the closed, rigid world of the army, their love affair created jealousy and misunderstanding among Barry's fellow soldiers. Rumors spread that Barry was gay. Eventually, on Fourth of July weekend, as Calpernia was winning Miss Tennessee Entertainer of the Year, Barry's Iago-like roommate Justin Fisher goaded another soldier into brutally murdering Barry.HO

Soldier's Girl: Drama. Starring Troy Garity, Shawn Hatosy, Lee Pace. Directed by Frank Pierson. Written by Ron Nyswaner. 9 p.m. Saturday, Showtime.

There were probably a number of Americans who didn't think much about the issue of violence against gays until "The Laramie Project" came along, both onstage and in a superb HBO adaptation. Once it became the foundation for theater, the beating death of a gay

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student became much more than a news story: For many, gay-bashing now had a face and it was Matthew Shepard's.

But how will TV audiences react to another fact-based story in which one of the principals is a transgendered former U.S. sailor who now goes by the name of Calpernia Adams? Some viewers may not even think they care about seeing "Soldier's Girl," Showtime's unflinching but carefully crafted film based on the 1999 murder of Pfc. Barry Winchell by a fellow soldier at Kentucky's Fort Campbell. But this isn't a film about a straight boy who falls in love with a woman with a penis: As written by Ron Nyswaner ("Philadelphia") and directed by Frank Pierson ("A Star Is Born," 1975), "Soldier's Girl," which will be broadcast Saturday night, is a tragic love story with universal appeal.

Nyswaner and Pierson don't try to explain Winchell's attraction to Calpernia, whom the young private first sees performing in a drag revue in a Tennessee gay bar. By not getting tangled up in psychology, the filmmakers keep our focus where it should be, on two human beings who fall in love. Awkward at first and not understanding his own feelings, Winchell (Troy Garity) is tentative and unfailingly polite with Calpernia (Lee Pace), calling to mind a pimply teenage boy trying to muster the courage to ask a popular cheerleader out. For her part, Calpernia, who's surely seen it all -- from both sides of the gender fence -- finds her own tough-as-press-on-nails armor dissolved by Winchell's simple respect for her.

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"I was brought up to act a certain way around a lady," he says.

By the time Winchell and Calpernia acknowledge their feelings with a complete sexual relationship, it no longer matters to them -- or to us -- what part goes where.

HARBORING A SECRET

Meanwhile, back at Fort Campbell, Winchell is careful about hiding his relationship with Calpernia. But some of his buddies, particularly his wired, Ritalin-gulping roommate, Justin Fisher (Shawn Hatosy), suspect that Winchell's secret social life involves the beautiful transgendered performer they all met during a drunken outing at the gay bar.

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Despite what we know or don't know about transgender people, we easily understand the evolution of Winchell and Calpernia's relationship. On the other hand, the relationship Winchell has with Fisher is complex and elusive, and keeps the audience guessing, trying to figure out if we should feel sorry for Fisher because he's so clearly working overtime to hide his feelings of vulnerability, or if we should hate him for the bully he so often is.

Into this mix comes an even more screwed-up kid named Calvin Glover (Philip Eddolls), who becomes the instrument of Fisher's drug- and alcohol-fueled mania to reel Winchell back to the world of "real men" at Fort Campbell.

The filmmakers have likened their story to "Othello," casting Fisher as a military Iago goading the unwitting Glover to commit the murder. But as written and directed, the story actually bears a more telling similarity to the story of the murder of Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury in 1170,

at the hands of loyalists to his onetime friend, King Henry II. Did Henry in fact order Becket's murder, or did he merely express a fleeting wish to be rid of his nemesis, only to have that thought interpreted as an veiled order by his followers?

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Misguided loyalty is also at the black heart of Glover's murder of Winchell.

Did Fisher actually tell the young soldier to kill his roommate? Or was it merely the seed of suggestion carefully planted in the kind of blind loyalty that Fisher values above all other sentiments?

"It's about the only thing that matters, loyalty among men," Fisher intones early in the film. Eventually, loyalty will overcome the possibilities, at least, of reason and compassion in Glover's mind and lead him to beat Fisher to death.

As a director, Pierson has always been fairly uninspired, which oddly enough makes him a perfect choice for "Soldier's Girl." There's not an ounce of artiness to Pierson's style, and that enables Nyswaner's script to do its careful work.

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RAZOR-SHARP PERFORMANCES

But more importantly, it enables three outstanding performances by Garity, Pace and, especially, Hatosy. Perhaps Pierson knew which buttons to push to elicit this trio of performances, or maybe he just got out of the way. But regardless, you'll rarely see acting this intense, focused or letter-perfect on any screen.

Garity brings complete credibility and dimension to Winchell without being able to rely on any verbalized introspection on his character's part. While it's true that Pace is aided by extraordinary makeup and prosthetics (are they real or mammar-ex?), he is also convincing not only expressing Calpernia's feminine "now" but her masculine "then" as well. Finally, Hatosy is on fire every time he's onscreen. You'll feel physically uncomfortable watching him, wondering when his short fuse will burn down.

Press materials for "Soldier's Girl" make a bit of noise about how the film reveals the unworkability of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy toward gay and lesbian personnel. Well, no it doesn't. What it does show is that, except for Fisher and Glover, no one else much cared about Barry Winchell's private life. What triggered Glover's attack and Fisher's instigation of it was sickness and hate, factors that are still too much with us, in the military and in society at large.

May 30, 2003

Assistant Managing Editor, Arts and Entertainment

David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and TV critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. A native of Rochester, N.Y., he holds a bachelor's degree in English and a master's in journalism from American University in Washington, D.C.

He joined The Chronicle in 1992 as a copy editor with the arts section and became entertainment editor in 1995 and executive features editor in 2006. He took on the job of television critic in 2010, writing regular TV reviews and columns not only for The Chronicle but for other papers in the Hearst chain.

Before The Chronicle, he was managing editor of Dole Newspapers in Somerville, Mass., and editor of the Amesbury (Mass.) News.