OUT ON FILM 2020 REVIEW: Lisa Donato’s GOSSAMER FOLDS delivers warm 80s story of underdogs helping each other out
During a week that portends dangerous times ahead for civil liberties, it may seem strange that a movie set in 1986 offers what feels like a warm and safe respite; indeed, a parallel universe in which love wins and people can be who they are. But for the most part, Lisa Donato’s Gossamer Folds, which screens at Out on Film, doesn’t dwell on the perils of the ’80s, like the normalized homophobia and specter of AIDS. If anything perhaps it offers hope that even during times and places we think of as stereotypically intolerant, underdogs have always found and helped one another out.
The 1986 setting doesn’t offhand feel essential to Bridget Flanery’s script – it begins with an odd “eat my shorts” gag that assumes the phrase was in common use pre-Simpsons. (Yeardley Smith, who’s part of the cast here, could presumably have made that clear.) Small-town prejudices aren’t so different then and now, nor are struggles over correct pronoun usage. Sure, all the phones here have cords, but nothing in the story would be ruined if they didn’t. No, the timing makes a subtler point than that – think about it in relation to FX’s Pose, and it becomes clearer. While the ball scene was taking off in New York as a safe space for LGBT POC, rural Kansas was a whole different experience.
And it’s here that we might say Gossamer Folds deals with an unlikely friendship between ten year old white boy Tate (It‘s Georgie, Jackson Robert Scott) and his 25 year-old black trans woman neighbor Gossamer (Empire‘s Alexandra Grey), but really, there ought not be anything “unlikely” about a friendship between neighbors who try to treat everyone well. If anything, the most unlikely relationship in the film is the excessive callousness with which Tate’s mom’s boss (Smith) treats her employee for occasionally having to bring her son to work. Mom (Sprague Grayden) is newly moved from the city alongside Dad (Shane West), for reasons that become clearer later. But the marriage isn’t great: that youthful intensity West used to bring to his teen roles has aged him into a human version of Chekhov’s gun here. The fact that the sight of a trans woman makes him start ranting about John Wayne Gacy is enough to make us fear the worst. Mercifully for the plot, as living firearms go he’s more of an aimless shotgun than an AR-15.
Tate gets to know Gossamer primarily while his parents are busy being dysfuctional, and just let him play outside in the yard unsupervised. (This, perhaps, is another relic of the ’80s.) Gossamer lives next door with her in-home tailoring business and aging English professor father Edward (Franklin Ojeda Smith) who still calls her “George” and “he,” while trying to keep his mouth shut about boyfriends. Edward sees in Tate a bit of the boy he thought he had, creating a dynamic that helps him understand how Gossamer differs from that. Meanwhile, as Tate’s mom begins to create some distance from her husband, she’s freed from having to conform to his prejudices.
That’s not an extremely complicated plot to work from, but Scott and Grey are so, so good that it’s their dynamic that matters. As a dictionary-obsessed only child, Scott spits out ten-dollar vocabulary words with hilarity and accuracy, while Grey portrays a powerful woman who may get irritated with less-enlightened folks but rarely sees herself as any kind of victim. With nobody else nearby in sight to be their best friends – school hasn’t started, and Gossamer goes to the city to socialize – they’re really not so mismatched after all.
