Oh, transvestites! You teach us so much in the movies. You all have heavy emotional baggage, but you maintain such a carefree and fabulous façade that you get over it. This is what you teach us – to loosen up, and maybe enjoy a little Abba or something. Movies have taught me that any man who dresses as a woman will want to outglam Cher at the first opportunity, and while he’s doing that he’s going to teach me wonderful lessons.
Kinky Boots is a movie in that general mold. If I had to describe it in a sentence, it would be To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, The Full Monty – a faltering British shoe factory takes a wacky turn to stay afloat… they stop making oxfords and start making boots for cross-dressers. Who needs loosening up more than working class British people? No one, it seems!
Kinky Boots is supposedly based on a true story, but I have a hard time believing that reality is this rote. Joel Edgerton, aka Uncle Ben from the prequels, is born into a shoe company, but he wants to leave the glum Northern town his family lives in for the lights of London, and he wants to get out of the shoe business and get right into marketing. Oh, to dream the impossible dream! But, as luck and plot devices would have it, his dad dies the very night he gets to London. He must return home to run the factory, which is quickly going down the toilet. He gets his flash of inspiration when he tries to save a cross dresser from a gang of thugs and learns that men who dress as women have a hell of a time finding boots whose heels can support their weight. Uncle Owen recruits the tranny – played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, recently seen by only nerds in Serenity – to design boots for his factory. Of course the provincial factory workers don’t like having the poofter among them, but they all learn the value of friendship, hard work, and possibly collective ownership.
Every moment in Kinky Boots is screamingly, painfully obvious. The only way the film could have surprised me would have been if the projectionist accidentally spliced in a reel of Cannibal Holocaust. But that’s the point, really – films like Kinky Boots are the cinematic equivalent of soma. You’re not seeing them to be confronted, surprised or challenged; rather you want to be lulled and you want to have your current beliefs completely justified. What makes a movie like this different from the usual American crap is simply its country of origin – if the actors all had American accents Miramax wouldn’t be handling this, it would have been handled by parent company Buena Vista. Somehow people continue to subscribe to the idea that if it’s foreign it must be smarter or better. I can not stress this enough – not true.
At the center of Kinky Boots are two fairly awful performances. Edgerton plays the usual clueless British guy – think Hugh Grant divided by ten. The problem is that Edgerton has this fleshy face and these tiny eyes that make me keep thinking “FAS.” In that light his befuddled and goony behavior is a troubling neurological issue and not an adorable British quirk.
He stars alongside Ejiofor, a truly fantastic actor who is doing himself no favors in this film. Ejiofor and Edgerton have less chemistry than a physics class, which is a major problem, but that’s dwarfed by the way Ejiofor plays his character – as a preening, pompous ass. The film also calls for Ejiofor to sing a number of times; if I had seen this man performing a karaoke bar I would have been impressed, but as he’s playing the leading act at a tranny club I was mostly horrified. Ejiofor makes a good effort, but a good effort never made anyone a singer.
By the time the third act comes around I recommend you leave the theater to beat the parking lot rush – you’ll be able to figure out every single beat in advance. The only reason to stick the whole film out is Nick Frost – while he’s not earning any awards he does an admirable job playing a character quite unlike any of the ones he is famous for.
The most interesting convention that Kinky Boots sticks with, by the way, is desexualizing cross-dressing. Ejiofor’s character is completely asexual, and he actually fits two gross stereotype roles – he’s the fabulous (but sexless) cross dresser as well as being essentially what Spike Lee terms a “Super Magical Nigger.” While not as awful (or blatantly mystical) as the Coffey character in The Green Mile, I think that Ejiofor’s cross-dresser has more than earned himself a spot in this tasteless – and non-threatening to white folks! – pantheon.