Narrator: Linda Hunt.
The foreshortened life of a celebrated gay writer, who chronicled the impact of AIDS before succumbing to it himself in 1995, gets sympathetic and affirmative, if inevitably elegiac, treatment in “Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer’s End.” While pic’s adulatory approach sacrifices critical detachment, its warmth and human interest, as reflected by its documentary Audience Award at Sundance, make for a general-interest crowd-pleaser that should do well in a variety of fests and documentary situations, not just those targeted at gay auds. It makes its vid bow in Cinemax’s “Reel Life” series in June.
In part, pic scores because it tells the tale of an exceptional man who was also typical, an emblem of gays who came of age before gay liberation. As old home movies, stills and interviews show, Monette, born in 1945 to the middle-class comfort of suburban Massachusetts, was an archetypal good boy whose secret feeling of difference prevented him from really enjoying his academic success in high school and as part of Yale’s class of 1967.
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He knew he wanted to write from an early age, but it was years before he found his voice or his subject. After a decade of teaching and other jobs in the East, in 1977 he moved to L.A. with his lover, Roger Horwitz. Monette wrote screenplays and three novels which drew little attention. Then, with “Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir” (1988), which recounted Horwitz’s death, he arrived.
His next relationship, with casting director Stephen Kolzak, also was cut short by AIDS. Thereafter he met the companion who would remain with him for the rest of his life, Winston Wilde, and became as diligently productive as he was, increasingly, lionized and sought-after as a spokesman and literary celebrity. His 1992 autobiography, “Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story,” wasn’t his final work, but it put the capstone on his reputation, winning the National Book Award and other high-profile laurels.
Monette, who cooperated with this portrait, presents the intriguing image of a man who achieved real consequence in the world only after age 40, and whose personal as well as artistic growth was owed in large measure to the pressures of a fatal disease. While he was clearly charismatic and witty, pic is at its most moving in depicting the love binding him and Wilde, an extraordinarily devoted and generous companion.
This account ends up feeling a bit soft-edged and hagiographic, when a few tough questions and candid replies would only have increased its interest. Monette surely would have been fascinating if probed about the self-destructiveness that contributed to AIDS’ spread, or the darker aspects of gay culture (sex is primly avoided as a subject) or the specifics of his transformation as a writer. There’s a painful honesty to his best writing that “Paul Monette” itself often misses in adopting the admiring stance of a reverential fan.
Pic’s integration of interview and archival material is smoothly done, though , and all tech credits are fine.
