A camp movie for the theater kids.
Although Camp is based on such showbiz workshop-resorts as Stagedoor Manor in Loch Sheldrake, NY (where the movie was filmed), it's also a fantasy projection of the encouragement and training that occurs in such locales. The cast of young hopefuls-effeminate Michael (Robin De Jesus), plain-Jane Ellen (Joanna Chilcoat), teenage tart Jill (Alana Allen), sexually precocious Dee (Sasha Allen), and all-around heartthrob Vlad (Daniel Letterle)-represents the breed of adolescents lucky enough to find an alternative to social stigmatizing. The film begins with their need for sanctuary (Michael gets beaten up when he attends his high school prom in drag; Ellen can't find an escort for hers). Camp Ovation is where they commune with like-minded outcasts. Staging Broadway production numbers fulfills their social ambitions while also giving vent to their suppressed emotions.
Camp is the year's first genuinely good comedy, yet its humor has a pinch. ("Think fast!" a sports counselor shouts, throwing a ball at a particularly delicate, unathletic boy.) Theater becomes a ritual that provides salvation. The movie's opening number, "How Shall I See You Through My Tears," is an informed reference to the 1988 Bob Telson-Lee Breuer production, The Gospel at Colonus, that appropriated both modern and classical theater for spiritual/cultural regeneration. It's belted out by Sasha Allen, a big-lipped black-girl gay-icon-in-training. Though you could see her becoming a commanding disco diva in a few years, this performance is a heartrending expression of youthful desperation. Graff stages it elaborately as a low-budget Busby Berkeley fantasia that is simultaneously inside and outside the theatrical illusion. After this number (better sung and danced than anything in Chicago) you understand theater's multileveled worth as well as the complexity of Graff's concept.
What makes this movie better than Alan Parker's unctuous 1980 film Fame is its disregard of fame. (A photo of Saint Sondheim gets leveled-bitchily.) Graff concentrates on the crucial, previously overlooked fact of kids adopting a language for themselves that is neither conventionally rebellious nor hazardous. Showtunes seem healthier (safer) than the tattoos, piercings, motorcycles and drugs of cliche teenage defiance. The wholehearted way these kids sing Broadway's sophisticated verbalizations suggests that this adult art form they cling to is a life raft as much as a career path. At Camp Ovation you don't have to hide being overly emotional or eccentric; an alienated view of the world becomes entranced through words and music composed by professionals so skilled in emotional articulation that everyone-from kids of diverse, unlikely backgrounds to urbane Manhattanites and bridge-and-tunnel tourists-understand their messages. These kids take those messages to heart and carry them forward.
Graff's original screenplay sanctions their need. Camp's redefinition of camp has everything to do with the acceptance of different kinds of queerness through musical theater. During Camp Ovation's roommate orientation, the kids connect by describing their performance pieces, name-checking their favorites and understanding each other's taste. (One boy plans to sing "Don't Rain on My Parade" as in the film Funny Girl, grasping an orthopedic walker to represent Streisand's tugboat perch.) Using the Broadway musical as an idiom, Graff pays tribute to a cultural tradition in which youths realize their own isolation and yet recognize confreres in the outside world. They're beneficiaries of the art that provided covert meaning for previous unhip generations. There's no shame in this subculture any longer. Camp only becomes conventional-most Hollywood-like-when Aretha-esque Tiffany Taylor sings "Here's Where I Stand," over-explaining her individuality to an uncomprehending father.
Broadway lost its preeminence to rock and soul, but Graff knows how music connects young people to one another and to the past. When Vlad enters the bivouac, both girls and boys are attracted to him. He's cute in a bisexual jock way, and when he takes out a guitar and strums a favorite song, the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses," they're stunned at his ease with them: "A boy! An honest to God straight boy!" More than a funny line, it conveys their thrill at this proximity to "normality."
A flirtation between Vlad and Ellen provides one of the shrewdest-ever discussions on musical elitism. "Joni Mitchell. I know all the records," Ellen says. But that isn't modern enough for Vlad, who remarks, "They have this great new thing: Drums." He adds, "Sometimes it's good not to be special, to listen to what everyone else is listening to," then flips on a boombox that plays L.L. Cool J.
This exchange gets at the distinctive ache experienced by kids who don't feel like other kids, and then blesses it with Vlad's sweet tolerance (and L.L. Cool J's robust appeal to a typical teen identity).
Among Camp's pleasures are songs from Promises, Promises and Company, shows that probably will never be officially transferred to the screen. This makes the kids' aspirations at Camp Ovation even more trenchant. Seeing a teenager sing "I'm Still Here" or "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" sung by a large white girl to a tiny black boy is complexly amusing. Taken out of their original contexts, these numbers turn freakishness into beauty; they demonstrate how alienation cultivates talent and leads to precocious sophistication. By affirming this phenomenon, Camp redefines camp as a response to all-American alienation.
So many poignant idiosyncrasies are vouchsafed here, it's regrettable the film isn't better than it is. There are plot elements too obviously taken from Fame or Michael Ritichie's classic 1975 beauty pageant satire Smile. (Don Dixon plays a bitter, alcoholic composer modeled after Michael Kidd's gruff choreographer in Smile, but Graff hasn't clarified whether Dixon's cynicism is discerning or to be pitied.) Camp is true to the ways in which popular music expresses innocent longings, but a discussion in which Michael and Vlad compare their psychiatric and chemical disorders makes a superficial argument for both boys' queernesses. Graff forgets the class and race sophistication of South Pacific, the transcendent ironies of "Bali Ha'i."
Instead, the running theme of Vlad's sexuality (he's the object of everyone's affection) feels confusedly hostile and infatuated. As Vlad, Daniel Letterle looks unfathomably cross-eyed, though he's not. He's like Matthew Modine playing the Stephane Rideau character in Techine's Wild Reeds, but the summer- camp roundelay in which Vlad sleeps with different girls while keeping other girls and boys dangling seems so forced, the film could be retitled Contrived Weeds. (Although the moment Vlad stands shirtless in dripping wet shorts and asks Michael, "Do you forgive me?" is Techine-worthy.)
Camp needed an out-of-town try-out, even some rewriting and reshoots of several clumsy scenes. Its conclusion lacks cinematic uplift (I don't mean Chicago's tv-commercial-style flash) and settles for insider coyness. Graff's tasteful familiarity with both Broadway and pop ranges from Follies to Oasis, Dreamgirls to Todd Rundgren-and making the Replacements, "Skyway," a wistful piece of crude daydreaming, into the film's theme song isn't expansive enough. He might have boned-up on Welcome to Woop Woop, the post-camp Australian satire that used Rodgers and Hammerstein as the lynchpin to future compassion. What used to be deprecated as camp-the wacky style of a subculture-was put forth in Woop Woop as a means of survival that civilization must understand.