PROVOKR PICK: Adam
A Comedy of Gender
Adam (Nicholas Alexander), a rising high school senior, goes to spend the summer with his older sister, Casey (Margaret Qualley), in New York City. Adam proceeds to tag along with his sister, who is a queer woman, to queer bars in Bushwick and viewing parites of The L Word. At one of these parties he meets Gillian (Bobbi Menuez), a cis-lesbian who mistakes him for a trans-man, a romance blossoms between the two, all the while Adam strives to keep up his charade.
The script for Adam was written by Ariel Schrag, based on her controversial novel of the same name. Gender and miscommunication have long been sources of comedy in film and theater, just look at several of Shakespeare’s plays. Of course, there is a large difference between cross-dressing and trans identity, and that’s what makes a premise like this all the more murky. So far, two Change.org petitions have been created to protest the release of this film, claiming that it denigrates and makes fun of trans people. Now, since the film has not yet been released, I can’t say if that’s true. From what I have read, the book on which this is based is in fact rather problematic, but have the changes made to the script done enough to counter that? Only seeing the movie will answer that.
To the film’s credit, it was directed by Rhys Ernst, a trans-man who spent time as a producer on Transparent. According to him, the most problematic aspects of the book have been significantly changed for the film. Adam premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and has been garnering positive reviews from those who have seen it, so I have hope that those substantial changes may have been just what the story needed.
Adam comes out August 14, 2019.
