There’s much to enjoy in Stage Mother — Thom Fitzgerald’s raucous follow-up to 2018 festival favourite Splinters — which follows an older Texan woman as she makes an eye-opening trip to San Francisco following the drugs-related death of her drag-queen son. Jacki Weaver is a real treat as Maybelline, a closeted Southern church-choir director who takes over the running of her son’s gay bar, to the initial horror of his grieving partner, Nathan (Entourage’s Adrian Grenier in an underwritten role). And, as she is won over by the unconstrained lifestyle, which forces her to take a fresh look at her own happiness, the pure ‘walk a mile in my shoes’ optimism of the story is undeniably something of a tonic.
Yet Brad Hennig’s screenplay also suffers from an unevenness of tone, which threatens to derail it at key moments. That Maybelline and her one-note backwater husband Jeb (Hugh Thompson) are meant as ciphers for ignorant Red State conservatism and, similarly, that the employees and patrons of bar Pandora’s Box embody euphoric free-thinking liberalism is somewhat par for the course with such a culture-clash drama. But, at times, its over-earnestness gets in the way of the natural pace of the story. It’s not enough for Maybelline to embrace her son’s lifestyle and become more independent in her own right (along the way she also tackles such things as drug addiction and sexual consent). While her straight-talking efforts — to help tortured drag performer Joan of Arkansas (a compelling Allister MacDonald) with his narcotics habit, and her son’s best friend and single mother Sienna (Lucy Liu, charming) to fend off an over-amorous sexual partner — are well-intentioned, they feel more like box-ticking than a real exploration of the issues at hand.
The film really hits the high notes whenever Joan and fellow performers Cherry and Tequila Mockingbird are on stage.
Still, as one of Canada’s pioneering gay filmmakers, Fitzgerald (The Hanging Garden, 3 Needles) ensures that his characters take proud centre stage, and the film really hits the high notes whenever Joan and fellow performers Cherry (Tangerine’s Mya Cherry) and Tequila Mockingbird (Oscar Moreno) are on stage. The film hard-sells Maybelline’s suitability for the task, be it her time overseeing a stilted small- town choir equipping her for choreographing drag numbers, or belting out show-tunes with her young son in flashback. Thanks to her expert tutelage, the trio blossom from lip-syncing caricatures to impressive drag divas with the power to draw a huge crowd.
Under the discerning gaze of cinematographer Tom Harting, Halifax in Nova Scotia is an impressive stand-in for San Francisco, its gleaming cityscape still a beacon of love and acceptance that’s in direct contract to the dusty, decaying ideals of small-town USA. And by the time Stage Mother reaches its unsurprisingly upbeat ending, everything tied up in a sequinned bow to the strains of Weaver and pals belting out ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’, its timely message of unity and hope may well have won over even the most cynical of viewers.