Flaming Creature

Alan Cumming turns up the heat in Suffering Man's Charity.

by Sam Adams

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Alan Cumming is a god. Or at least, he will be in a few minutes. He's just stepped outside of the theater where he's rehearsing the lead in Euripides' The Bacchae, to be staged in August at this year's Edinburgh International Festival. For Cumming, the role of Dionysus, the god of revelry, is the latest in a long line of libertines, from Cabaret's priapic MC to Eyes Wide Shut's flirtatious hotel clerk, Titus' vengeful emperor to The L Word's cross-dressing club promoter. Given the wide swath of characters he's played, a common thread is elusive, but one thing they share, from X2: X-Men United's Nightcrawler to Spy Kids' Fegan Floop, is a kind of impish delight, a keen sense of the pleasure to be had in pushing people's buttons.

"I mean to be provocative," Cumming chuckles. "I think that's apparent in my work."

An openly bisexual actor who recently wed his partner of three years, illustrator Grant Shafer, Cumming is arguably the most visible queer actor in the English-speaking world, a position he's achieved not by downplaying his sexuality but by flaunting it. In the 1998 Broadway revival of Cabaret, he wore bondage gear and rouged his nipples, remaking Joel Grey's androgynous vampire as a lip-smacking hustler. Shortly thereafter, he posed nude for the cover of Out, and in 2002, he published Tommy's Tale, a novel whose accounts of coked-up club sex were transparently (and admittedly) drawn from life. He has been a prominent activist for gay causes and received numerous awards, including the 2004 Artistic Achievement Award from the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, which will screen his solo directorial debut, Suffering Man's Charity, on July 21.

Conventional wisdom has it that coming out is the kiss of death for an actor in Hollywood. Mainstream audiences, the thinking goes, can accept gays and lesbians as themselves — think Rosie or Ellen — but not as characters whose onscreen sexuality differs from their own. Rupert Everett, for one, has publicly accused producers of disqualifying him from parts because he is gay, and recently authored a bridge-burning memoir which reads like a kiss-off to the industry.

Cumming says he's never had any firm indication that his sexuality has cost him roles, and tries to downplay the importance of the issue altogether. "It's a hypothetical situation," he says. "I think that real people don't care that much. They don't look at a film and say, 'I'm not going to see that because he's gay.' I think we, the media — especially the gay media — perpetuate that idea. I think we should shut up about it."

But press a little further and it's clear he's had to struggle at the very least against the perception that there were parts he could and couldn't play. When I point out that there are actors, like Everett, who say they've been told audiences simply won't buy them as straight, Cumming snaps, "That's a crock of shit. I've never murdered someone, but I can play one. If you can't get people to believe, you're just not a very good actor. If that's the issue, then of course you shouldn't get the part."

Perhaps Cumming is simply just good enough to convince people he can be anything at all. Or perhaps there's an alternate explanation. As Ray Murray, PIGLFF's artistic director points out, "He's British. People assume they're all a little 'that way.'"

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It would be foolish, of course, to downplay the role of Cumming's talent in his rise to fame. Even in small parts, and often in movies that aren't terribly good, he has been memorable from the beginning. (Though some, like the Great Gazoo in The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, he might prefer to forget.) His boundless (and, it must be said, sometimes unchecked) inventiveness has a way of standing movies on their heads. Think of him in Eyes Wide Shut as he cruises Tom Cruise, as if cheekily acknowledging the persistent rumors of Cruise's own not-quite-straightness. Even in serious roles, Cumming has a way of reminding the audience that it's only make-believe.

As a child in small-town Scotland, Cumming was raised on pantomime and variety shows, a tradition he acknowledges is still very much with him. "When I was growing up, most of the theater I saw was broad, almost vaudevillian," he says. "You never forgot the audience was there."

Cumming may mean to provoke, but he doesn't want to put people off. His most outlandish acts are tempered with a knowing grin. He played Cabaret's MC as voraciously, almost violently, pansexual, but with just enough of an arched eyebrow to give the tourists a willkommen into Weimar decadence. "I think certain performers have a relationship with the audience that goes beyond the character," he says. "They know a bit about you, or you relate to them in a way that makes them feel like they're in on it, or you're winking at them or encouraging them to engage. I enjoy that."

• Short reviews from week one of the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival

Cumming took his conspiratorial humor to new heights in 2005 with the release of his own line of beauty products. Rather than skirt the cheap double entendres suggested by his surname, Cumming embraced them: the body lotion was called Cumming All Over, the soap Cumming in a Bar. In an ad for his eponymous fragrance, a naked Cumming rolls around in the sheets of a white-on-white loft, his eyes rimmed with mascara. The 90-second spot (viewable at www.cummingthefragrance.com/html/commercial.html) is a brilliant send-up of perfume-ad clichés; as one Cumming writhes, another, clad in a suit and tie, leaves a lipsticked note in the front hall, as if to suggest that the narcissistic perfumer has just had a tryst with himself. But it's also a blunt assertion of male desire in which Cumming is both submissive and confident, bottom and top. "Shame," he tells the camera, "should not exist. Shame is not sexy."

It ends, of course, with a laugh. Cumming thrusts a bottle of perfume toward the lens, lets loose a cloud of spray, and intones, "I'm Cumming." Then he dissolves in schoolboy giggles, as if even he can't believe what he's getting away with.

It's doubtful even Cumming's most ardent fans knew what to expect from Suffering Man's Charity, which premiered in March at the South by Southwest Film Festival. Cumming plays John Vandermark, an exacting music teacher with the wilted-magnolia mannerisms of a Tennessee Williams heroine. Chastising his lone pupil for not rolling the r's in moderato, he swans about a decaying house plastered with pictures of the great composers, pining for Sebastian St. Germain (David Boreanaz), the struggling novelist who occasionally occupies his guest bedroom. (That his inamorata's name resembles that of a soap-opera Lothario is entirely intentional.)

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Sebastian has told John that he needs to be celibate to write, but after it emerges that he's been screwing women left and right, John snaps like an overwound string. Knocking his deceitful house guest unconscious, John ties him to a chair with Christmas lights and begins to whip him with a cello bow, slicing implausibly deep cuts in Boreanaz's ample torso. What follows turns a high-pitched comedy into a Grand Guignol bloodbath, a shift abrupt enough that, Cumming relates, audience members at early screenings were prompted to surrender part of the contents of their stomachs. Can that be a trace of satisfaction one hears in his voice? He certainly sounds disappointed about having to remove "a few seconds of splattering" from the initial cut.

The sense of dislocation the audience feels as Suffering Man's Charity careens wildly between genres and tones is exactly what Cumming felt reading Thomas Gallagher's script. "When I read it, I was like, 'What the fuck? What's happening now?'" In the movie, he says, "I ask the audience to laugh at things they shouldn't laugh at. It's all kind of skewed, and it undermines them in a way. You need to go into it thinking, 'I'm going to be bad. I'm going to collude with this. Do something a little shameful.'"

Financing, as one might imagine, was not easy to find. But Philadelphia investor Craig Snider was compelled by Cumming's devotion. "It was clearly a passion project for him," Snider says. "He was very involved in the preproduction process, going back and forth with the writer, and he put money into the project himself. That was really telling, and one of the reasons I was willing to do it." Snider, who had been brought into the fold by producer Donald Zuckerman, helped round up other investors from the Philadelphia area; enough of the budget came from the region that Cumming briefly considered shooting the film here before moving production to Los Angeles.

Snider describes Cumming offscreen as surprisingly "normal and balanced. He's on so often, and he plays such electric characters, that when you see him in a pensive moment, it's quite a contrast," he says. Not that there were many pensive moments on the set. A brisk shooting schedule and the size of Cumming's role (to say nothing of the size of his performance) meant that he was constantly running from one job to the next with little if any respite. "He was working dusk to dawn," Snider says. "And getting paid bupkes for it."

The chaos didn't end with shooting. When Cumming was editing the film at home in New York, he came into the studio to find that a disgruntled producer had absconded with the hard drives containing the most recent cut of the film. After felony charges were pressed, the drives were returned and the producer's name taken off the film, but, Cumming says dryly, "It did sour the relationship. ... The whole process of making the film was as hysterical as the film itself," he says. "That sometimes happens, when the mood of the thing infuses the circumstances of it. It wasn't pleasant."

Even discounting the vomiting, much of the reaction to Suffering Man's Charity thus far has been negative. When it showed at the Philadelphia Film Festival in April, Murray says, "The audience sat there, and they responded, and they laughed a lot, but when the balloting came back, it was really low."

"The movie is not what it seems," says Snider. "And I think that really bothers people. Blood and comedy don't really go together." (Although the film has been a hard sell, he adds that a distribution deal is in the works.)

No doubt part of what bothers audiences are scenes like one where Boreanaz arrives home in the company of a drunken, hot-to-trot Karen Black, who doffs her skirt and thrusts her legs skyward while spewing what Murray admiringly calls "the vulgarest language I've ever heard in a film." But the movie's most discomfiting aspect is Cumming himself, who plays his vicious, petty queen to several inches past the hilt. A serial (if rarely successful) seducer of prominent young men, he's the kind of pathetic, depraved letch who was a standby of movies in the pre-Stonewall era.

Cumming admits that his character isn't much of a role model. In fact, he says, "I sort of love it. For so long now, we're used to thinking of gay people in those terms, as very nice, smiley, happy, the best friend — very positive images. And of course, that's great, and there's a great imbalance to redress. But isn't it nice and refreshing to have a sad old queen lusting up a younger man? That does exist. Especially for me, it's quite shocking. I'm Mr. Always-Blazing-the-Trail-for-Equality, for gay rights and things, and here I am portraying this very negative image of a gay man. That's intentional. Again, it's provocative, and I just think it's time. We are human beings, and we all have negative aspects. John has many. Being gay is the most positive thing about him, in a way."

Although Murray points out that Suffering Man's Charity has not played many gay and lesbian festivals, he expects PIGLFF's audience to understand what Cumming is attempting to do. "They're gonna be with it right from the beginning," he says. "There's a campiness to it that I hope this audience will find."

And if they don't, that, too, is all right with Alan Cumming. "I love it when people have a reaction of any kind," he says. "I think it's great. I like getting a big feeling out of someone, good or bad. If they laugh or if they gasp, it's much better than if they say, 'Oh, that was nice,' and go home and forget about it."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Suffering Man's Charity will screen Sat., July 21, 9:30 p.m., $10, Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St., 267-765-9700, ext. 4, www.phillyfests.com.