Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Camp

Movie Guru Rating:

Bad Karma (2 out of 5)

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A movie about stage coaches and teen queens

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

Camp is more realistic and convincing than it intends to be. And I don't mean that in a good way.

An allegedly high-spirited romp about sensitive kids at a summer theater camp, the movie actually feels like a student project, with all the awkward timing, missed cues, sloppy direction and amateurish self-consciousness that implies.

It has a great back story: Writer-director Todd Graff grew up going to a real summer theater camp (Stagedoor Manor in upstate New York) and then went on to teach there. He wrote a script celebrating the experience, and then somehow managed to convince Stephen Sondheim to not only let him use Sondheim show tunes for free in the movie's production numbers but also to make a cameo. (Sondheim shows up toward the end, looking alarmingly weathered and a little confused.) Other Broadway denizens then came aboard as well, including Michael Gore of Fame, who contributed two songs. And so with nothing but a dream and a cast of young unknowns, Graff made his movie.

Unfortunately, we don't actually live in a Broadway musical world, and making art is more complicated than having a good idea and getting Sondheim's blessings. So Camp sputters and stutters and makes stabs in a bunch of different directions without ever finding a narrative rhythm or tone. It has moments of painstaking earnestness, some of them effective, but it also lurches toward Heathers-style black comedy at some points, and its characters rarely transcend their stereotypes. And the musical numbers, which should be the movie's highlight, are clumsy and fake—nothing about them captures the kids' individual personalities or talents. They have all the oomph of a Pepsi commercial (and at least Pepsi commercials are well edited).

The most interesting thing about the movie might be its role in the ongoing Queer Eye-ing of America. The title is intended as a gay in-joke, and Graff's most conceptually audacious move is to show what kind of kids really attend theater camps—i.e., lots of queeny gay boys and aspiring fag hags. (There's a running gag about the camp's hapless sports director, who can't figure out why none of the boys want to play basketball or softball.) While the film doesn't show anything more explicit than a kiss, its offhand treatment of teen sexuality in general and teen homosexuality in particular would have seemed shocking even 10 years ago. But after a decade of Gregg Araki and Larry Clark movies, the kids in Camp seem positively wholesome: They don't drink or do drugs, they don't go on crime sprees, and they mostly sleep with people they really care about.

You can tell Graff has his eye on the mainstream, because his protagonist is the film's token straight white boy, a sunny, hunky blond kid named Vlad (David Letterle), with whom all the camp's girls and boys instantly fall in love. Vlad's summer romance with smart shy-girl Ellen (Joanna Chilcoat) and his evolving friendship with doe-eyed drag queen Michael (Robin De Jesus) form the film's dramatic core. The three kids are actually pretty good actors, and you can sense a better, truer movie in their scenes together. But Graff is unable to build those scenes into anything more sustained, so they remain isolated moments in an incoherent script.

More crucially, in a movie about people devoting their lives to the theater, Graff gives little sense of the joys or traumas of performing. The camp's instructors, from what little we see of them, are either clueless buffoons or pretentious asses who berate the kids in the name of high art. Even the competition among the kids for lead roles is given scant attention, except for an absurd subplot about two scheming girls that plays like a high school rendition of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Meanwhile, the bitter, alcoholic director (Don Dixon), a once-successful writer who hasn't had a hit since the 1980s, is every bit the backstage cliché that he sounds. Whatever Graff actually learned from his own summer camp experience, and whatever he loved about it, there's not much of it in his movie.

There is also the slight matter of the mawkish musical moments. For a film that purports to pay homage to Sondheim, its original material is short on intelligence, irony or emotional subtlety. It opens with a dull fantasy sequence set to a booming anthem of self-affirmation, the kind of feel-good self-pity song Whitney Houston used to sing before she found cocaine. Sondheim would never let it within a mile of one of his shows.