Of perhaps only historical interest,  An Early Frost, made in 1985, comes out of that Hallmark school of filmmaking, which strives to make you feel good about yourself despite the quotidian trials of life, and out of that American tendency of cultural elites to instruct their inferiors: this is how we must act in the face of the AIDS crisis. As a Emmy winning TV movie that was heralded as the first film to openly deal with AIDS it must be saluted for its bravery; but as an instruction manual it is out of date. 

It is one of the strategies of the film to sprinkle the cast with cinematic nobility in the form of old Warner Bros. star Sylvia Sidney, as the family matriarch, and Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands as the parents of the AIDS victim, even though their roots are in the tough New York school of acting and the harsh documentary naturalism of John Cassavetes’s films, whose uncompromising aesthetic An Early Frost‘s reassuring palliatives stand opposed to in nearly every way. Aidan Quinn as the handsome son is very good in the role but one wonders if his casting had more to do with his preternatural and exploitable thinness, like Steve Buscemi’s in the competing AIDS-crisis movie  Parting Glances (1986). Gazzara and Rowlands add an actorial heft in a film that in many ways avoids too much drama, not to mention the outward trappings of gayness. The film lacks a kiss (of any persuasion) much less a trip to a gay bar or a telltale tube of Vaseline near the bed-stand. It’s the most prophylactic gay movie, in all ways, since  Never Too Young to Die (1986).

An Early Frost first aired on NBC on November 11th, 1985, and was produced and written by Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, who later went on to do the American version of  Queer as Folk. Their work has the olive brach quality of the talents behind films such as  Making Love and  Claire of the Moon, seeking to minimize the differences between gay and straight culture for the edification of the straight half. Earlier explorations of gay culture such as  Boys in the Band, by vocalizing inner tensions uninhibitedly, ceded half the battle for acceptance to the “enemy.”  Curiously, though, An Early Frost subscribes to some of the most retrograde psychoanalytic views of homosexuality’s basis. Nick Pierson (Gazzara) is a successful businessman, running a lumber company with firm generosity. His wife Katherine brings the art to the household, teaching legions of small town American boys how to play the piano. The script suggests throughout that Nick is the tough but distant patriarch and Katherine the smothering, babying queer-maker. Their son Michael is manufactured from the nexus of their opposing developmental philosophies. Yet later, Michael’s boyfriend Peter (D. W. Moffett, Michael Douglas’s aide in  Traffic) argues on Michael’s behalf to the unaccepting Nick that Michael can’t help being what he is. This runs counter to the notion, inscribed in the film, that with a little familiar rejiggering, Michael might not have been gay. This reliance on psychoanalytic voodoo unintentionally opens the way to expensive sessions with somnambulant shrinks and summer vacations at a Christian conversion camp.

The film follows the template of previous slow death TV movies such as  Brian’s Song, with the added garnishes that determined all subsequent AIDS-themed movies, such as the references to bloodwork, group sessions, the battle between anger and acceptance. In fact, it is interesting to see how similar the film is to  Philadelphia, in that Michael has just made partner in a law firm, though with  Frost stopping way short of the lawsuit plot. Instead,  Frost is about gentle acceptance. For all its earnestness and didacticism, the film is still heartbreaking in its near-final shot of Michael smilingly telling his parents that he loves them — both of them — through the window of a taxi (the mirror image of an opening scene when life was good), as he is about to be driven off, presumably to die.

An Early Frost also stars  John Glover, Terry O’Quinn as a sympathetic doctor, and Bill Paxton as Michael’s brother-in-law. QuickStopEntertainment was provided with a screener disc that was not street ready. It had the trailer, and the film sans chapter breaks, but no menu, no “Living with AIDS” documentary, and no commentary track featuring Quinn and writers Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman. Wolfe Video’s An Early Frost hits the street on July 18, 2006, and retails for $19.95.

 

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