The gorgeously shot gay romantic comedy World and Time Enough kicks off with a montage from the interiors of a series of Minnesota cathedrals. We are quickly introduced to our hero Mark, a dark-haired 20-something art student with a slightly mad expression wearing a white T-shirt reading, "Fuck the System!"
Next we meet a queeny young man, David (Kraig Swartz), who proceeds to relate the movie's story attired in a dark sweater, holding a lollipop. It will take almost the entire 90-minute running time of the film to determine just how reliable a narrator David is.
Mostly WATE is a black, fitfully romantic comedy about Mark and Joey. Mark is a frustrated, hyperpolitical, aspiring visual artist (Matt Guidry). Joey, his dirty-blond, monkey-faced cute boyfriend (Gregory Giles), whiles away his days collecting trash alongside state highways, creating temporary "sculptures" on hot-button subjects: AIDS, abortion, and the George Herbert Walker Bush economy.
Stylistically and thematically, WATE pays dutiful homage to the indie cinema of the early 1990s, especially Gregg Araki's 1992 gay-buddy crime caper The Living End, and perhaps hetero-indie writer-director Kevin Smith's Clerks films about an uptight New Jersey convenience-store clerk and his prank-prone video-clerk buddy.
World and Time Enough occupies that juncture just before life-saving AIDS cocktail drugs became widely available, so that HIV+ Mark really does think of himself as living under a death sentence in the days when the film was written and shot. Adding to the black humor of the piece is the backstory. Mark's mother died in a church, crushed by a falling cross. The accident inspired Mark's dad to create small-model cathedrals. Mark and his dad grew apart. The son reaches out via answering-machine messages that we, the audience, realize are never heard by the father, dead by his own hand.
Joey's home situation is equally conflicted. He was given up for adoption at birth, and his adopting dad is more than a bit of a homophobe. He tries to learn the identity of his birth parents, stymied by the bureaucratic rules of the agency that processed his adoption.
The film's parallel plots, Mark and Joey's stories, merge, producing a quasi-comic, absurdly tragic third-act climax the filmmakers struggle to end on a hopeful note. It's a great example of a fictional period-piece still pertinent due to both the craft and good intentions of the filmmakers. There's excellent use of a commentary track to link 1994 with our present-day grasp of AIDS and LGBTQ issues. The film won the Frameline Audience Award before its initial commercial release.
Writer-director Eric Mueller (pronounced Miller) expresses his inspiration for the film in the commentary track. "The project was funded by grant money, and I got a grant for this part [filming the cathedrals]. I went and shot that without fully understanding what the storyline was going to be about, except that it was going to be a film about a person who was HIV-positive and wanted to build a cathedral. I liked the juxtaposition of the temporariness of life with the solidity and longevity of a cathedral. But we didn't write and shoot the story until two years after [the opening] footage was shot."