In the opening shot of Loggerheads, a blonde man is talking about turtles to an unseen audience of one. That one turns out to be another man, and the turtle talk is a prelude to a kiss, a kiss we won't witness for a while. Yes, it is a bit tricky and even a little coy, but that bag of tricks is at the heart of one of those vexing blue-state films tailored to a red-state audience.
North Carolina native Tim Kirkman's 1998 film essay Dear Jesse spoke to the ironies between his own background and that of the deliciously vile anti-queer former Senator Jesse Helms. Written and directed by Kirkman, Loggerheads spins three tales, each unfolding a year apart and in a different part of the state. It's a film almost too consciously designed to see if blue and red can talk to, instead of past, each other.
In more or less the order of their interest, here are the stories. Mark, a loose-limbed drifter (immaculately brought to life by Kip Pardue) wakes up on a North Carolina stretch of beach that is home to the loggerhead turtles. Writer/director Kirkman flogs the turtle metaphor as vividly, effectively and shamelessly as Tennessee Williams used the poor shackled iguana in Night of the Iguana. Mark's foray with the turtles is interrupted by a cop enforcing a local no-bums-on-the-beach ordinance. Mark is rescued by George (Michael Kelly), who's sort of the Ava Gardner of the film, a crusty innkeeper with a heart of gold and hots for the cute lug. Throughout the movie, Mark and George will chat each other up in language all too familiar to plague survivors. With shots of the turtles mating and just being turtles, along with the sound of the Atlantic Ocean washing up on sandy shores, Pardue and Kelly form the loveliest rugged-guy couple we'll see prior to Brokeback Mountain.
Kip Pardue had seemed fated to languish in those masochistic cameos: the hunky boy-next-door molested by teen girls running amok in Thirteen, or the sadistic brother who kills himself to the satisfaction of Emile Hirsch's punching-bag brother in Imaginary Heroes. In Loggerheads, Pardue gets a third of the movie to strut his concise but very soulful emotional range. Michael Kelly, on the other hand, bears trace elements of the unruly sensuality of the young Jack Nicholson, circa Five Easy Pieces. It's a pity that Loggerheads is not designed to take him to the dark side.
The other two-thirds of the movie consists of some excellent female emoting very much akin to the acting and dramatic beats of HBO's powerful If These Walls Could Talk. In one story, Elizabeth (Tess Harper) plays a minister's wife who starts to miss her adopted gay son, who ran away from home after he was found kissing another boy at 16. Harper and Chris Sarandon play the softer notes in the fundamentalist hymnbook on gay wickedness, and we're kind of inclined to at least appreciate if not sympathize with their point of view. This softening-up job is assisted by a feisty older woman, Ruth (Ann Owens Pierce), who pushes their buttons by placing a naked statue of De Vinci's David in her front yard, the genitals shamelessly uncovered.
The final story is the nicely handled tale of Grace (Bonnie Hunt), a once-pregnant teen who was forced to give up her baby boy at birth by her mother, obsessed with appearances.
Double whammy
The unique strength and weakness of Loggerheads are in creator Kirkman's desire to assault our hearts with a double whammy: the truly moving plight of birth-parents and kids seeking to close the wound of adoption; and that old standby: queers are human, too, especially if they have AIDS.
Part of the problem lies in Kirkman's using a gimmick more appropriate for the theatre: the seamless shift between present-day story and flashback or memory. Watching a DVD screener, I didn't really get the distinction the first time around. I think the clues are more obvious on the big screen.
Ultimately, a critic's opinion of Loggerheads derives from his own particular taste for movie manipulation. Am I looking for a thinking man's Big Eden, or the edgier, unabashedly queer pleasures found in Bill Sherwood's classic Parting Glances?
Loggerheads proceeds at a turtle's pace. At times, you feel like you're sitting in the preacher's house, with its well-starched tablecloth and hymns for all occasions. There are nice moments: Chris Sarandon's preacher stares a bit too long at a blonde Little Leaguer in a barber-shop chair. Does he see his estranged gay son sitting there? We sense that he may regret things said in haste that may not have a handy Bible passage that's able to repair the damage, or make amends.