Written and Directed by Sav Rodgers | 95 min | ▲▲▲1/2 | Kanopy, Hoopla
What if a film you love, one that helped you assemble your identity, has become culturally problematic? If you’re burgeoning filmmaker, Kansas-native Sav Rodgers, you make a documentary about how important the film was to you, and also how the people who made it think about it 25 years later.
We’re talking about Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy (1997), a dramedy that felt cutting edge when it was released. That’s because it featured a living, breathing bisexual character who refused to be pigeonholed. It’s about two comic book artists, Holden (Ben Affleck) and Banky (Jason Lee), who get to know Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams), who in the parlance of that time, “bats for the other team.” Holden and Alyssa fall in love despite her being a lesbian, though Holden’s being a judgmental asshole eventually sours it.
In some ways the picture still holds up — though there’s a whole lot of unnecessary yelling — and in other ways it doesn’t. At the heart of this is a queer character, Alyssa, written by a straight, white guy who, though basing the story on some of his own experience, carried with him a whole lot of presumption.
Coming out in Kansas, Rodgers found the film to be a lifeline and watched it repeatedly. His film divides itself evenly between a series of interviews with the key creatives, cultural commentators musing on the lasting impact of Chasing Amy in the LGBTQ+ community, and Rodgers’ personal experience with the transformational and healing power of art.
Rodgers puts a lot of himself in this — the Michael Moore approach is not one I’m generally on board with. Here it works because his intentions are so lovely. He wants to understand better why the film changed him, why it isn’t appreciated by others the way it is by him, and how the people who made it feel about it now. Through his eyes, the film’s legacy is reconsidered and elevated in interesting and unexpected ways.
What’s also clear is that Chasing Chasing Amy offers something the filmmaker couldn’t have expected: Joey Lauren Adams’ much more ambivalent memories of making Chasing Amy. This film is accidentally a lot more important than it might have otherwise been. It’s a testimonial, another chapter in the shadow history of violence around Harvey Weinstein.
