For the first time, I am editing a review after further reflection and taking away its stars. I can no longer say I even like this movie. It is mean-spirited in an underhanded way that Kim Reed is probably not even aware of.
We are so used to seeing the LGBT character in a movie as the victim that we are blindsided when that character is in reality the victimizer. Reed used this movie to attack and expose her adopted brother Marc's truly horrific mental problems, which did nothing good for him but a lot bad.
The moral problem is that Kim is the strong one in that relationship, the gorgeous, charismatic one who all her life had extraordinary advantages and adoration from everybody in her world. Her triumphant return to her home town as a woman and her total acceptance by everybody but Marc makes it obvious that she still operates from a position of extraordinary power in that world.
Kim is NOT the disadvantaged, abused one in this movie: Marc is. The fact that his disadvantages were not in any way the fault of Kim or anybody else in the extraordinarily compassionate McKerrow family, rather the fault of the genes he got from his birth parents, does not excuse anything. She was not abused by Marc as they grew up together, so she had no excuse for exposing his troubles to the world. It was cruel and grossly self-serving: nobody ended the movie better off than when it started except for Kim herself.
Hers is a fascinating story, but instead of sharing HERSELF with the audience, she turned the camera onto her poor, tortured brother whose only offense EVER was to be jealous of her vastly superior advantages. By doing so she inflamed his problems beyond endurance. If she had just left him alone and told her own story instead of his, we all would be very much better off - especially Marc, but even Kim herself, because it would have forced her to descend from her tower of invulnerability and expose herself instead of her poor, tortured, fundamentally innocent brother.
We are so used to seeing the LGBT character in a movie as the victim that we are blindsided when that character is in reality the victimizer. Reed used this movie to attack and expose her adopted brother Marc's truly horrific mental problems, which did nothing good for him but a lot bad.
The moral problem is that Kim is the strong one in that relationship, the gorgeous, charismatic one who all her life had extraordinary advantages and adoration from everybody in her world. Her triumphant return to her home town as a woman and her total acceptance by everybody but Marc makes it obvious that she still operates from a position of extraordinary power in that world.
Kim is NOT the disadvantaged, abused one in this movie: Marc is. The fact that his disadvantages were not in any way the fault of Kim or anybody else in the extraordinarily compassionate McKerrow family, rather the fault of the genes he got from his birth parents, does not excuse anything. She was not abused by Marc as they grew up together, so she had no excuse for exposing his troubles to the world. It was cruel and grossly self-serving: nobody ended the movie better off than when it started except for Kim herself.
Hers is a fascinating story, but instead of sharing HERSELF with the audience, she turned the camera onto her poor, tortured brother whose only offense EVER was to be jealous of her vastly superior advantages. By doing so she inflamed his problems beyond endurance. If she had just left him alone and told her own story instead of his, we all would be very much better off - especially Marc, but even Kim herself, because it would have forced her to descend from her tower of invulnerability and expose herself instead of her poor, tortured, fundamentally innocent brother.