“ I love you, I’m not going to let you do this to yourself.” - Gun Hill Road
Imagine that you have just spent the last three years of your life in prison. You left your family in a time where your son loved baseball and family, you and your wife would go dancing, and life made sense. Holding onto that snapshot within a single photograph, when you go back home and things have changed, you must decide if you are willing to change with it.
Gun Hill Road, directed by Rashaad Ernesto Green, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011. Peppered with peak 2010’s fashion, religious irony, and messy family relations - this film takes the audience into a world that is often overlooked and ignored.
Enrique, played by Esai Morales, returns home to Gun Hill Road in the Bronx to find the comforts of his power within his family dynamic and relationships dwindling in his grasp. His wife Angela, played by Judy Reyes, has been having an affair in his absence while his son Michael, played by Harmony Santana, is in the process of transitioning into Vanessa. Three incredibly vulnerable and authentic performances bring this film one step further, creating a deeper connection between the audience and the film’s powerful story.
This film challenges the audience to feel three sides of a single story. Jake Weinraub beautifully captures the essence of this film in his review saying how Gun Hill Road is “a moving portrayal of transition, and how gender, sexuality, race, and culture intermesh and become embodied in one family that struggle to express their desires in the confines of community and society.”
Stylistically this film feels very intimate. Steady movements and close ups bring the audience into the heart of this family and into the moment. Green uses film technique in a way that captures the audience's attention without them realizing it. When conflict arises and the film begins to cut and fade more drastically, the audience is able to relate to the emotional force that the characters are presenting. Everything about this film feels personal, and I think that is part of it’s genius.
This film is not easy to watch. It can be beautifully painful and infuriating at times, not holding back from the truths and realities that so many transgender individuals face. Brilliantly, the story that Green tells is most powerful in the quietest moments. Frames that make up mere seconds of the film but capture mountains of emotion create a backbone for this powerful and vulnerable film.
While this film does not necessarily end with the perfect happy ending that the audience might be left wanting, the emotional journey that concludes is enough for me to recommend Gun Hill Road to anyone looking for a moving story of transitioning into one’s true self.
- Aidan McKinnon
