Critics reviews

Cone's sharp eye for detail and attitude of empathetic humanism... felt especially relevant in the post-election conversations surrounding the discontents between the "two Americas" of religious rurality and secular urbanism. The more I spent time with Cone's work generally and Henry Gamble's Birthday Party specifically, however, the more his films seemed to speak to the challenge of how to confront the president's corrupt bargain within the LGBTQ community.

Cone doesn't condescend while tracing the moment when faith becomes an obstacle to self-realization. And he's still thrown a party, with lots of moments of group uplift and hilarity captured in elegantly framed widescreen by cinematographer Jason Chiu.

Over the course of a single day-into-night bash, a drifting, curious, Altmanesque camera accommodates over a dozen distinguished characters, from the prepossessed but wide-eyed Henry (Cole Doman) to his late-blooming mother Kat (Elizabeth Laidlaw) to the uncommonly out Logan (Daniel Kyri). He also accomplishes a complexity of tone, sliding between comedy and drama, breezy teen pop and bitter pill parenthood.

A rather sexy movie — in part because premarital sex is presented as something risqué or taboo — Henry Gamble's Birthday Party is a beautifully rendered, impeccably scored experience that makes a profound, heady impact. There's an interesting moment featuring a conversation over how Christian colleges cover, or do not cover, evolution, and it's a more layered discussion than you may initially expect.

Henry Gamble's Birthday Party is a movie, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Boogie Nights, in which a backyard swimming pool becomes the nexus of a social network that's inextricable from an awareness of flesh, whether abashed or accepting. Here, that's complicated further by body issues, both religious and adolescent.

There are times when the film plays like a French farce, or a suburban version of Jean Renoir's "Rules of the Game," with different couples running in and out of different rooms... Underneath the exuberance, the film roils with turmoil. A lot of low-budget films have a similar setup to "Henry Gamble": they take place in one location and focus on interpersonal relationships. But "Henry Gamble" is *huge* in comparison. It's about people in the process of "becoming.

Mr. Cone is not a sophisticated writer, and his dialogue frequently spells out what ought to be subtext... "Henry Gamble's Birthday Party" feels sincere but not accomplished, empathetic but not deep.

Whereas [The Wise Kids] impressively upends clichés, particularly in the plot threads devoted to the flawed adults, HGBP too often relies on caricature (as in the virago obsessed with sex-trafficking) and histrionics (a twentysomething pariah hacks up his face with a disposable razor). Yet Cone, who is bighearted toward but not uncritical of his Bible-thumping characters, has a keen sense of seemingly incongruous details.

Much of the didacticism of the film is attenuated by Cone's strong ensemble who work hard at fleshing out these stories and imbuing their characters with a humanity that makes them feel more than mere ideological mouthpieces.

In a 2011 interview with Reader writer Ben Sachs, writer-director Stephen Cone said, "I think those French filmmakers who took off in the 1980s—André Téchiné, Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas, and Patrice Chéreau . . . I always want my movies to be as alive as theirs are." Cone's sixth feature-length film is the closest he's come to channeling those directors' graceful, expressive approach to filmmaking.

The film works best in its quieter moments, especially in its touching climactic scene in which Henry, sensitively portrayed by Doman in his film debut, finally allows himself to act on his suppressed impulses. It adds a welcome hopeful note to the preceding turmoil, reminding us yet again that the heart inevitably wants what it wants.

The film strives to build complex characters by neither villainizing or idealizing them... The film also verges on didactic as it depicts the clash between the mingling sexual progressives and the religious conservatives, which causes many of the exchanges to feel more like Afterschool Special material than naturally occurring dialogue.