"The Sum of Us"
                             A film review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                         WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                               June 3, 1995

   The Tampa Bay Gay and Lesbian Pride Film Festival used to happen at the
Tampa Theater in June, but for the last couple of years we've had to wait
until October to see the Festival's many gay-themed films.But this week, even
without the Festival, the Tampa Theater is playing a really terrifically
enjoyable, up- beat, gay-themed film, Australian import "The Sum of Us." This
is a film version of David Stevens's award-winning play of the same name, and
the screenplay, also written by Stevens, has itself now won best screenplay
awards from the 1994 Montreal Film Festival and the Australian Film Institute.

   This is a film about family values! Real family values: loving and caring,
being loyal to your relatives. It's the realization that, in perhaps a partial
but important sense, what we are is the sum of who our parents and
grandparents and great- grandparents are. Jeff Mitchell (Russell Crowe) is a
young plumber and rugby football player who lives with his ferryboat pilot
Dad, Harry (Jack Thompson), in a working-class neighborhood in Sydney. The
film opens with home-movie-like footage of Jeff as a kid playing football with
his cousins and his grandmother (the kids on one team, Gran on the other)
under the watchful if somewhat disapproving eye of "Aunt" Mary, his
grandmother's "longtime companion." In a later flash back to that time Jeff
confides in the audience that he first learned about love between people of
the same sex and how natural it seemed when he saw Gran and Mary sleeping
sweetly in one another's arms on one of his childhood visits to their house.

   Jeff and his widowed father, Harry, share the homemaking and cooking and
carry on and bicker with one another and drive one another up the wall, but
are still great friends and clearly devoted to one another. But both are
lonesome. A lot of these things we learn because screenwriter Stevens has
retained in the film the theatrical asides that he used in the play, so from
time to time Jeff or Harry will interrupt the narrative flow of the film to
talk directly to us, the audience, and explain things or give background
information. This device become essential in the later portions of the film.

     Harry tries his luck at finding a new wife through a computer dating
service and meets someone he likes a lot, Joyce (Deborah Kennedy). Jeff, who
is gay. has been a bit wary of romantic entanglements since his heart was
broken a few years back, and this worries his Dad who wants very much for Jeff
to be happy. When Jeff announces that he is going down to the local pub to
meet a guy and he's especially nervous and concerned about how he looks, Harry
is thrilled. Ever since he learned when Jeff was about fourteen that he is
gay, Harry has done everything he can to be supportive of his son, even to
going with him to check out the gay bars when Jeff was old enough. When Jeff
brings Greg (John Poulson) home that night, Harry's hospitality and
attentiveness overwhelm the young man, whose own family is so uptight and
bigoted he can't be honest with them about his sexuality.

   The events that propel this situation into action are best left for you to
discover. I suppose if you belong to the American Family Association or some
other homophobic group you won't like this picture, you'll find it immoral and
disgusting. But anybody else would find it hard to resist these down-to-
earth, real, caring, people and the warmth and good feelings this lovely
picture radiates. In sum, "The Sum of Us" adds up to a wonderful film-going
experience. It's only at the Tampa Theater until Thursday night. Don't miss
it.

   For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and
Film.