Surprisingly lighthearted and witty, Paul Rudnick's
Jeffrey(based on his
off-Broadway play) was one of the first films to tackle the AIDS crisis without patting itself on the back or offering everything up in a sobering movie-of-the-week scenario. The titular Jeffrey (Steven Weber) is a happy-go-lucky gay man who suddenly comes face to face with the fact that AIDS has turned sex into something "radioactive." Paranoid in the extreme, he vows to become celibate--at just about the same time that hunky Steve (
The Pretender's Michael T. Weiss) saunters into his life, eyes twinkling and hormones raging. The only problem is that Steve, for all his muscles and charm, is HIV-positive, thus setting Jeffrey's deepest fears into motion. When it was written in 1995,
Jeffreystruck a nerve in mining the fear that a number of gay men felt during the height of the AIDS crisis. Even just a few years later, though, Jeffrey's paranoia (what, he's never heard of condoms?) seems dated, and his behavior more self-damaging than self-aware--basically, he needs a slap upside the head as opposed to therapy. Still, Rudnick (who went on to pen the more mainstream
In and Out) is never one to pass up a witty one-liner or an opportunity to poke fun at anyone, and
Jeffreynow stands as a hilarious, sometimes poignant portrait of gay single life and the perils of dating in a paranoid time. Weber's Jeffrey is simultaneously open to the possibilities of life and fearful to embrace them, and Weiss is, well... ...
