Lavender Men ***

Starring: Roger Q. Mason, Pete Ploszek, Alex Esola

Director: Lovell Holder

Country: USA

UK Distributor: Prime

Taffeta (Mason) is a stage manager on a mediocre play about the life of Abraham Lincoln. After the lights are switched off one evening, Taffeta’s imagination runs away with themself, bringing to life the rumoured love affair between the US President (Ploszek) and a soldier, Elmer Ellsworth (Esola).

This realised daydream is described as Taffeta’s “fantasia”, in which they play all of the incidental parts, including Mary Todd. At times sassy narrator, at others witty caricature, this is a wildly theatrical role at the centre of a narrative that all takes place on a stage set. Adapted from Mason’s own stage show, this is a histrionic movie that doesn’t shake off the confines of its staging.

Despite examining Lincoln’s rumoured love affair, the plot really revolves around Taffeta. Reimagining Honest Abe’s story through the eyes of a Queer person of colour however, we do see whole new facets that are otherwise left out of the history books. Let’s put it this way: Lavender Men couldn’t be further than Spielberg’s Lincoln (although Mason probably makes a better Mary Todd than Sally Field…). But as the story takes us down character subplots of Taffeta in the modern day, it’s a shame that these are mostly unlinked to the story that they’re recounting on the stage.

We’re asked to suspend our disbelief a lot, for which we are rewarded with a host of flashy dramaturgical devices, but when it looks like theatre and sounds like theatre, surely this isn’t a movie but actually… theatre? There’s nothing wrong with adaptations of plays or even movies set in a theatre, but the medium of film has so much more to it than that… and in this case, it doesn’t maximise the potential it has, failing to add anything more than if we had just gone to see it on stage.

This is an enjoyable and fun new version of history, but its self-proclaimed “fantasia” unfortunately doesn’t rise to the possibilities of its medium. But you’d be a cold-hearted bitch not to fall in love with Taffeta, that’s for sure.

UK Release: Out now to watch on VOD on Prime

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