Though inspired by an actual story, Julian Jarrold’s Kinky Boots is a high-concept movie, one that rehashes all the clichs and ingredients of a recent cycle of British films that began with “The Full Monty” and “Billy Elliott,” and continued with “Waking Ned Devine,” “Calendar Girls,” and most recently, “On a Clear Day.”
Using more familiar Hollywood references, Kinky Boots could be described as a cross between The Odd Couple and Some Like It Hot, though more in theme and intent than in artistic quality, technical execution, or sheer fun. Blending elements of culture clash, personality conflict, farce, burlesque, and drag, Kinky Boots is such a strenuously fabricated and innocuous fare that you are always aware of the seams in the dresses”and high-heel red boots.
Made mostly for export (and specifically targeted at the American market), all of these pictures are uplifting comedies about outcasts, usually unemployed, poor, or minority members of the British working class, who need to figure out how to stand up for themselves and how to change their lot in life from losers to winners. Big winners, American style, like Stallone’s Rocky.
With their “something for everyone” philosophy, Kinky Boots and the other films are motivated by demographics rather than artistic or thematic considerations, trying to appeal to the largest and most divergent audience possible. You can imagine the filmmaker sitting in their office and coldly calculating: The drag and musical scenes should please gay moviegoers, the central interracial couple could attract minority moviegoers, and the inspirational message of tolerance and understanding of deviance should cater to women of a certain age, the blue-haired old ladies, who had made hits out of mediocre British imports like Lavender Ladies (with Judi Dench and Maggie Smith). Trust me: Kinky Boots is the kind of film you can take your parents and grandparents to see without being the least embarrassed.
The comparison between Kinky Boots and Calendar Girls is particularly pertinent, since both movies were written by the same scribe, Tim Firth, who’s credited with working on the “original” script from Geoff Deane. This version of the formula again throws together into the mix two individuals who have nothing in common, but come to realize that by joining forces, they can benefit financially if not socially; the bonding and mutual respect come later.
The movie’s two protagonists are Charlie Price (Joel Edgerton of Star Wars: Episode II fame) and “Lola,” played by the UK actor Chiwetel Ejiofor who’s rapidly becoming an international star, after appearing in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda, and most recently, Spike Lee’s Inside Man, as Denzel Washington’s partner.
Charlie is a young, mild-mannered Englishman from Northampton who inherits his father’s failing shoe factory after the latter’s death. “Lola” is a feisty female impersonator who in due course turns Charlie’s world”and the entire luckless factory”inside out and on its way to the catwalks of Milan.
With brassy but clichd humor”who can resist the sight of a big muscled black man dressed ostentatiously and wearing red kinky boots”middlebrow poignancy, disingenuous morale, and fake happy ending, Kinky Boots is meant to explore the dynamics between two men from different walks of life, having spent their lives trying to fit into mainstream society, who suddenly realize they are much better off if they stand out for who they really are.
In the first segment, we are introduced to amiable Charlie, a man who thinks he has escaped the dead-end industrial town of Northampton with his ambitious fiance Nicola (Jemima Rooper). However, when his father suddenly passes away, Charlie is unexpectedly left in charge of the sinking family business in sturdy shoes. Trapped between a world of cheap knock-offs and to-die-for Jimmy Choos, Price & Sons doesn’t need a manager so much as it needs a savior. Charlie realizes with an alarming sense dread that, just to stay afloat, he would have to lay off many of his dad’s loyal life-long employees.
Walking one dark night in Soho, Charlie encounters Lola, a rough-and-tender transvestite wearing teetering high heels. After initial suspicion and animosity, mostly on Charlie’s part, the two men begin to socialize. Though realizing they come from completely different walks of life, Charlie and Lola are smart enough to recognize that both have reached a point where they have nothing to lose by taking a risk.
The rest of the movie depicts how the duo bucks tradition–and boring loafers–and sets out to conquer the brave new world of sexy cross-dressing footwear with Lola serving as Charlie’s fashion advisor. In due course, the disarming Lola transforms not only the dreary assembly line but also every man and woman he meets.
In the last reel, as the make-or-break Milan fashion show approaches, every member of the factory, from the macho Don (Nick Frost of Shaun of the Dead), whose masculinity is threatened and tested by Lola, to the stalwart Mel (vet actress Linda Basset) to Charlie’s sole confidante Lauren (Sarah Jane Potts) finds the unlikely dreams of Loa and Charlie catching fire.
The narrative, such as it is, is divided into three parts, each laced with retro disco musical numbers, performed by Lola and her backup group in outrageous costumes and wigs; one number makes the group look like Diana Ross and the Supremes in their early years.
The acting of both leads is agreeable, though both are constrained by the banal writing and clichd characterization. Initially, Edgerton is playing Charlie as a bumbling nebbish, but his performance improves and gets more charming as the story goes along.
A major talent to watch, Ejiofor is more assertive from the beginning, but he, too, is burdened with sentimental flashbacks that are meant to arouse the audience’s sympathy for his deviant character. Visually, it’s hard to resist a big brawny black man in turquoise or red spike heel, though we have seen that before a decade ago, when Wesley Snipes played a drag queen in To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar.
Sexually, too, Kinky Boots plays it familiar and safe, never making it clear whether Lola is gay; he may be asexual for there are no men or women in his life. The whole movie is stamped with a decidedly heterosexual sensibility, and a scene in which Lola dances intimately with Charlie’s fiance has an ambiguous tone, all the more so reinforced by showing the couple from the POV of Charlie, who seems slightly jealous but not too upset to interrupt their act.
Kinky Boots may be a direct function of the international movie market since most of these movies have a built-in commercial appeal. Artistically, however, it’s too bad that mainstream UK comedy has sunk to this level of mediocrity and predictability with fake confections that don’t begin to suggest the distinctive class, milieu, or even humor of contemporary British society.
Kinky Boots, Calendar Girls, and company represent a far cry from the 1950s British comedies we have all admired, the classic, post-WWII wit-fueled films about genuinely outrageous situations and characters, often played by Alec Guinness in such gems as The Lavender Hill Mob and Kind Hearts and Coronets.
