Love! Valour! Compassion! Soundtrack

The premise sounds great but the promise is never fulfilled. Terrence McNally's Tony Award-winning hit about a cluster of gay male friends who gather several times one summer at a Victorian house on the bank of a rural lake never quite measures up (at least on film) as anything particularly profound. The story traces a history of infighting and changing relationships within the group, with the shock of AIDS slowly pushing everyone toward greater closeness and honesty. But instead of making an impact, so much of the film is trivial: dinner conversations are banal, tantrums are tedious, genitals are a little too overexposed. The two best and most familiar actors in the piece, Jason Alexander and John Glover, ironically play the most cliché-ridden characters. Still, Glover--who portrays British twin brothers who could not be more different from one another--is a very good reason to see this film. --Tom Keogh