Playing the Part (1995) User Reviews

Excellent short documentary -- amazingly honest

[Skylark-4 · 9/10 · 28 August 2000]

An excellent movie by a very promising director.

This documentary is an intense snapshot of the director's life as she nears graduation from Harvard. It seems that she wants to tell her parents she's gay, but she's having a hard time with the announcement. That seems to be an "excuse" for the film, or a "theme" that holds it together. But really, the movie is much more about being a person than being gay. What makes this movie so good is the amazingly honest way she portrays the family members around her, including her rocky relations with her mother. If she had been straight, or if she had some other secret she was trying to tell her parents, I think she could have made a movie that is every bit as good.

Evidently she's a student of Ross McElwee. If you like his movies (like 'Sherman's March'), you'll probably love this one. It has many of the charms of McElwee's style, and some advantages of its own.

This movie IS available on VHS from Amazon. It's included on a tape called "Girlfriends (1995)" along with three other lesbian-related short movies that aren't bad, but aren't nearly as good as "Playing the Part."

UGH! An Exercise in Unbridled Self-Indulgence

[nycruise-1 · 17 April 2009]

While certainly some segments are entertaining in their own right, the majority of this movie focuses on the notion of "poor little me" - the "me" being the filmmaker who is wrestling with telling her parents that she's gay.

It's all for naught: she never does; but, more importantly, we the viewers end up not caring!

The problem here is that the filmmaker had Ross McElloway (misspelled but I don't feel like looking his boring profile up) as her instructor.

One of the few positive things that can be said about McCabe's exercise in unbridled self- indulgence is that is nowhere as near as painful to watch (and definitely nowhere as achingly long) as her professor's "tour-de-torch" "Sherman's March".

Oh - one more thing - filmmaker McCabe no longer considers herself "gay" - so even those in the gay community who might be tempted to check this in the name of "sisterhood" you can fuggeddaboutit: Miss Mitch has moved on - and you should too by skipping over this now "out-dated" piece.