If I cared about my reviewer ranking (I don't), I'd never review a movie like Any Day Now. So many people love it so adamantly that they can't help attacking anybody who doesn't.
Although he plays an interesting character, Alan Cumming's performance is so over-the-top that he is never believable; and since the whole movie hangs on his performance, the whole movie is a failure.
I never for one second forgot that I was watching Alan Cumming act, never for one second related to Rudy Donatello as a real person or cared about what he cared about. In that regard, Garret Dillahunt's Paul was much better. I did believe in and care about him, but it wasn't enough.
I never for one second even believed Rudy was gay (even though Cumming is) or that he cared a bean about Marco or Paul or anybody else but his own obnoxious drama-queen self. Marco was a prop to him, not a person; Marco was just a pawn in Rudy's egomaniacal drive to right society's injustice against himself.
Willing suspension of disbelief is one thing, and I do it all the time when watching movies; but trying to FORCE myself to believe something when everything in me constantly screams "Fake!" is more than I demand of myself.
The atrocious wigs that sat atop Cumming's and Dillahunt's heads throughout the movie, and Cumming's shrill and embarrassingly bad New York accent, were persistent and unnecessary distractions that did not help the movie's credibility. Movies are for entertainment; if they don't entertain, they fail. The failure is theirs, not mine.
I agree completely with a review on another site that starts "The message is admirable, but the vehicle is a clunker." The legal rejection of gays as adoptive parents is an indefensible injustice that must and will be corrected. This movie not only completely fails to advance that cause, but it sets that cause back. That's inexcusable.
Gay couples deserve better than this movie. It makes a strong case for NOT letting gays adopt, because the gay in this case is a narcissistic, hysterical, totally self-absorbed nut like Rudy Donatello, unfit to adopt ANY child, especially one like Marco who needs constant, self-sacrificing attention. Rudy's total unfitness to adopt a child has nothing to do with his being gay; it has to do with his unstable, totally self-centered personality.
Near the movie's end - just in case we'd somehow missed the point that the tragedy was about HIM, not about Marco - Rudy grinds out a truly cringe-inducing rendition of Bob Dylan's hymn-like "I Shall Be Released", tears and sweat streaming down his face. His rampant, crippling narcissism is appalling.
Saying that Any Day Now is based on "a true story" is no excuse. The writer-director Travis Fine chose what to include and leave out, what to emphasize and tone down. The movie is his responsibility; he was not forced by "facts" to make it as he did.
If Fine's intention was to advance the cause of gay adoption, his hero should have been fit to parent a disabled child, so that the law's rejection of him could be seen as truly biased and unjust. Rudy - THIS Rudy - was NOT fit to parent such a child, or any child. I am proudly and militantly gay, but I kept hoping for Marco's sake that the courts would not give Rudy custody of him.
I doubt that's the point Fine intended to make when he wrote and directed this movie, but it's the point he did make. Thank God the future of gay rights doesn't depend on this movie, or we'd all be back in the closet with the door locked and our guns loaded.
