Longtime Companion (1989)

image courtesy of filmstreams.org

Pride Month has turned into something of a film festival for me this year, and watching these movies back to back has left me sitting with a question I can't quite resolve: how honest are they? I don't really know how true to the lived experience of these people any of this is. For one, I'm relatively sure not everyone playing a gay man in Longtime Companion is actually gay. And I don't know how the community feels about that casting choice today, beyond the occasional flare-up I catch online. What I can judge is how these characters made me feel, and how convincingly they relate to one another - and on that front, this film succeeds completely.

I've seen Angels in America (a masterpiece, no argument) and a handful of films about the activism that grew up around the AIDS epidemic, most recently BPM (Beats Per Minute), which is fantastic. This film sits in a different register than either of those. It's quieter. Less interested in spectacle or rallying cry, more interested in the slow erosion of a friend group, watching it get whittled down one person at a time by a disease nobody yet has a name for.

Some of these losses happen quickly. John (Dermot Mulroney) doesn’t make it that far. Others stretch out, and it's in that stretching that the film finds its power. Sean's (Mark Lamos) decline in particular is devastating - not because of any single scene, but because of how long we're asked to sit with it. His is effectively the film's "main death," the one we're given the most room to absorb, largely through how David (Bruce Davison, in an Oscar-nominated performance) handles watching his partner disappear in front of him. Davison plays that helplessness with a kind of restraint that makes it worse, not better. There's no big breakdown scene to release the tension. The grief just accumulates.

What struck me most is the structural choice mirroring the epidemic itself: the film gets more literal, more clinical, more explicit as it goes on, almost tracking the spread the way the disease actually spread - quietly, then suddenly everywhere. The word "AIDS" itself doesn't even appear until the film is already halfway through. That's not an accident. It's a choice that puts you inside the disorientation of the early years, when no one had the language yet for what was happening to them. “Gay cancer” being the common term.

Alongside the personal losses, you watch the public mood curdle in real time. The world outside this friend group turns colder and more suspicious, and that hostility splinters the group from within - sadness curdling into frustration, frustration curdling into blame. What the film captures so well, though, is the flip side of that: how this circle of friends doesn't just grieve together, but organizes together, trying to figure out how to survive a disease that seems to be targeting only their small corner of the world. And they're doing this in Reagan's America, a political climate already primed to stigmatize them, now handed what felt like a ready-made justification to do it more openly.

That tension - between the cruelty closing in from outside and the tenderness holding things together on the inside - is what gives the film its emotional spine. It's a sad film, unmistakably. But it's also one filled with hope and mutual support (party because of a very sweet ending), which, given the moment it's depicting, might be the most anyone could have asked for.

4 out of 5 Stars