Movie Review: 'To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar' (1995)

In Snydersville, where none of the residents seem to have any idea that these dismayingly severe-looking amazons are actually men (but why doesn't anyone look at their hands?), each of the queens gets one thin episode apiece. Noxeema befriends the resident recluse. A local boy gets a crush on Chi Chi. And so on. The three end up teaching the town a series of lessons: They show the women how to stand up for themselves, how to slap down an abusive man or two, and, of course, how to approach life with style — which, in this movie, seems to mean bringing back the Carnaby Street fashions of the '60s. Swayze, Snipes, and Leguizamo are more than game; all three evince a casual comic mastery of the finger-snapping, eye-rolling, hip-swiveling élan of the modern male bitch princess. But the director, Beeban Kidron, working from a connect-the-dots script by Douglas Carter Beane, flattens them out. The drag queens in To Wong Foo are sitcom saints, each with one defining trait. And so the movie's appropriation of drag-queen wit, with its undercurrents of savage narcissism, turns gender-bending insouciance into hollow shtick.

Given that many gay men who enjoy dressing as women have a highly ambiguous — some would say patronizing — view of the opposite sex, the film's piety about the sanitized good intentions of its heroines may stick in your craw. To Wong Foo trots out a gay-baiting cop (Chris Penn) for the audience to hiss, and yet the movie, out of rank caution, completely desexualizes its heroes. For all the erotic desire they display, they might as well be Ken dolls beneath their ever-changing ward robes. I wasn't a big fan of last year's indie drag-queen comedy, the meandering The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but that one at least contained glimmers of eccentric camp panache. The costumes weren't just retro-kitschy — they were from Mars — and Terence Stamp's performance had a world-weary beauty. But the rote, we're-all-girls-here bitchery of To Wong Foo is a reminder of the paradox that faces today's ''liberated'' drag queens: The more they win society's acceptance, the more they may find they're outrageous to no one but themselves. C