If you had asked me a few days ago, I would have assumed it was obvious that a film about gay teen suicide could not also be morally inspiring. Yet this is precisely what Prayers for Bobby achieves. It tells the true story of a religious mother in small town America whose picture perfect life is shattered when she finds out that her teenage son Bobby is gay. Mary, played superbly by Sigourney Weaver, simply cannot accept her son’s sexuality and sets out to cure him of his ‘sickness’. This encompasses prayer groups, hard exercise and psychotherapy as Bobby, desperate to restore his once close relationship with Mary, throws himself into these treatments in a fruitless bid to restore his life to the normality he enjoyed prior to his inadvertent outing. Ultimately though he can’t do this and he finds himself drifting into the small gay world of his home town. This only deepens the divide between himself and Mary before he finally heads out into the local city to live with his sympathetic cousin for a couple of months. This opens up a new life for Bobby and, initially, he finds peace with himself through his first relationship.

As you may have guessed from the opening line of the review though, this peace does not last. Bobby finds himself caught between two worlds; his sexuality renders him a sinner to his conservative mother but his internalised sense of sin prevents him from embracing his sexuality. Ultimately the weight of this ambivalence proves too much to bear and he throws himself off a motorway bridge into the path of an oncoming truck. The rest of the film follows Mary’s struggle to come to terms with her guilt and, although the film up to this point is certainly compelling, it is what follows that makes Prayers for Bobby such an astonishing achievement. Her attempts to make sense of Bobby’s death lead her to question her fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible and her submissive relationship to God. She finds a new purpose and meaning to her life as she comes to campaign against the very bigotry which drove such a wedge between herself and her son that he chose to end his life. The film ends with her making an impassioned speech at the seat of local government in favour of gay rights. You can watch it below. The clip may seem a bit cheesy but it really isn’t in the context of the film.

In the events following the film Mary became a highly visible spokeswoman for the Diablo Valley chapter of Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians and Gays. She also appeared frequently on television talk shows and campaigned for public schools to introduce counselling for gay teenagers. While the events of the film are certainly tragic I found this trajectory from intolerance to activism profoundly inspiring. It showcases the ineradicable human capacity for renewal and understanding, as well as the ever present possibility of solidarity in the face of ingrained intolerance. At a time of political and economic uncertainty, while gay rights are under renewed attack, it offers a potent antidote to circumstantial pessimism.

Much of the critical acclaim received by the film seems to have been directed at Sigourney Weaver’s portrayal of Mary. The stunning quality of her performance can be seen both in the sympathy which she engenders in the audience for the bigoted Mary and the sense of plausibility which she inspires in relation to Mary’s seemingly unlikely transition from bible thumping homophobe to prominent gay rights campaigner. However in many ways I felt she was over shadowed by Ryan Kelley’s earnest performance as Bobby. The simple humanity which he brought to the role stayed with me after the film. He offers a beautiful though tragic portrayal of a young boy trapped within circumstances he did not choose and ultimately unable to negotiate a path beyond them. While these are the two outstanding performance in the film there are any number of touching though low key performances throughout the cast.

Astonishingly Prayers for Bobby was actually produced as a TV movie. Could there be a more powerful retort to those who bemoan the contemporary state of American television? This film is a wonderful achievement, imbued throughout with pathos, which exhibits admirable insight into its topic area (sexuality, bigotry, exclusion) while also reaching beyond it and touching ineffably upon the most profound aspects of the moral experience of being human.

We first meet Detective Tommy Craven greeting his daughter at Boston station. He’s clearly a loving but overprotective father, a man subtly ill at ease with the modern world. His daughter chides him for ‘always’ being early, and on the way home answers his probing questions by suggesting he needs a relationship: he wears a ring yet we never discover what happened to his wife. He demurs, saying she’s ‘my girl’. The pair return home where she is violently sick and, cast in the role of father, he tries to rush her to hospital…only for her to be shot and killed the moment they set foot out of the house, thus setting in motion the mystery which drives the film.

It would be easy to dismiss this piece, all the more so given the critical acclaim received by the BBC television drama on which it was based. In fact, most critics have done just that, often making reference to the quality of the original in the process. However, such repudiations ironically foreground, though fail to acknowledge, what’s most interesting about the film. A large part of what makes it such a tempting target for critical ire is its casual regurgitation of overly familiar Hollywood clichés: the last honest man, the hardboiled and incorruptible detective, a father struggling on behalf of his children.

We’ve seen this story a million times before. Or have we? The obvious points of reference are films like Taken and television programs like 24. Yet unlike Bryan Mills or Jack Bauer, who never stumble or display weakness, Tommy Craven struggles from the point of his daughter’s death; we see that behind the icy exterior of a man who knows what do and how to do it there is weakness and doubt. Throughout the film he imagines conversations with his daughter and we see his resolve falter on more than one occasion. We also see him throw up through fear and grief, as a visceral representation of his weakness (vomit plays a strangely prominent role in the film).

In its final scene he stumbles, as if drunk, through the house of the malevolent CEO and what might have once been justice is now simply revenge. Despite being a military veteran and a police detective of 30 years with, we learn earlier in the film, an impeccable record (thus he is an unblemished upholder of the Law) he’s been pushed too far and seen too much to think that justice can be done. He doesn’t aim to bring the perpetrators to justice but simply to end them so he can die knowing he has done something.

He says to the CEO before he makes the kill shot, ‘deep down you know you deserve this’: a man who has dedicated his life to the law, in both the political and psychoanalytical sense of the term, ultimately finds himself appealing to the private conscience of his enemy as he extra-judicially executes him.

In Ransom, a similar film of the mid 90s, the multimillionaire father (also played by Mel Gibson) was reunited with his son after ultimately killing the corrupt cop who’d kidnapped him and demanded a ransom. Killing was involved, as a troubled father redeemed himself through action facilitated by sheer resolve and unwavering integrity. However, this killing was defensive and against a corrupt cop, thus recovering the law rather than undermining it. Most of all it led to his reconciliation with his son. His previously neglectful parenting was forgotten as his performative enaction of the role of father, which had previously eluded him, washed away all sins.

In contrast, Tommy Craven’s killing is offensive, involving a pre-emptive assault on the CEO’s house, against a man whose activities were sanctioned at the top levels of the federal government, Ultimately, the reconciliation it facilitates is fantasistic and confined to the afterlife. The film ends with his dead daughter embracing him and leading his spirit out of the hospital. The only point in which we see him as the protective father occurs at the start of the film (as he attempts to rush his sick daughter to hospital) and it quickly ends with her being blown apart with a shotgun.

For all its cinematic clichés, the Edge of Darkness represents something new and, well, dark. While once the redemption of the father played itself out through conservative fables of resolve, integrity and justice, now it ends in three murders and no redemption nor justice.

In the 1990s stories such as this worked to sustain the integrity of American masculinity in social conditions which seemed to perpetually undercut and disorientate it: the inadequate father eventually found redemption through rediscovering those qualities (strength, bravery, courage) which society had obscured. Now however those qualities don’t facilitate redemption; only revenge. They don’t fix what is broken. They simply allow one ultimate and final act: not to set things right, not for justice but simply because acting is better than doing nothing.

A narrative form which once rested on the sublimation of masculine rage through the reestablishment of the law has transmuted into a form which permits no sublimation. Now there is just rage and the expression which can be found for it prior to death.

A word of warning: this is not an uplifting film. It is however one of the rare films worthy of the epithet “unmissable”. Set in 1987, it tells the story of Claireece Precious Jones (usually known simply as Precious): a 16 year old black girl who is obese, illiterate and pregnant for the second time by her father. She lives in Harlem with her physically and emotionally abusive mother, while her first child (‘Mongo’, short for ‘Mongoloid’, who has Down Syndrome) lives with her grandmother. We never see Precious’s father, aside from a solitary flashback to his rape of her – presumably one of many such occurrences  – while she is briefly unconscious after being knocked out by her mother, who lashed out in rage as a consequence of what she saw as Precious’s culinary inadequacies.  As I said, this is not an uplifting film.

We first meet Precious in her class room, as she slaps a student disrupting her maths class and fantasises about the future she hopes to share with her handsome maths teacher. This is soon shattered and she is called to the Principal’s office to discuss her second pregnancy. Though she is suspended from school, her Principal (prompted by the handsome maths teacher who says he sees promise in Precious) arranges for her to attend an alternative school. Her mother is, to say the least, scathing about these new educational prospects: “you’re a dummy, bitch. You will never know shit. Don’t nobody want you. Don’t nobody need you.” In spite of this, Precious goes on to the new school (“Each One Teach One”) which, along with the birth of her son, sets into motion the chain of events which will ultimately take her out of her mother’s house.

An undercurrent of fantasy pervades the film, as Precious periodically escapes from the grim particularity of her circumstances into fabulous dreams of recognition and happiness. However even in these fantasies, Precious can never entirely escape: nightmares about rape drift seamlessly into fantasies of celebrity and fame. Similarly at one point she looks into the mirror and sees a pretty slim white girl of a similar age and yet seeing herself in these terms gives her the confidence to go out and face the world. This ambiguity, as reality and fantasy never stand entirely apart, sums up the film as a whole: there’s simply too much to it for it to be neatly encapsulated in simple terms.

The film seems like this should feel manipulative, given the ambiguous mix of pity and admiration it provokes, however somehow it just doesn’t: this is a testament to the quality of Lee Daniels’ direction and the performance of Gabourey Sidibe as Precious. The quiet power and earnest defiance which she brings to the character leaves the audience rooting for her in the most genuine way, without ever reducing the film to the level of sentimental fable. [spoilers ahead: stop now if you want to avoid them] This avoidance of sentimentality continues right until the end, as Precious stands up to and overcomes her mother. I found this the most upsetting scene in the film by far, largely because it was so difficult to know what to ultimately make of it. As Precious walks confidently off into the distance, mother to two children, what are we to make of her mother? Neither contempt nor pity seem appropriate and yet we are left with these and much else besides. Then the credits roll… and the only thing I’m sure of is that I want to see the film again…