Estate Project for Artists with AIDS
Reviewed by Patrick Moore

HOPE FULL

Andy Abrahams Wilson's "Hope is the Thing With Feathers" is a harrowing and hypnotic 28-minute documentary film focusing on the poet and painter Beau Riley. Although the story of losing a loved one to AIDS (in this case Riley's lover, David) has often been told, it's rare that a film actually takes us within this subject rather than simply reporting it. Ultimately, the film is less a portrait of either man than of their extraordinary grace in facing death.

The title comes from Emily Dickinson and the film is filled with the comings and goings of birds. Spirits outside the window, having come to take David away, appear as wrens. Like hope, these birds abruptly fly off, but offer some fleeting consolation to the men awaiting death. The film is also filled with quotations from poems including Riley's "Via Dolorosa," written after his lover's death. However, the most resonant line in the film was uttered by David from his deathbed: "Am I the rose or part of the rose?" The film's definitive answer is that we are the rose, that there is no separation between us and that, if we are still, we can surely feel our connectedness.

Abrahams Wilson softens what might be an overly grim portrait through sepia-toned, slow motion images of moving water, wind blown trees and floating roses. Potential cliches, even shots of open sky and sick men made whole again, are presented with such dignity that there is little room for cynicism. Riley himself is a fascinating character, alternately queeny and authoratative, speaking in strange vocal patterns. He doesn't hold back when interviewed and seems particularly honest about his alcoholism and its impact on his relationship with David. His participation in his lover's death, he explains, was an attempt to make amends. Alternately crying and laughing, Riley says, "I was ecstatic with duty--it was a spiritual experience."

Death is, of course, more complicated than that and Riley's poetry reveals both acceptance and bitterness for a lover who is leaving: "Some of us are less and less interested/some of us are spending more and more time in another place," he wrote. To hear Riley's line "..but he is going very fast now, his tiny body is a blur within a roar" is to be reminded how many fine voices have been lost to AIDS.

Interestingly, the film is nearly over before Riley addresses his own mortality. "I'm dying now and I'm not cool with it," he says. "But I don't act that way because of David." Through witnessing and participating in his lover's death, Riley seems to have prepared for his own. He died six months after David. As we see his own ashes being spread in the final scene, Riley's voice brings the film to a close, expressing gratitude for his good fortune at having met a man whom he loved.

Return to top of page