(IMAGE: John Boswell, left, and his “friend” Jerry, courtesy Blood Sweat Honey)
Blood Sweat Honey, 2022. 119 minutes. Documentary.
Grade: 2.5 out of 4
In both 1980 and 1994, Catholic scholar John Boswell published ground-breaking books on the history of homosexuality and its tolerance within the church. In both Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, and later The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, he argued that church unions which had previously been considered sanctifications of spiritual brotherhood bonds between men were actually gay unions, and indeed that same-sex unions pioneered the notion within Christianity that marriages could and should be for love, rather than property and children. Not a Tame Lion isn’t a movie that strongly argues nor debates these notions; rather, it’s a documentary about Boswell himself, and the legacy he leaves behind.
Primarily through talking-head interviews with friends and colleagues, the film paints a picture of Boswell as a sort of rock star of academia. Young and handsome at Yale, and prone to learning a new ancient language almost every year, he gleaned much of his research from archival materials nobody else had utilized because they couldn’t translate them. And once some of the monasteries and churches realized where his research was going, they’d try to stop him, at which point the charismatic professor would recruit students and colleagues to run interference, or take pictures that he required.
The stories themselves are strong enough, and don’t really need staged footage of a Nathan Drake lookalike wandering through tombs with a flaming torch, yet director Craig Bettendorf clearly feels that since he paid for the scene, he may as well use it to the maximum. The movie also strains at times to make pop-culture connections that add little for viewers who’d be inclined to see the film anyway. Boswell had a special set of skills…like LIAM NEESON! He concealed his terminal illness…like CHADWICK BOSEMAN and NORM MACDONALD! Boswell was apparently a big Disney nerd, so he’d probably have laughed. But in context they feel like efforts by a stodgy old professor to sound hip.
It’s a shame that relatively little footage of Boswell speaking apparently exists to use – Bettendorf reserves the best of it for the movie’s grand finale, having covered the author’s death about halfway through the film’s run time, and focused on the legacy thereafter. Many contemporaneous news and talk show clips set the scene for the cultural backdrop against which Boswell’s research landed. There’s plenty of Jerry Falwell, a young Newt Gingrich fearmongering, and a really young Dr. Fauci optimistically predicting an AIDS vaccine by the end of the ’90s. In the new era of monkeypox, it not only sounds like the same thing coming back around again, but even largely the same players.
The awkward-sounding title comes from Boswell’s own description of God, summing up what he saw as a non-contradictory relationship to Christianity as a gay man. For all his work on behalf of destigmatizing the idea of same-sex marriage, he refused to let his lifelong partner be identified as anything other than a “friend.” He believed personal business was between a person and God, and Scripture was its own thing, which had changed in interpretation for the better in some areas, and the worse in others. Because he’s not around to speak for himself, it’s hard to know quite how he reconciled it all, but those close to him offer their best guesses.
As constructed, Not a Tame Lion is rough around the edges, with too many interviews featuring that irritating, public-domain-sounding music so common to first-time films underneath when it is not necessary. And a lot of the footage, at least on my online screener, is such lo-res digital that it’s hard to imagine it looking especially crisp on a big screen. Yes, of course there’s an animated sequence of the sort that’s been de rigeur ever since Bowling for Columbine.
Yet at its central goal of making a case for Boswell as a man who mattered, it undoubtedly succeeds. One can dispute his findings – indeed, Wikipedia entries on his books go out of their way to do so. But his methods seem beyond reproach, and his personality that of a man who was exactly what we would want in our academics and teachers, devoted to the thirst for learning but still a whole lot of fun. Now watch some veteran actor or other get an Oscar nomination for making the fictionalized version of this. Heck, Nathan Drake himself, Tom Holland, might be a decent choice.