Loggerheads, meanwhile, fixedly remains a "gay movie." As such, no one will complain that it ruins the image of adopted children or next-door neighbors or hotel managers by suggesting that any of those people might also happen to be gay. That's because Loggerheads treats its gay themes with a heavy-handed predictability that Lee knew well enough to avoid, alienating audiences who might otherwise appreciate the movie's more universal elements.

Deep down, Loggerheads is really a story about two mothers and the son they share in common. Bonnie Hunt plays a regretful birth mother who goes searching for her son decades after giving him up for adoption. Ann Owens Pierce, meanwhile, plays an adoptive mother married to a conservative North Carolina minister (Chris Sarandon), who drove their son (Kip Pardue) out of the house as a teenager when they discovered he was gay.

The three stories are told out of sequence, and it's not until the end, when the audience finally pieces together the proper order, that the film delivers its most heartbreaking message about the value of acceptance and human life. So what makes Loggerheads a gay movie and not a safe bet for broader audiences?

It's all in the telling, and Loggerheads practically aches with its own heal-the-world earnestness. This is not a shrill lecture film like Crash, but rather a soft-spoken but self-servingly slanted-issue picture. Director Tim Kirkman seems to fancy himself a master of restraint, allowing his themes to gestate in the pregnant silences between conversations that deliberately say nothing. But between the static camera work and minimalist strums of the soundtrack, Kirkman is working overtime manipulating the film's true-story roots, trying to wring maximum tragedy from each and every scene.

Granted, there's a familiar truth in the interplay between Pierce and Sarandon as they discuss the mundane everyday drama of their suburban lives. Their storyline -- the one mainstream audiences might most identify with -- is the film's most successful thread. More emotional, however, is Hunt's sub-story, although in his inexperience, Kirkman makes obligatory scenes (often of her looking forlorn) feel far too obvious, giving us the impression we've seen this movie before.

The real problem is the central story, in which Pardue plays a HIV-positive drifter who washes up on Kure Beach, where he's taken in by a curiously chaste gay man who operates the local hotel. Pardue is disarmingly handsome in an almost effortless way, and Kirkman knows it. Though the director empathizes with the young man's situation, there's an almost vulgar subtext to the way his camera seems to worship the wandering stud.

To Kirkman's credit, he's made a deeply personal film, but his own internal conflicts subvert the movie's intended sincerity. Where Brokeback Mountain trusts its audience to figure out the film's message, Loggerheads feels preachy -- or worse, predictable.

[as featured in The Miami Herald]