Outfest: "Chasing Chasing Amy" - Film Review
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the moviebeing covered here wouldn't exist.
Chasing Amy has an odd place in the history of LGBT movies. For a certain generation, this was the most mainstream queer movie that was accessible. For filmmaker Sav Rodgers, it saved his life. He was horribly bullied in high school and his only source of reprieve was the world of the Kevin Smith-created film Chasing Amy. Sav’s documentary, Chasing Chasing Amy, is his answer to the film he obsessively watched for years. What began as a TedTalk has turned into a feature film where Sav interviews people involved with Chasing Amy in an effort to explain why this film made such an impact. The film’s director, Kevin Smith, becomes Sav’s biggest cheerleader throughout the course of the movie.
Chasing Chasing Amy is a fun jaunt through the film’s history until about the one-hour mark, when Sav sits down with Joey Lauren Adams, the film’s star. She had done a one-on-one interview with Kevin the day before, but this was solo. At first she lightly teases Sav that he’s not going to be able to think of a question to ask about Chasing Amy that she hasn’t been asked before. Sav explains how this film essentially saved his life as a teen, and that inadvertently opens a can of worms from Joey’s perspective. In her interview with Kevin, he talks about how cathartic this movie was for him. How he figured out through writing Chasing Amy what a terrible boyfriend he was to Joey. He says over and over again how Chasing Amy fixed him, which was already an uncomfortable turn of phrase for a viewer, but it’s one that so clearly bothers Joey.
Professional Amateur Productions, Spacestation, & Yeehaw Pictures
At one point, Kevin refers to Joey as his muse for Chasing Amy, which paints her as an inactive member of creating this film. Instead, Kevin got to chew up and spit Joey out for the sake of making the movie that he claims saved his career. In her solo interview, Joey seems to have been forced to make peace with the fact that the movie that also defined her career was extraordinarily painful for her. She did not emerge from the movie “fixed,” as Kevin had. It’s not just Kevin either. Joey had casting directors speculating about what she looked like naked and interviewers even asked Kevin about sleeping with her. It’s no wonder she doesn’t enjoy looking back on this time in her life, and it’s no wonder that Kevin does.
As her solo interview concludes, Joey says she’s thankful for how it affected Sav’s life and that brings up a fascinating, complicated duality of art. We talk all the time about how to separate art from the artist, or if we should even be doing that. In this particular case, that conversation feels its murkiest. How can you take away Chasing Amy’s impact on Sav? On Joey? On Kevin? On Guinevere, the writer of Go Fish, a movie made by and for queer women during the same time period that was ignored? Or so many other people who look at this movie as a cultural touchpoint? How do you hold the truth of the movie’s impact with the reality of how it was made? It feels complicated, and thornier than simply asking that creatives who are known abusers no longer be afforded celebrity status.
Bill Winters
At the heart of Chasing Chasing Amy is Sav. Inadvertently, he’s created a documentary about his life, his hopes, his fears, his insecurities, his love. What anchors the film is his relationship with Riley, his then-girlfriend, now-wife. Chasing Chasing Amy sees Sav propose on the TKTS steps in Times Square. The tangled web Chasing Amy has woven for Sav is oddly beautiful. The only reason he became a filmmaker is because of Chasing Amy, the main support he had when he came out as transgender was Kevin, and his debut film exists because of that film.
The strange thing about pop culture is that it means something entirely different to every single person involved. That includes the audience. My opinion on Chasing Amy (which I watched for the first time after seeing Chasing Chasing Amy) is wildly different from Sav’s. Somehow, all these versions of the film exist simultaneously, yet separately. Chasing Chasing Amy speaks to the magic of filmmaking, in creating a community beyond what’s imaginable. It also speaks to experiences like Joey’s, and in her sharing that story so publicly, she creates a new connection with a new audience. Art is constantly transforming and reinventing itself, and Chasing Chasing Amy is proof of the ever-changing nature of creation.
Chasing Chasing Amy had its world premiere at Tribeca in June 2023 and is the closing presentation for Outfest 2023 on July 23rd.
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