Finding North (1998)

I enjoyed this movie, particularly John Benjamin Hickey's work. He is natural, relaxed, and did not force emotions, given the topic of the surviving partner of a gay man who had died of AIDS.It dealt with the tremendous emotional loss, the lack of social validation of his relationship (not considered a husband/widow) in a poignant way. Hickey's character's attempt at suicide is not far-fetched. At the height of the initial wave of gay men dying from AIDS, their surviving partners/ spouses were often cut-out or barred from funeral services, denied access to homes they co-owned or rented, and had joint bank accounts emptied by hateful family members of the deceased.While the bank teller character is more caricature, she lends the right humorous twist to this 'road trip/love story'. The various Texas characters are on-the-money, well-cast, and sweet.I have watched this movie a number of times and enjoyed it very much, each time.

This film, a chronicle of road trip combining a despondent gay man who has lost his lover to AIDS with a bossy Brooklyneese woman who still lives with her overbearing parents, is calculated to bring chuckles and tears. Unfortunately, the film is riddled with improbable coincidences, hokey sentimentality, and amateurish acting and filming. One hopes to like the film, and I do commend its portrayal of a gay male in reasonably unstereotypical fashion. The blatancy of the script's contrivances, however (they "meet cute," he just happens to come into her bank the day after she saw him almost leap to his death from a bridge - and she's carrying the shoe he left behind, she pursues him all the way to Texas with no encouragement or realization that he's gay, they learn "life lessons" after meeting his dead lover's crusty surrogate mother, etc.), just sabotaged the film for me. It made me squirm in uneasiness, and I never found myself relaxing in the hands of a filmmaker who believed in her material. Thumbs down here.

Most heterosexuals won't "get" this movie, because they insist that gay marriages are somehow inferior to theirs. But there is no difference, so they won't understand why the main character in this film is so devastated by loss of his husband (to AIDS) that he wants to end his own life.This film is a lovely story, nicely done, so it is tragic that it may be 30 years in the future before straight people will finally appreciate the veracity of it.

Wow! What an excellent film! It's honesty is so touching. The relationships depicted here are what we need more of in movies today! The unlikely friendship that develops between these two is absolutely beautiful! SEE THIS MOVIE!