Review of Driftwood, new gay teen ghosts in prison movie

A new movie hits DVD today that might appeal to fans of a few different genres: ghost stories, prison movies, teen angst films, gay coming-of-age movies, and flicks that feature a lot of shirtless guys in homoerotic situations but who don't actually touch each other.

Driftwood, a murder mystery wrapped in a rehabilitation saga with a delicious plea for tolerance as its chewy center, tells the story of David Forrester (the exceptional Raviv Ullman), a misunderstood kid whose parents (Marc McClure and Lin Shaye, yay!) book him into an "attitude adjustment camp" after his rockstar brother overdoses, fearing that some dark writing on his blog indicates that he might be a suicide risk.

The camp, Driftwood, is run by the openly sociopathic Captain Kennedy (former pro wrestler Diamond Dallas Page) and his henchman Norris (David Eigenberg, best known as Steve from Sex and the City), who clearly take more of an interest in using the wayward young men as slave labor and breaking their spirits than in actually rehabilitating them.

David is soon visited by the ghost of a dead kid from his unit named Jonathan, and before long some not-entirely-unexpected secrets come to the surface about how and why he died. As far as the ghost story goes, pretty standard stuff here.

But where Driftwood gets interesting is in how it handles a few unexpected gay storylines. Browbeaten Noah (Jeremy Lelliott) was sent to the camp to have the gay beaten out of him, which Captain Kennedy and his lackey Yates (Talan Torriero of Laguna Beach fame) seem to be more than happy to do. But the interesting thing is that with all the macho posturing and bad-boy behavior within the group of inmates, they actually stand up for Noah and tell their superiors to back off.

Noah stands up for himself as well, and in one scene takes things way too far, which as countless real-life school shooting tragedies have taught us, is not by any means an exaggeration of what can happen when bullying pushes someone to the breaking point. Driftwood seems to be making a definite statement about the difference in attitudes regarding sexuality between the generations, and its message is clearly that the days of intolerance are over, and that young people today are ready to wipe the slate clean and start over with a more enlightened attitude.

Whether this is really true or not remains to be seen, but it's a refreshing perspective, particularly within a genre that is usually not the most sensitive to gay characters. The central ghost story, in fact, revolves around a teen who was murdered for being gay. But while other ghost stories would be content to use the tragic gay teen as an exploitative plot point, Driftwood seems to be saying "No more" by presenting Jonathan's tragic fate as a contrast to the story at hand.

The presence of an apparently closeted teacher who seems fixated on tormenting Noah offers another look back at the wages of intolerance and shame, and again suggests that the future generation wants to stop the cycle and move past it. The doomed teen's final line, "You were supposed to protect me," sums up the central tragedy of the film and resounds long after in its refusal to accept the torch of self-hatred. Pretty progressive for a ghosts-in-prison movie, eh?

Aside from the plea for tolerance that grounds the film, it's fairly by-the-book. There's no real gore or intense violence, no nudity, and flashy camera tricks and blaring musical interludes are relegated to the sidelines in favor of fairly understated storytelling. Considering that the message is one that young folks could certainly stand to hear, it's nice that the filmmakers have kept things teen-friendly: aside from some shirtless scenes there's nothing particularly leering or discomforting, unlike some other hot-boys-in-recovery flicks I've seen (read: anything by David DeCoteau, bless him). Likewise, the "Trojan horse" approach of embedding a stand against anti-gay bullying in what is otherwise a standard genre film might help the message reach fertile soil.

Perhaps not surprisingly, co-writer and director Tim Sullivan is openly gay himself, and when I interviewed him last year he discussed the gay tragedy at the film's core, and he has spoken about Driftwood being a plea for understanding in a post-Columbine world. What kids do to one another and drive each other to do can certainly be dark and horrific, and Driftwood does well to provide a light at the end of the tunnel.