The worldwide AIDS crisis has inspired a lot of great literature, theater, film and television. It’s been chronicled and explored from multiple perspectives. But “Fairyland,” the 2013 memoir by Alysia Abbott, may be the first such story that kicks off from the point of view of a little girl.
In this film, written and directed by Andrew Durham, young Alysia (Nessa Dougherty) and her father, Steve, are conventional Midwesterners in the early ’70s when Alysia’s mother is killed in a car crash. Now a widower, Steve is determined to move west, to San Francisco, specifically, where, he tells his stiff mother-in-law, Munca (Geena Davis), he intends to finish “my book.” And we do see him at his manual typewriter every now and again, but he’s clearly more enthusiastic about exploring the Castro and thereabouts.
The movie’s depiction of the still-freewheeling Haight-Ashbury neighborhood (“Baby, it’s no longer the summer of love,” his drug-dealing quasi-landlady advises him) puts across the exhilaration of liberated, out-of-the-closet living. By the same token, Steve, played with sympathy and warmth by Scoot McNairy, can be a wildly irresponsible parent. (Although he’s commendably honest, and does not duck the question when Alysia asks, “Dad? Why do you only have boyfriends, and never girlfriends?”) When AIDS descends on the neighborhood, Alysia, a college student in France (and now played by Emilia Jones of “CODA”), is compelled to come home and care for him. As he starts his inexorable fade, he encourages his daughter to start writing herself.
The movie is a product of its milieu, produced by Sofia Coppola under the aegis of American Zoetrope, a company started in San Francisco. This moving film’s sense of hometown pride is subtle but apt.
Fairyland
Rated R for themes, language. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters.
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