1999: Tina Holmes in "Edge of Seventeen"
Wednesday, June 5, 2024 at 8:00AM by Nick Taylor
Hello, strangers! Did you miss my supporting actress write-ups? With no smackdown to latch onto like a gay barnacle, I’ll be hopping onto our 10|25|50|75|100 anniversary format to look back on supporting actressing feats of years past. For those keeping track at home, this means I’ll be writing up performances from films released in the US in 2014, 1999, 1974, and 1949 (technically I could also do 1924, but I think that’s less likely). If you would like to see the whole list of films and performances I'm considering for this series and a longer run-down of it, click here! The dream is to post these corresponding to months of release, or, barring that, themed categories based on what month it is. Like how June is gay Pride month, meaning I can write about queer films and queer actresses all month long! Broader schedules hopefully mean more wiggle room to write about as many films as I like!
For my first entry in this series, I’m immediately going to take advantage of that US release calendar for Tina Holmes's indelible performance in David Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen . . . .
The film debuted at the San Francisco LGBT Film Festival in 1998 before hitting TIFF the next summer and receiving a theatrical release in May of 1999. Edge of Seventeen follows Eric Hunter (Chris Stafford, cute as a button) living in Sandusky, Ohio in 1984. He’s a high schooler enjoying his summer before senior year, a summer that will mostly be spent working in the food court of the Crystal Shores fairground. The job is lame as hell, emblematized by drabbly patterned uniforms that might as well be alternating brown paint swatches, but the people he’s working with turn out to be a great crew to be stuck with in the trenches for three months. Among the standout members of this crew are supervisor and proud dyke Angie (Lea DeLaria), and hunky, bleach-blond OSU student Rod (Andersen Gabrych).
The most important of Eric’s coworkers is Maggie, played by Ms. Holmes with remarkable poise, good nature, and melancholy. Maggie is Eric’s best friend, and has been harboring a crush on him for some time. She’s clearly besotted with him, pining away in a non-demonstrative key that still has everyone assuming they’re already dating. Eric knows about it too, and though he values their friendship tremendously, he reacts to her romantic and sexual interests almost experimentally. He’s still trying to figure out who and what he’s attracted to, and making out with her is as good a test-case as anything else. Stafford and Holmes play the different dimensions of their friendship gorgeously, inhabiting so many dynamics through body language alone, never mind the candor exhibited in their line readings and expressions. Edge of Seventeen gets a lot of mileage from showing Maggie’s camaraderie and social ease in the first half of the film. She’s a good person and a great friend, someone who’s really treasuring the people she’s with and the memories she’s making before going off to college.
This changes, however, when Eric finally makes it with Rod and comes to terms with the fact that he likes guys, news he excitedly shares with Maggie. Holmes plays this interaction so delicately, balancing Maggie’s conflicting impulses between supportive friend and heartbroken almost-girlfriend. She smiles, she hugs Eric, she even offers a sentiment that she’s suspected something in the back of her head for a while now - which might be true, given how observant she’s been with other aspects of their lives. But there’s a palpable sense of confusion underneath her line readings that comes across as Maggie trying to bandage her own wounds. She’s on the verge of tears from the moment he confesses. In true wallflower fashion, Maggie is trying so very hard not to make this moment about her, and both Moreton and Holmes allow her sadness to define this scene just as much as Eric’s sincere, slightly self-absorbed joy.
One asset of Moreton’s direction is an insistence on longer takes, blocking multiple people in the frame and timing his cuts judiciously. We get to see the chemistry actors conjure in their rapports and their body language. This is especially true for Holmes, who conveys practically molecular shifts in what Maggie is thinking and feeling. There’s a great early scene of Maggie and Eric sitting on his bed together, where the almost-couple tentatively question each other about their kissing experience before practicing together. Moreton directs this perfectly, letting the tension between Eric and Maggie hang in the air and develop at its own pace, while making clear that they’re not always nervous or aroused at the same levels, or for the same reasons. Every flicker of Holmes’s eyes, the intensity and quality of her gaze, the curve of her lips, the ease with which she dresses and undresses in front of her friend, all of it transmits an immediate and active interiority without the actress once coming across as calling attention to her own minimalism.
Another bonus is the distinct refusal to pitch Maggie’s reactions to Eric as homophobic. Eric confessing he’s gay doesn’t nuke their friendship. Maggie stays close to Eric, helping him play around with his style while trying to figure out exactly what to do with this crush she’s had on him for years. His small-town Midwestern ass takes to the waters of punk-edged queerness with real enthusiasm, even as he’s still trying to figure himself out. She honestly seems excited to dye his hair and chop it this way and that, watching her friend blossom into a new person while trying on funky clothes of her own. Does she still seem a bit wounded? Yes, though Moreton and Holmes never use this feeling as an opportunity to vilify Maggie’s pain. Eric is not exonerated for playing with Maggie’s emotions, and Holmes thrives at playing the accrued feelings and heavy decision-making that eventually surround her character.
What does threaten their friendship is Eric’s carelessness with Maggie’s feelings, either using her as an accessory to work out his own uncertain feelings or so caught up in his own hormones that he badly neglects her. The latter happens when Eric invites her to the local gay bar to meet his new friends and re-acquaint herself with Angie in her natural habitat. Maggie walks down the bar’s entrance in one short, uninterrupted shot facing the camera that’s practically as glitzy and anticipatorily stomach-churning as Lorraine Brocco going into the restaurant basement in Goodfellas. She’s excited, she’s distracted by her own outsider status, she’s trying to have a good time and a little too clenched about it for us to feel confident in her chances. We hope for better results than we get, and it’s not the last time Eric will come up short for his best friend. But it was nice while it was there. Right?
Surely part Holmes’s impact has to be credited to smart casting - she radiates a patina of warmth, able to slide between sunniness and disappointment so easily and so poignantly. Yet we always understand Maggie’s characterization as a feat of acting, indebted in part to generous direction but very much the result of Holmes’s sensitive interpretation. Edge of Seventeen as a whole is a feat of generosity and craft. It’s genuinely interested in being a colorful, emotionally wise film about a kid in Sandusky, Ohio in 1984, and from color palette to music selection to set and costume design, it specifies and reflects those intentions beautifully. Holmes isn’t the only reason to see this film, but her still-waters-run-deep approach to embodying a normal teen going through life might be its very best reason. She’s one of many, many supporting actress performances from 1999 connecting to queer cinema, and for my money she might well be the cream of the crop.
Edge of Seventeen is currently streaming on Kanopy in the US and is available to rent on most major platforms.
Reader Comments (4)
Am I alone in thinking she almost completely ruined the final season of Six Feet Under? Not sure the writers needed to turn Nate into even more of an asshole, but her Maggie just made me cringe every time she came onscreen -- an unnecessary character, an undermodulated performance.
please do the late great jessica campbell from election during pride month - "it's not like I'm a lesbian or anything. i'm attracted to the person. it's just that all the people i've been attracted to happen to be girls." [cue: 'jennifer jennifer']
plus it'll make up for you crediting her as trish campbell on your list of alternatives
@par - Thank you for correcting me! 1999 has such a rich trove of queer films/characters/actresses to pick from, yet I'm equally torn between diving fully into that year and hopping between different years and going "queer people have always been around!!!!", though if I don't get to Campbell now I may save her for later. After all, this is an election year. Could be even timelier in November.
Thank you for this wonderful blog post! I've been a frequent visitor on this blog but this post officially made me sign up to be able to engage in the comments section. I really enjoyed this film when I watched it in 2020 for the first time, the woes of how getting older doesn't quite live up to what one thinks it'll be was shown beautifully in this film and also any fresh out the closet gay man's fears of exploring the culture and being gay. I really enjoy Tina Holmes's performance and the final moment where Maggie is once again heartbroken just stays with you. Seriously though, where is Tina Holmes these days? Also anyone got an update on what Chris Stafford and Andersen Gabrych are up to these days? I hope there can be some kind of an anniversary reunion with these three just to hear about their experiences making this movie.