Bear with me. We’ve got to do a bit of defining.

Hard choices are those that you know are going to cause problems in your life but, because you also know in your heart they are right, you make them anyway.

Simplistic, but keep on bearing with me.

I got into this seemingly simplistic line of thought while watching an offbeat movie. Low-budget, minimal production values, poor sound, 16 mm film, unknown actors. But a script with occasional flashes of good writing and more than a few challenging plot set-ups. What especially caught and held my attention was how, at various critical moments in the narrative, the writer/director, together with the editor, persisted in making the hard choices. Repeatedly he’d go to some pains to nudge the story in a certain direction where you thought you knew what the characters would (predictably) do—and then have them—convincingly but surprisingly—make the hard choice.

And he continued to do so right up to the last frame.

The result was a movie that, given the production limits, had no right to turn into anything approaching what might be called "art", wound up being just that.

As I watched the final credits I had to conclude the movie worked—and worked powerfully—for that one reason. Picking the hard choices instead of the easy ones.

Here’s the framework:

The two main characters are both more or less suicidal. As the movie starts, one, a cineaste-writer has just learned he’s HIV-positive. The other is a Los Angeles street hustler. They meet ugly right after the hustler has shot three tough guys bent on beating him up.

As the movie follows their relationship, which develops slowly from a one-night stand into a romanticized fantasy of love and finally into—against all odds—the real thing, we are presented with a series of situations of the kind where smart young directors on the make make the easy choices because they know that’s how to get ahead: Please the audience.

Or as an earlier era had it: Vox populi, vox dei ("the voice of the audience is the voice of God").

The violent deeds of the hustler finally force the pair to make the great American decision. They choose the road and set out cross-country, going, in the best American tradition of the road, nowhere and everywhere.

(The few reviews of the movie always mention that it’s a kind of gay "Thelma and Louise." The director preemptively takes care of that canard early in the movie when one of our guys encounters a couple of Lesbians also on the run; the resulting scene is a dead-on deflation of the fluff-balloon that was "Thelma and Louise.")

Again and again life hits the two characters in the face, and the director runs smack up against a possible easy choice. Surely this time, we think, the hustler is going to learn something and become a better person and stop shooting people. Surely this time, we think, the cineaste-writer is going to learn something and drop his shell of irony and stop keeping people at an emotional distance.

But no, again and again—and wholly believably (it’s LIFE, ferchrissake)—we see them both keep on keeping on making the same mistakes.

The two characters persist in making the easy choices (as most of us do most of the time) and the director doesn’t flinch once from showing them in all their all-too-human frailty.

And we watching very slow learn what the two characters are forced, against all odds, to learn and accept: Their only hope for joy and beauty and a semblance of salvation is the hardest of all choices: in each other.

Their finally hardest choices toward which the whole movie has been forcing them are:
   1) life over death, and
   2) each other over aloneness.

Up until the very last frames it’s far from clear how they will choose.

And even when they’ve made their choices and the credits roll, you’re left pondering: OK, they did that. But what next?

Great dramatic art builds a pyramid of choices made by the characters, reaching a climax—the peak, if you will—where all choices have been removed except one. And even that one, once made, only enriches the ambiguity of the serpentine path that has led to that climax.

Think Hamlet, Oedipus, Willy Loman, Jett Rink, Roy Cohn.

So too with our guys in this small, overlooked movie. What their story may lack in the grandeur of Shakespeare or Sophocles, it carries the cinematic day as an unflinching portrayal of a gay Estragon and Vladimir marooned finally with each other on the edge of the continent. Or, as the director put it in less pretentious terms, "It’s like a Hope/Crosby movie in which Crosby fucks Hope."

The movie? "The Living End," written and directed by Gregg Araki.