Eight friends spend three weekends in the country over the course of a summer as they explore their sometimes conflicting attitudes about love, sex, friendship, life, and death in this screen adaptation of Terrence McNally's award-winning play. Gregory Mitchell (Stephen Bogardus) is a successful choreographer whose skills as a dancer have begun to decay as he slips into middle age. He has a handsome summer home in Upstate New York which he shares with his lover Bobby Brahms (
Justin Kirk). Gregory and Bobby often invite several of their friends to join them for holiday weekends: Perry Sellars (Stephen Spinella) and Arthur Rape (
John Benjamin Hickey) are a pair of yuppies (complete with a Volvo) who have been a couple for 14 years (as Perry jokes, "We're role models -- it's very stressful"). John Jeckyll (
John Glover), a musician and composer with a short temper and a witheringly bitter sense of humor, arrives with his latest boyfriend, Ramon Fornos (Randy Becker), a good-looking dancer who often suffers the wrath of John's foul mood. Buzz Hauser (
Jason Alexander) is a witty and flamboyant enthusiast of the Broadway theater who describes his greatest fear as a production of
The King and I starring Tommy Tune and
Elaine Stritch; he's also HIV-positive, though he stubbornly refuses to discuss his condition with his friends. And John's twin brother James Jeckyll (also played by John Glover) is his brother's polar opposite, a kind and forgiving soul who is now living with AIDS. Love! Valour! Compassion! was directed by
Joe Mantello, who also directed the original New York stage production; this film also reunites the show's New York cast, with the exception of
Jason Alexander, who stepped into the role created by
Nathan Lane. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide