Alan Cumming Makes the Festival Work (Any Day Now)

Alan Cumming's performance in Any Day now at the PS Film Festival enthralled the audience.

Frequently at film festivals, there is one star who offers an performance so emotional and heartfelt that audiences pack the theater show after show, leaving no seat unfilled, in essence pulling the festival together so that it leaps to success. To be sure, a fine script and good supporting actors assist in making the star of the film the brightest among dozens of international films. The bright star in the 2013 Palm Springs International Film Festival appears to be Alan Cumming.

Cumming's performance in Any Day Now reveals a Palm Springs International Film Festival coming to life, matching its audience's pathos and humor--an actor in a film that paints a clear picture of the human rights struggles in the 70s that people today might have either forgotten or were not old enough to experience and that makes any kind of references to sexual orientation mute and all references to "family" potent. When it comes down to doing the right thing, Cumming's character Rudy transforms from a male diva to a concerned parent of "his child," a disabled kid, Marco, with Downs Syndrome whose number one problem is his dysfunctional mother. 

The film illustrates that mother isn't always best, especially when she's gone down a road that transforms her to a human drug consumption machine whose intellect is so dulled it couldn't make the cut of an unruly family pet.

Cumming's performance, nothing less than stunning, is well-balanced to the goody-two-shoes partner played by Garret Dillahunt, both of whom brought a story about an innocent boy who came together with two guys to make one sweet family home.