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Movies & TV

Inside Out Review: Limited Partnership

LIMITED PARTNERSHIP (Thomas G. Miller, U.S.). 74 minutes. Tuesday (May 26), 5:15 pm, TIFF 1. Rating: NNN


After meeting in an L.A. bar called the Closet in 1971, Tony Sullivan and Richard Adams were married in Colorado in 1975, their licence to wed granted by Boulder county clerk Clela Rorex, a women’s rights activist who decided she wasn’t willing to deny equal rights to same-sex couples.

Though the marriage was legal, Adams’s Australian citizenship triggered a different battle when the Immigration and Naturalization Service denied his spousal right to a green card on the most hateful of terms, officially declaring that a bona fide marital relationship was impossible “between two faggots.”

That statement – and its chilling implications for Sullivan and Adams’s hopes to stay together – haunts Limited Partnership, which tracks their relationship over four decades.

Director Thomas G. Miller steers us through the bittersweet story by underscoring every moment with generically wistful or bouncy music and shuttling us through time with ostentatious animated graphics, but playing it formally safe doesn’t take the edge off the real pain these two men have endured just for loving one another.  

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