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It's amazing how quickly the gay zeitgeist changes. By the time this Terrence McNally adaptation hit theaters in 1997, the reality of the AIDS epidemic had been forever altered by the advent of the triple cocktail. And a mere five years later, in the the post-Ellen, post-Will & Grace, gays-everywhere era, even the film's low-key political subtext seems like an '80s anachronism. Yet the enduring strength of Love! Valour! Compassion! is its attention to character, to the complexities of a social set, and to the ways in which chance events can ripple across them, changing everything. Full of fine performances from the well-oiled Broadway cast (with Jason Alexander ably subbing for the absent Nathan Lane), the film doesn't exactly break free from its stage incarnation. But, boxed-in as it is, the film's characters seem real, and the simple push and pull of their interlocking friendships keeps the action moving. A willfully affirming answer to the self-hatred of The Boys in the Band a few decades earlier, the film does tend to wear its heart on its sleeve. But its fine performances, economical setting, and mournful warmth mark it as a superior effort -- superior not only to all those endless, by-the-books coming-out stories, but also to the slew of comedies that followed it in the separate subgenre of scripts that deal with the complexities of gay middle age.