The Normal Heart (2014)

 

This HBO movie aired last night, and I was as hopeful as I was apprehensive.  I knew about its source, Larry Kramer’s 1985 play, and I was looking forward to seeing a fine Hollywood cast perform this story of the early fight against HIV.  At the same time, Ryan Murphy’s attachment gave me pause – my experience with Glee, The New Normal, and Pretty/Handsome has shown me that Murphy’s work tends to be a mix of outrageous, heartfelt, and preachy.  While certain characters, moments, or threads resonate, the overall effect is often messy and/or aggravating.

 

So I guess it’s good that Murphy only directs this TV film, and Kramer himself adapts his largely-autobiographical play.  It’s very “play-ish” in that it’s incredibly talky and each major character gets at least one big “spotlight” speech.  Fortunately, I liked that when it’s done well, and it’s mostly done well here.  The story is told with urgency, confusion, and heartbreak.  When the play was written, it was coming directly from the trenches in the midst of the crisis, and that allows the film to seize its viewer in a way that historical pictures don’t always manage.

 

In The Normal Heart, writer Ned Weeks is enlisted by an overwhelmed doctor to spread the word about the “gay cancer” that keeps appearing in her examination room.  Ned forms the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a group committed to educating the community, lobbying for research funds, and helping the dying.  As the disease tears its way through people in Ned’s life, he grows increasingly angry and desperate at the country’s seeming indifference.

 

I’m most fascinated, not by Ned’s crusade, but by the conflicts that arise between him and his own activist group.  Some of Ned’s practices – publically calling out politicians, insisting that everyone comes out, and urging total abstinence until more is known about HIV – don’t sit well with his more moderate collaborators.  They fear that his strong-arming and scare tactics won’t get them what they need, that he’s giving their important cause a bad name.  Though Ned argues that people are dying and there isn’t time to play nice, his associates aren’t simply weak-willed fence-sitters without stomachs for the fight.  They have valid points as well; they won’t get funding by alienating the politicians who can help them, and, for an oppressed group that’s been taught by the majority to be ashamed of their “unnatural” love, telling them they’ll die if they have sex could prove irreparable.  (Interesting that the idea of using protecting is barely offered as an alternative.  Omitted to maximize the conflict, or the product of a different time?)

 

Mark Ruffalo, after wowing me with his Bruce Banner in The Avengers, does a great job with Ned.  He’s a man combusting, someone appalled to see an epidemic met with apathy.  Julia Roberts plays the doctor crusading alongside him, and Matt Bomer is highly affecting as Ned’s boyfriend.  Among Ned’s fellow activists, Joe Mantello (who I actually know best from directing Wicked on Broadway, but he’s fantastic here) and Jim Parsons (that’s right – Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory as a sweet but stubborn campaigner) are standouts.  The film also features Jonathan Groff (third time Murphy’s cast him, wow!) and Alfred Molina.

 

Warnings

 

Language (including homophobic slurs,) sexual content (including nudity and sex scenes,) some drinking, and hard-to-watch depictions of the effects of AIDS.