Outside WGA Theater – Screening of The Normal Heart starts at 9 PM tonight!
Inside the WGA Theater, audience awaits!
MONDAY, MAY 19 2014 EVENT
HBO PREMIERE OF “THE NORMAL HEART”
Location @ The WGA Theater 135 South Doheny, Beverly Hills
Attending Talent Ryan Murphy Executive Producer Matt Bomer as Felix Turner Taylor Kitsch as Bruce Niles Jim Parsons as Tommy Boatwright RSVP’s Jaimie Alexander Wille Garson Niecy Nash Scott Bakula Brad Goreski Evan Peters Kathy Bates Lyn Greene Jennifer Salt Annette Bening Georgia King Scott Speedman Alex Borstein Linda Klein Lea Thompson Craig Chester Jennifer Jason Leigh Anna Torv Frances Conroy Jane Lynch Jenna Ushkowitz Tim DeKay Laurie Metcalf Constance Zimmer
THREE OF HEARTSTalk about a handsome trio! Jim Parsons, Matt Bomer and Taylor Kitsch buddy up for the premiere of their HBO film The Normal Heart at the Writers Guild Theatre in Beverly Hills on Monday.Credit: Jason Kempin/GettyPublished: Tuesday May 20, 2014 | 01:00 PM EDT
It will also have a second screening in Los Angeles area on Wednesday, May 21, 2014 at The LACMA Film Club 5905 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles CA 90036 tel 323 857-6000 publicinfo@lacma.org
Thank you Terrible Waitress at the FanForum site for giving us the English translation:
Hollywood’s most unusual star
Kaley Cuoco
It is quite possible that you don’t know this extraordinary blonde – this will change very soon!
The list is endless – ‘Harry Potter’ star Emma Watson, ‘Twilight’-heroine Kristen Stewart, even Oscar winner Angelina Jolie stand out. All have one wish: to snatch at any cost the lead role in the bestseller adaptation ’50 Shades of Grey’. But the film producers wanted just one for the major role: Kaley Cuoco. She rejected the quite cool super offer with “boring soft porn stuff, not interested”.
Who is this woman who has no interested in a guaranteed mega blockbuster? For her 18th birthday she had breast augmentation and openly says it was “the best decision I have ever made”. She is blonde! She is hot! She is extremely funny! These are the most common statements when Hollywood aficionados talk about Kaley Cuoco. Without these, the hit series “The Big Bang Theory” would not be so successful. Since 2003 Kaley, as the waitress Penny (for $3m per season) twisted the heads of four quirky physics geniuses, making for top TV-rating – and makes “The Big Bang Theory” the most popular comedy series in America. It’s not only on internet forums that Kaley Cuoco is exuberantly raved about – Tom Cruise desperately wants her for “Top Gun 2” and Tom Hanks wants to work with her in comedies. The coveted “Peoples Choice Awards 2014” just crowned her mega career.
In all countries, Kaley Cuoco is surprisingly popular – and secretly snapped away the lead role from comedy queen Jennifer Aniston in “The Wedding Ringer”. The film premieres in January 2015 and is already considered a great romantic hit. “Hollywood needs a new Meg Ryan, and that is me!” explains Kaley Cuoco, positive. She can expect top offers for the next ten years – with payment of $20m and more per film.
Celebrity parties and red carpets Kaley Cuoco avoids: “it only stirs the envy of the competition”. She adopted 3 pit bulls from the city shelter to make her free time more exciting, and on December 31st 2013, married tennis star Ryan Sweeting. And while she speaks in interviews of “a common animal farm and children”, she already has her next career move in sight – Cameron Diaz admits with her slanted comedy hit “The Damaged Girlfriends”, with a sequel already decided in Hollywood – with Kaley Cuoco in the lead role.
Pic 1: No girlfriends – but three pit bulls! All come from the shelter.
Pic 2: In “The Big Bang Theory” they are the on-off couple Penny and Leonard (Johnny Galecki)
Pic 3: Kaley is a good jumper. With her horse Thor, they landed a ranked place in a tournament.
Kaley’s Men
Popular – for two years, Kaley Cuoco was with “The Big Bang Theory” co-star Johnny Galecki until 2009. She says “it took a minute and some awkwardness” of this.
In 2012 she flirts with Ashton Kutcher and Hollywood listens as Kaley has had girlfriend Mila Kunis reporting something??? ( sorry I have no idea what it said there) 2013, she begins a brushing with Superman star Henry Cavill, their overnight romance of 10 days fizzling out as “no matter where we went he stole the show”.
In December 2013, she married the tennis star Ryan Sweeting. His dowry: a 50 million dollar fortune.
I got an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Boston University this weekend. BU is the alma mater of Nina Tassler, one of my bosses at CBS, and it was a great honor to not only receive the degree, but I also gave the convocation address at the School of Fine Arts. The School of Fine Arts includes graduates with degrees in music, theater, and the visual arts.
My Macca-friend and his wife drove up from New York to be with me for the weekend, and I had my first ever totally Shabbat-observant hotel experience. This involved the front desk letting us into our rooms rather than us using electronic card keys, taking the stairs rather than the elevator everywhere we went (including a Graduate Women In Science and Engineering luncheon which was on the ninth floor of a campus building), and making kiddush and HaMotzi (the blessing for bread) in our hotel rooms.
It was a very fun weekend and it was also very emotional. Speaking for the graduate women in science and engineering was a particularly interesting part of the weekend, with me sharing my experience about gender bias and misogyny in academia and them nodding along in agreement, to the astonishment of some of the older professors who couldn’t believe that kind of stuff still goes on!
Here are some photos of the highlights of the weekend.
Here is the stadium with 20,000 people for commencement where I actually got my degree.
Here is my view from the stage.
Here is me in my BU robe with my UCLA regalia which is blue velvet (BU’s regalia, which I got at commencement, is cardinal and white with a black velvet tam).
Here is me and my Macca-friend. (He is not a Maccabeat anymore, he graduated, but he still lets me call him that anyway.)
Here is me one seat away from Mr. Bill Cosby who also got an honorary degree. And for the record, he had no clue who I was. But that’s cool. “Blossom” premiered after “The Cosby Show” in its last year, but he’s a busy guy. He doesn’t have to know who I am! It was a HUGE honor to meet him!
And, yes, fellow Kveller Carla Naumburg and I hung out, and this lake near her house made me want to move to Boston!
Congratulations to all of the graduates from BU and elsewhere. Go and transform the world!
Published on May 19, 2014
My friend and client, Kaley Cuoco, was kind enough to be my first guest on my new series of videos, Show Me Your Boudoir.
In this series I’m going to take you in the private quarters of some of the coolest people in TV, Music, Film and Fashion as we find out their favorite beauty products, personal items and little tips on keeping a super cool Boudoir. Come with me on this fun celebrity filled adventure!
Published:5:29 pm EDT, May 15, 2014| Updated:2:30 pm EDT, May 16, 2014 By Angela Barbuti
With the end of Season 7 already here, let’s take a look at what’s ahead for the next season of The Big Bang Theory.
We can be sure that the lovable nerds will be faced with many challenges and have each other there for support.
Here’s what we can expect in Season 8.
1. Sheldon Has Left Town — But Not the Show
At the end of Season 7, we find Sheldon at a crossroads.
He cannot take the news of his roommate’s pending nuptials, so he’s at the train station, ready to leave town.
Leonard lets him go, and he definitely leaves.
Jim Parsons told TV Line, “He gets the hell out of there and I have no idea where he’s going or what he’s planning. I won’t know until I come back and read the first episode [of Season 8].”
The actor continued to say:
It was very interesting to read it for the first time and then to play the final episode because it really gets at the crux of something that is perhaps his defining characteristic as a character on television — which is his resistance to change. If you look at it through that lens, so many of the things he does, the things he says, the places he sits, etc, have everything to do with the fact that this is the way it’s done, this is the right way to do it and this has served him fairly well as a human. They’ve got him in a situation now, the writers do, where it’s not possible to carry on without some of these changes.
2. We Might Get Our First Look at Penny’s Mom
It’s official, the pair is finally engaged!
Kaley Cuoco has been rooting to see a wedding in the couple’s future. In an interview with CBS, shown above, she said, “To me, I think Lenny is meant to be.”
As far as wedding planning goes, we hope to see the entire gang in the wedding party.
Penny’s mom is one of the only parents we haven’t met yet, along with Stuart’s mom.
On the last episode of Season 7, we see Penny on the phone with her mother, telling her the good news.
Could that mean that we will finally see Penny’s mother?
Cuoco has mentioned that she already knows who she’d want to play her.
“My ideal mother would be Lisa Kudrow. I just think she should play my mother. I have this idea that she had me when she was really young,” she said.
3. We’ll See More of Emily
TV Line reported that Laura Spencer will return as Raj’s love interest, Emily.
The actress is also on Bones, but executive producer Steve Molaro assures us she will return.
He told The Hollywood Reporter, “She will be continuing on in some form, yes. I don’t have much of a clue about Season 8 yet, but she will be around.”
He also told TV Line that her other series will not affect her return:
We are aware [of her Bones role], and they are aware that we are using her, too. … I’m sure it will be one of those things where we can work it out, scheduling-wise, and it’ll all be OK.
4. More Will Be Revealed About Howard’s Mother
Mrs. Wolowitz’s health issues are a lot for Bernadette and Howard to take.
“Coming up, she’s going to need a little more health care than she has been needing and as a good son and daughter-in-law, that is going to fall on their shoulders to some extent,” Molaro said.
E News reported that her new health aide will reveal things about Howard’s usually hidden mother:
In this season’s penultimate episode, we’ll be introduced to Marta, the woman in charge of tending to Mrs. Wolowitz’s each and every need. We’re not going to give everything away, but let’s just say that by the end of the episode, you’ll be writing thank you notes to Marta for what she reveals.
5. The Cast Has Much More to Tell
None of the cast members seem to be going anywhere.
Kaley Cuoco told CBS This Morning:
We’ve all actually have said recently we feel like we have so many more stories to tell. We’ve got years left in us. We don’t want it to do be done. I wish it would last forever.
Oprah did an article recently in her magazine about body types and the best clothes for them and we have included the whole article below. Melissa is the third actress in this article. Enjoy!
The Most Flattering Clothes—And Hairstyle—For Your Body
In fashion, as in life, it’s always best to stay true to yourself, and that means knowing what makes your figure look smashing. A few gorgeous, talented women are here to show you how it’s done.
Jane Lynch, 53
Body Type: Tall
At six feet, Lynch, who plays scheming Sue Sylvester on Glee and hosts Hollywood Game Night, says finding clothes that fit is quite the challenge. “Darts are always too high,” she says, “and the knee is never where it’s supposed to be.” Lynch favors menswear-inspired pants and jackets. “If I find something that fits, it’s usually a designer’s mistake, and I can never get it again.”
What She Knows Works for Sure
Gap extra-long jeans, bold cuffs from jewelry designer Alexis Bittar (“I don’t wear a lot of jewelry, so I like to make a statement”), black Elie Tahari slim bootcut pants, and for shoes black suede two-and-a-half-inch Miu Miu pumps. “I know this sounds so lesbian, but I like a sturdy heel.”
O Creative Director Adam Glassman’s Take
A vibrant Black Halo Eve gown shows off Lynch’s arms; the plunging neckline is sexy without being over-the-top.
If you’re tall…
Look for horizontal details—stripes, belts, waist-length jackets and ankle-strap shoes—to counteract a beanpole look. If you find an item you like, buy it in multiples.
Check out these websites:
US.LongTallSally.com
AnnTaylor.com
If you have larger feet, as many tall women do, Nordstrom.com carries up to size 14.
Dress, Black Halo Eve, $850. Earrings, Max and Chloe. Necklace, Lele Sadoughi. Bracelet, Dina Mackney. Shoes, SJP. Top Notes: Chic, Short and Touseled
Los Angeles hair guru Ken Paves made sure all our celebrities’ styles were in perfect proportion.
Ken Says…
“Just because you’re statuesque doesn’t mean you can’t be feminine and even delicate. You can have a fun, flirty cut. All you need is to add movement and texture.”
Balancing Act
Ken enhanced the width of Lynch’s cool, cropped haircut. “I added volume at the sides because she has broad shoulders,” he says. He applied Kérastase Lift Vertige root lift gel to Lynch’s wet hair, then held her hair straight up and hit the roots with a blow-dryer. When he finished, Lynch’s hair was spiking in every direction—so Ken smoothed it with a vent brush and a blow-dryer for effortless-looking results.
Shirt, Thomas Pink, $195. Bracelet, Alexis Bittar. Tights, Donna Karan. Shoes, Christian Louboutin.
Rutina Wesley, 35
Body Type: Athletic
Wesley says her personal style isn’t so different from that of her True Blood alter-ego, strong-willed vampire Tara, who is partial to body-conscious, edgy pieces like corsets and ankle boots. “I have a lot of input in choosing her wardrobe, and I’ve learned to wear things that accentuate my muscles but in a feminine way,” says Wesley, an avid runner and Pilates fan. “My arms, especially, can look bulky in the wrong top, so I’ll wear one with sleeves instead of a tank.”
What She Knows Works for Sure
Giuseppe Zanotti wedge sneakers and J Brand jeans. “They fit my curves well, and I can get into them without too much shimmying.”
O Creative Director Adam Glassman’s Take
Feminine pieces in flowy fabrics soften an athletic frame.
If you’re athletic…
Wear halter styles—they draw attention away from broad shoulders and toward the face.
Try longer sleeves like three-quarter or elbow length; they slim muscular upper arms.
Check out these websites:
IssaLondon.com
LisetteL.com
CloverCanyon.com
Top Notes: Smooth and Flowing
Ken Says…
“Simply styled, luxuriant hair beautifully contrasts with an athletic body.”
Balancing Act
Ken layered Wesley’s hair throughout to give it movement and a soft shape. Afterward, he worked Unite U Luxury D Frizz oil through her dry hair in sections from the midshaft to the ends. Then he went over it with a warm blow-dryer to help the hair absorb the oil, followed by a shot of cool air to lock it in. “Oil is good for keeping thick hair soft and swingy,” he says. Finally, Ken used a two-inch curling iron all over to add a bit of wave.
“When you’re going for luxurious, it’s all about fluidity—and keeping everything incredibly soft.”
Dress, DKNY, $395. Necklace, Pluma.
Melissa Rauch, 33
Body Type: Busty and Petite
“I used to wear extremely baggy clothes—lots of jeans and oversize sweaters,” says the 4’11” Rauch, who plays microbiologist Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz on The Big Bang Theory. “But a few years ago I realized that the tailor is my friend. Pretty much everything I buy needs to be altered: I sometimes go up a size in tops and have them taken in under the chest. I also shop in the junior section a lot and at Forever 21.”
What She Knows Works for Sure
Bleulab reversible jeans, Margi Kent shapewear, dresses by Rebecca Minkoff, BCBG (“They really pay attention to waistlines”), and Rubin Singer for red-carpet events.
O Creative Director Adam Glassman’s Take
A busty woman looks best in a top that fits her chest rather than hiding it. Opt for a sleek scoop or V-neck like this Boss shirt—boxy shapes and crewnecks will make you appear bigger. More details to look for when choosing a top: darting and a forgiving fabric.
If you’re busty…
Besides having a tailor on speed dial, you can build your look from the inside out—the right bra goes a long way to creating tasteful cleavage. Accessorize with scarves and long necklaces. They establish a vertical line that will elongate your shape.
Check out these websites:
The-Shirt.com
EssentialCami.com
Store.MyIntimacy.com
Beauty Bit
To avoid an over-the-top bombshell look, complement your voluptuousness with minimal makeup but full, lush—and sexy—black lashes, courtesy of CK One Color Volumizing Mascara ($18; Ulta.com).
“I’m learning how to dress for my new body shape,” says Amurri Martino, who is expecting her first child this summer. “People say you can wear your regular clothes, but it’s not true! Everything has to be longer, especially shirts. And I prefer to wear things that are tight around my growing belly so I can show off my shape.”
What She Knows Works for Sure
Asos’s maternity line (“They have really cool jeans and faux-leather leggings”), anything by Tory Burch. “Her pieces are feminine and pulled together, but not too girly,” says the actress, who teams up with her mom, Susan Sarandon, in the upcoming movie Mother’s Day.
O Creative Director Adam Glassman’s Take
Look for stretch fabrics that will accommodate your changing silhouette. And resist the urge to hide in oversize clothes—they’ll make you look frumpy. Sleek pieces (like this Elizabeth and James skirt) are more flattering.
If you’re pregnant…
Don’t cover up luminous skin. It’s okay to flaunt lovely shoulders and décolletage.
Stick to neutrals or richer shades—they’re more becoming than brights or metallics.
Check out these websites:
DestinationMaternity.com
IsabellaOliver.com
HatchCollection.com
Beauty Bit
Play up your pregnancy glow with a rosy cream blush, such as Guerlain Météorites Bubble Blush in Pink ($42; Dillards.com), dabbed on the apples of your cheeks.
Jacket, Ann Taylor, $198. Top, Sportmax, $425. Skirt, Elizabeth and James, $365. Jewelry, her own.
Christina Milan, 32
Body Type: Petite
At 5’2″, actress and singer Milian (current single: “Video Model” featuring Lil Wayne) is always on the hunt for perfectly proportioned clothes. “I can’t wear anything baggy; pants are always too long,” she says. “I usually shorten dresses to show more leg, but I try not to go too far—I don’t want to have to watch my butt every ten seconds.” Her easiest fix for too-long garments? “I roll up my jeans, boyfriend-style, or I just wear heels.”
What She Knows Works for Sure
Wedge sneakers, 7 For All Mankind jeans, leather pieces from Alexander Wang, anything from NastyGal.com. “And a great Louis Vuitton shoe dresses up everything,” she says.
O Creative Director Adam Glassman’s Take
A petite woman doesn’t have to stick to solids. Just choose small prints so the pattern doesn’t swamp your frame. Cropped lengths, like these Nicole Miller Artelier designer pants, and heels in a color that matches your skin tone visually elongate the leg.
If you’re petite…
Accessorize with small, delicate pieces. Bold jewelry can look too big on petites.
Choose strappy, skin-baring heels. They’re more leg lengthening than pumps.
Check out these websites:
JCrew.com
BananaRepublic.com
AllisonIzu.com
Jacket, Cut25 by Yigal Azrouel, $495. Shirt, Ann Taylor, $89. Pants, Nicole Miller Artelier, $235. Earrings, Stephanie Kantis. Bracelet, Lulu Frost. Shoes, Manolo Blahnik.
Top Notes: Wavy and Sleek
Ken Says…
“When you’re petite, hair that’s too long—like waist-length—really makes you appear shorter.”
Balancing Act
Ken cut four inches off Milian’s hair, until it came just to her bra strap, and added layers, so her style wouldn’t visually weigh her down. Then he worked Kérastase Touche Finale shine serum through her dry hair. To prevent Milian’s style from getting overly full, Ken used a one-inch curling iron from the midsection almost to the ends. “By minimizing volume,” he says, “I gave Christina a vertical silhouette that helped create an illusion of height.”
“Dark, heavy hair tends to overwhelm a petite woman. Try a lighter tone.”
Dress, DKNY, $395.
Bellamy Young, 44
Body Type: Curvy
“I have a small waist, big thighs and a big booty, which I’ve come to adore,” says Young, who plays Scandal’s feisty first lady Mellie Grant. “Tailoring is everything. I need clothes nipped in at the waist and looser in the thighs and hips. I have my skirts narrowed at the knee. I’m 44, so I don’t wear anything too short.”
What She Knows Works for Sure
Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses (“DVF changed the way curvy girls live! The dresses are simple but super sexy”), Hudson jeans, pieces by Michael Kors.
O Creative Director Adam Glassman’s Take
A woman blessed with an hourglass shape looks best in curve-skimming styles. This Badgley Mischka dress cinches Young’s middle, and the wrap-look top plays up her beautiful form.
If you’re curvy…
Keep hemlines around the knee to prevent an outfit from getting too va-va-voom.
Choose structured looks. Don’t let your small waist get lost in something flowy.
Check out these websites:
ColdwaterCreek.com
Shoshanna.com
DVF.com
Dress, Badgley Mischka, $525. Bracelets on right arm, from top: Charm bracelet, Lulu Frost. Bracelet, Bauble Bar. Earrings, Heather Benjamin. Bracelet on left arm, Rachel Zoe. Shoes, Chelsea Paris.
Top Notes: Full and Bouncy
Ken Says…
“A shapely woman shouldn’t let her hair grow too much past her shoulders. You want to see her curves!”
Balancing Act
“Being a Southern girl,” Ken says, “Bellamy really likes big hair”—which, happily, looks just right with her voluptuous shape. He sprayed Phyto Phytovolume Actif on her roots, then set it with a blow-dryer. Next Ken took random medium-size sections and curled them with a one-and-a-half-inch curling iron. To finish, he had Young shake her head upside down as he misted her style with L’Oréal Paris Elnett Hairspray to give it body.
“Big hair today is not yesterday’s pageant hair. It’s beautifully textured volume and movement.”
Dress, Reiss, $370. Multicolored stone ring, A Peace Treaty. Flower ring, Tory Burch. Shoes, Rene Caovilla.
Yvette Nicole Brown, 42
Body Type: Full-Figured
“My style is defined by comfort,” says Brown, who plays the outspoken Shirley Bennett on Community. “I like clothes I don’t have to pull or tug on. I want to be able to walk when I’m 80, so no stiletto heels—I wear them on the red carpet only till the photos are taken, then I switch to flats. I like dolman sleeves because you can’t tell where you end and the fabric begins. And I’m in a battle royal with Adam Glassman over harem pants, because I love them and he does not. Harem pants are like a dolman top for your bottom.”
What She Knows Works for Sure
Pencil skirts (“They’re perfect for the curvy girl because they hug the hips and taper to the knee, so your bottom half doesn’t look like a big mass of body”), Lane Bryant’s Cacique bras, NYDJ jeans and V-neck tops (“I used to not let the girls see sunlight, but a V lifts them up”).
O Creative Director Adam Glassman’s Take
A full-figured woman needs to make sure she doesn’t fall into the boxy top, boxy bottom trap. Instead, wear formfitting pieces like this Christopher Fischer knit top and Eloquii pencil skirt. Nicholas Kirkwood wedge heels add height without discomfort.
If you’re full-figured…
Embellishments are not your friend. Skip ruffles and frills in favor of simpler pieces.
Invest in a good bra and shapewear, so you have a sleek foundation for your look.
Check out these websites:
Eloquii.com
LaneBryant.com
ASOS.com
Beauty Bit
Even no-fuss types can appreciate the pulled-together effect of a well-groomed brow. Dolce & Gabbana Shaping Eyebrow Pencil ($45; SaksFifthAvenue.com) enhances your arches in a flash.
Sweater, Christopher Fischer, $198. Skirt, Eloquii, $68. Bracelet, Rivka Friedman. Earrings, Alexis Bittar. Shoes, Nicholas Kirkwood.
Maria Menounos, 35
Body Type: Pear
Slim on top with curves at the hip…the Extra host, Suave spokeswoman and star of the reality show Chasing Maria Menounos definitely knows what works (and doesn’t) for her figure. “I’m never going to wear a sheath dress—that’s for Kate Bosworth or Kate Moss,” says Menounos, author of the upcoming book The EveryGirl’s Guide to Diet and Fitness, which details her past struggles with weight: She lost 40 pounds she had gained in college and has kept it off through careful eating and regular exercise. “I need something fitted at the waist with an A-line skirt. Shoulder pads are good for balancing hips. That, or a lot of pulldowns at the gym!”
What She Knows Works for Sure
Michael Kors and Dolce & Gabbana are among her favorite designers, as well as American Eagle Outfitters, Lucky Brand and J Brand for jeans. As for shoes, Menounos says she’s “allergic to platforms,” but loves wedges and stilettos.
O Creative Director Adam Glassman’s Take
An outfit that’s sleek on top and flirty on the bottom—like this Sandro dress—looks fantastic on a pear-shaped woman. Trumpet and A-line skirts are more flattering than pencil styles.
If you’re pear-shaped…
Keep hems above the knee or higher. Shorter skirts lengthen the leg.
Consider boatneck tops and cap sleeves to counteract wide hips.
Check out these websites:
NicandZoe.com
PinkTartan.com
ModCloth.com
Beauty Bit
A shiny pink lip gloss in the same color family as a vibrant red dress can be easier to pull off than a dramatic scarlet lip shade. Try YSL Gloss Volupté in No. 15 Grenade Pépite ($32; YSLBeautyUS.com).
There are going to be reviews coming out on The Normal Heart Film and so for your convenience we will be placing the reviews we come across in this blog message. We will not be biased and include all opinions. Please check back for new reviews to be added. We will place newer reviews first. Here is a spoiler-free review of ‘The Normal Heart’ for those who don’t wish to be spoiled: http://www.yourentertainmentcorner.com/spoiler-free-advance-review-of-hbos-the-normal-heart/
Click on the link of your publication review of choice:
The Normal Heart Review By Nathaniel R, Towlerroad May 26, 2014
It’s time for that other most-famous AIDS play to have its moment in the television sun. Larry Kramer’s “THE NORMAL HEART,” arrived Off Broadway in 1985, a half decade or so before Tony Kushner’s long since canonized “Angels in America,” but it’s taken a longer and more circuitous route to mainstream fame. It’s HBO to the rescue again with a television adaptation, which, as with the fate of Angels, came on the heels of a long gestating but never-meant-to-be movie version. (Barbra Streisand tried for years to mount a film version of The Normal Heart giving herself the plum role of Emma Brookner a.k.a. ‘Doctor Death’)
Though it rarely does Kramer’s ‘Heart’ any favors to compare it to the later masterwork, it’s hard not to. They’re linked in time structure, setting, historical record, and now in HBO incarnations. Think of The Normal Heart as Angels in America’s angrier cruder earth-bound cousin. It doesn’t bother with symbolism, poetry or spirituality – whether that’s through lack of ability, desire, or bilious rejection of the escapist side of the fantastical who can say? Instead, it finds its power in fragile bodies and righteous rage in the face of mundane defeats and every day humiliations.
Which is why it’s a little surprising at first to begin with the elemental: the open air, the sun and a glide over the water (supertitle: “1981”) as we head to Fire Island…
We’re on a ferry with Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo as Larry Kramer’s surrogate protagonist) and his friends. Most notably in these early scenes, that’s All American blonde beauty Bruce (Taylor Kitsch) and his boyfriend Craig (Jonathan Groff). We even get a god’s eye view or two when Craig collapses on the beach, violently ill for reasons none of the friends can initially fathom but for that “gay cancer” we see Ned reading about.
The Fire Island intro is surely an attempt to ‘open the play up’ which often happens when filmmakers bring famous plays to the screen but it works against the movie at first, since the material collects it power through its avalanche of claustrophobic scenes of men fighting in tiny rooms, apartments, offices and hospitals. Movies are often better at showing then telling, but in this case, let them tell. The Normal Heart’s power is not in its grand vision but in its testament. Its power comes from the shrinking suffocation of a tight knit community. To Kramer’s credit, The Normal Heart shows both the good and the ugly of communities in crisis who are just as likely to turn on as support each other. We see both and simultaneously, too –that’s just how people are.
One of the most effective threads in The Normal Heart is the confusion and betrayal the characters feel and argue about regarding their own sexual behavior. The very thing that they had to claim for themselves in an unfriendly society and the very thing that liberated them (sex) they’re suddenly told may destroy them.
As a time capsule and polemic, The Normal Heart is absolutely essential, and as play, at least, it is blisteringly angry. It’s hard to imagine just how potent it must have felt in 1985 when people couldn’t even bring themselves to say the word “AIDS” (as President Reagan wouldn’t for years), but here was this stage play shouting it out over and over again. Time has not necessarily dulled its power. The recent revival on Broadway was so popular that it surely led to this movie. But as a television movie it’s a somewhat mixed bag. It’s oddly paced, for one, both rushed (montage!) and slow to build. Some scenes in the play felt like stacked weights falling heavily on top of one another, and it was just crushing to watch. One of the most volatile scenes, when Ned is fired by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which he co-founded, should have the weight of the inevitable but because we’ve been distracted by the falling-in love sequences with Felix Turner (Matt Bomer, doing beautiful romantic work) it seems to come from out of the blue. Mark Ruffalo is great in that particular scene, and captures the obstinate charisma of the self-aggrandizing role (Larry Kramer’s play is, at least in part, about how awesome and loveably “difficult” Larry Kramer is!). But honestly I think Ruffalo pushes a bit to make it “gay”… something that Taylor Kitsch, for example, doesn’t do. Kitsch doesn’t absolutely destroy your heart like Lee Pace did on stage during Bruce’s final horrific monologue about a dead lover but he’s quite good. While we’re on that topic of straight actors playing gay, can we congratulate this movie for actually casting gay actors in at least some of the gay roles. That shouldn’t be so rare.
In one of The Normal Heart’s best scenes, a complete nervous breakdown in motion occurs when Mickey (Joe Mantello, who played Ned Weeks on Broadway) lashes out at Ned before the celibate peacemaker Tommy intervenes. Jim Parsons, wonderfully reprising his Broadway role, gets one of the play’s best, truest, funniest, and saddest lines when Tommy figures that they’re all suffering from “Bereavement Overload”.
But, then, The Normal Heart is always at its best when it completely loses its decorum and turns hysterical. Which is why Ryan Murphy, who we can all surely agree is prone to excess, seemed like either a dangerous choice or a special one in the director’s chair. Turns out this is his most restrained outing but restraint is a really weird fit. The material stubbornly sparks back to life here and there anyway, as in the paper flinging monologue from “Doctor Death” (Julia Roberts, low-key and grim throughout) when a government board won’t fund her AIDS research or Ned’s rants when he feels he’s been disrespected (which is roughly all the time; he’s a handful) and especially in Ned’s ultimatums with his brother Ben (Alfred Molina is fine as the not-quite-evolved-enough sibling).
Still for all its uneveneness as a movie — turns out it’s hard to bottle lightning — there’s absolutely no denying the emotional and prescient force of its finale; an impromptu wedding that earns all the tears. Every drop. As a time capsule and polemic, the play is nothing less than essential; a crude and angry screaming into the void, despairing that there’s no one listening. Here, then, an irony and great justice. 29 years later, the voices might be quieter, but people continue to lean in and really hear them.
The Normal Heart premiered last night on HBO with encore presentations coming. You can also probably watch it right this second on HBOGO. Expect Emmy nominations as one of the last high profile shows out of the gate (the eligibility cut-off date is next Saturday so we’ll discuss the Emmys then).
The Normal Heart Review By Jordan Adler May 26, 2014
In the most arresting moment from the 2012 documentary How to Survive a Plague, playwright and activist Larry Kramer observes the squabbling between the members of ACT UP, a coalition that pressed for more government testing of drugs for AIDS victims. In the middle of the shouting, Kramer stands up and yells, with vitriol, “Plague! We are in the middle of a plague!” Instantly, the furor in the room subsides.
Kramer was known as a fierce, furious, iconoclastic personality who had been fighting on behalf of the virus originally deemed the “gay cancer” in the early 1980s. His views were far from mainstream, and although his rage-filled attacks toward government on evening talk shows inflamed an audience, he soldiered on. Kramer’s most remarkable artistic achievement was his 1985 Off-Broadway play, The Normal Heart, which was as angry and sanctimonious as him.
Now, The Normal Heart is a powerfully acted and fiercely polemical drama that aired on HBO on May 25. (It is the second gay-themed movie in a row to premiere on Memorial Day weekend on the cable network, after 2013′s Behind the Candelabra.) To bring his play to film form, Kramer wrote the screenplay and expanded the story for an extra 30 minutes. Even if The Normal Heart lacks the urgency of the show when it first premiered – in the mid-1980s, Regan had not yet mentioned the AIDS virus, despite the tens of thousands of deaths from the disease by that year – it is still a moving and infuriating drama.
It is well known that Kramer’s play is quasi-autobiographical. The character of Ned Weeks, who Mark Ruffalo portrays in the film adaptation, is a Kramer surrogate, short-tempered and passionate. When the film opens in 1981, he is visiting a gay slice of paradise. Nude men tan on poolside chairs and engage in orgies on the docks of the beach. Ned is turned off by the excessive sex he sees, explaining to one character that the promiscuity of proud gay men makes love something that is hard to find.
However, during his stay on the beachside all-male oasis, a young man named Craig Donner (Frozen’s Jonathan Groff) collapses in the sun. When he blows his birthday candles in the next scene, Craig has a hard time extinguishing them through his coughs. Weeks later, he is dead, one of the first victims of the AIDS virus. Ned visits his doctor, sardonic polio sufferer Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts), who tells him that she keeps seeing more men with purple splotches on their skin come into her office. “I’ve never seen or heard anything like this,” she says, adding that this virus only seems to be happening in gay men. However, when Ned and Dr. Brookner organize a meeting to bring awareness to New York’s lively gay community, the message for gay men to stop having sex is ignored.
Failing to preach to his choir, Ned turns to activism and forms the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a small advocacy group hoping to push government into funding research that may be able to find a cure for this spreading disease. In opposition to the iconoclastic Ned is Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch), a handsome but closeted homosexual who can use his charm to entice followers to join the group. Ned also tries to get New York Times columnist Felix Turner (Matt Bomer) to give the virus some news coverage. Felix laments that it would be hard to print a story about the disease in its infancy, but soon starts seeing Ned. In the meantime, Ned sees little traction: the mayor’s office does not return his calls and his wealthy lawyer brother Ben (Alfred Molina) hesitates to donate a dime.
The Normal Heart is not just an essential document of a mostly forgotten chapter of modern American history, but offers many career-best performances. At the helm is Ruffalo, who despite playing The Incredible Hulk has never been more acerbically angry. The role gives the actor the opportunity to shout in derision, but it is far from a boisterous portrayal. His reaction to the quickly shifting tide of disease around him, which he swallows up with a pained look that rests almost permanently on his furrowed face, spurs to venomous disgust when others in his social group are content to keep quiet and take a more subtle approach. It is a raw and unnerving performance, with Ruffalo capturing Ned’s (and Kramer’s) volcanic energy and capacity for grief.
Bomer and Kitsch, two pretty young actors whose best roles have been on TV (White Collar and Friday Night Lights), are excellent as Weeks’ affectionate but emotionally affected gay pals. Another television star, Jim Parsons, plays Tommy Boatwright, a supporting player of the advocacy group who has the gumption but is trying to find the guts to raise awareness. (Parsons also played the role in a Tony-winning 2011 revival.) Except for a gruelling, gripping funeral speech, where he comments about how he saves the Rolodex cards of his friends who die, Parsons is too stoic for this tempest.
Meanwhile, Roberts has never been so bitter on the screen, a performance that makes her swallow her A-list pride and grow a face and voice of steel, getting more enraged as the cases pile up. The biggest scene-stealer, however, is Joe Mantello, a Tony-winning director and actor who rarely appears on film (he did play Ned in the 2011 revival, though). Mantello grabs the mic as Mickey Marcus in one scene and launches into a seething, riveting speech that shakes Ned to the core, after months of stagnant process for the group.
The Normal Heart is an angry and determined film about a gay subject, so it is little surprise that Ryan Murphy (the polarizing creator of Glee and American Horror Story) directs. What he lacks in filmmaking finesse – the fragmented editing during the various collapses of the AIDS-inflicted characters is too busy and distracts from the serious subject matter – he gains in bringing measured performances from the ensemble. Sometimes the anger comes out in the choppy editing, when it should be coming from the writing and performances. Still, the pacing rarely lags, and despite the various high-pitched monologues from Ned and company, Murphy also knows when to tone it down and move the audience. When the camera finally rests on the performances, The Normal Heart becomes riveting.
In the film’s finest scene, during an AIDS fundraiser, Murphy focuses on a twirling, shimmering disco ball as gay couples dance beneath it. Groups of men bustle out on the floor, while sick people stand to the side, looking solid despite the knowledge that the last remnants of their life are slipping away. When Murphy focuses on the kaleidoscopic rainbow of the disco ball, the energy and the emotion – those dancing and those watching on the side – blend together. A choir’s song soars through the air in this moment, bringing weight to what has been a pointed drama so far.
The Normal Heart brandishes its heart on its sleeve. It is also the fourth major film in four years – after the docs We Were Here and How to Survive a Plague, and the Oscar-winning Dallas Buyers Club – to focus on the difficult early days of the AIDS crisis. As incendiary and emotionally devastating as the subject matter is, Murphy’s adaptation pales somewhat in comparison with the fire of Plague and the poignancy of We Were Here. Regardless, the film looks at the heyday of the epidemic with astounding clarity, if not exactly the explosive urgency that Kramer’s play had in the mid-1980s.
The Normal Heart is not as powerful as Kramer’s incendiary play, but it is still too passionate and potently acted to miss.
3.5 out of 4 Rating
“The Normal Heart” Bears Witness to The Early days of the AIDS Crisis By Brian Juergens May 26, 2014
On the eve of Memorial Day – a day of remembrance for those lost in battle – HBO aired AIDS drama The Normal Heart, complete with an ad campaign that played to the idea that the early days of the AIDS crisis was a “war” (posters all over New York City read, “To win a war, you have to start one.”). The piece, which began its life three decades ago as a stark, confessional, furious play by AIDS activist Larry Kramer, arrived on screen with considerable fanfare thanks to the participation of Kramer (he wrote the screenplay), director Ryan Murphy (the controversial creative mind behind such buzzy shows as Glee, American Horror Story and Nip/Tuck), and Hollywood luminaries like Julia Roberts, Mark Ruffalo, and Brad Pitt (whose Plan B production company produced the film). While the resulting film may itself be a bit scattershot, it is worth stepping back and remembering that The Normal Heart is, above all else, a memorial to the millions of men and women we have lost to the disease, and a tribute to those who were first to fight this battle. This is a story that needed and needs to be told.
Ruffalo plays Ned Weeks (a character based on Kramer himself), a man who feels out-of-step with the gay community’s politics and values yet is connected with nearly everyone in the neighborhood on a personal level. When he starts to notice commonalities in the deaths of gay men to a new form of “gay cancer”, he tries to organize the gay community to both stop the spread of the disease (of which they know virtually nothing) and to lobby both the local and federal government and the medical community for research funding, information, and support. He joins forces with polio survivor and pioneering AIDS researcher Dr. Emma Brookner (Roberts), handsome and charismatic former Green Beret Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch), and Tommy Boatwright (Jim Parsons), a sassy but sweet hospital administrator, and tries to get a New York Times style writer named Felix Turner (Matt Bomer) to help sneak more stories of the strange new illness into the paper.
Weeks encounters opposition everywhere he turns, be it the assistant to Mayor Ed Koch (whom Weeks also insists is a closeted gay man), his own well-meaning but misguided brother, Ben (Alfred Molina), or the West Village gay community, which has just found its footing on a platform of sexual expression and is unwilling to take Dr. Brookner’s advice to “just cool it” until they learn more about how the disease is spread.
Much of Kramer’s original stage play is preserved, and makes for many of the movie’s best scenes. It’s monolog-heavy, with each of the central characters getting his or her big speech, and the text is forceful and unfussy. Parsons – whose character has little to do for much of the film other than stand on the sidelines looking forlorn – delivers a simple, quietly furious eulogy late in the film that brilliantly distills his character’s feeling of hopelessness. It’s one of the film’s best moments, paralleled nicely by a jaw-dropping scene where the character played by Joe Mantello (who played Ned in the recent Broadway revival, alongside Parsons) suffers a frenzied panic attack in the Gay Men’s Health Crisis office.
But there are many moments where the choices feel jarringly wrong. In the play, Bruce recounts in a harrowing monologue the story of his lover’s death while visiting his mother in Phoenix, and the humiliating lengths gone to in order to preserve his remains. Here we see the events in a rushed, clumsy flashback that robs much of the power from Bruce’s telling of the story. Many of the film’s somber moments feel precariously close to tipping into camp, and several sequences – a bizarre subway nightmare, a gay bathhouse commercial, and the bizarrely-edited opening scene where Jonathan Groff collapses on a Fire Island beach, to name a few – feel stylistically like they would be more at home on American Horror Story. Scenes that seem to function primarily as reminders of how garish the ’80s were feel out-of-sync with the human story that lives beneath the hideous outfits.
But Heart does dig deep to unearth lots of truths about gay politics, about shame, about internalized homophobia, and about the harsh realities of how the world responded, or failed to respond, to the early days of the crisis. And in the end, the film’s biggest success might be its central love story, which is anchored by solid, subtle, and committed performances by Bomer and Ruffalo. The film is able to take its time with these two men, and by the time tragedy inevitably strikes, their relationship feels lived-in and real. The film is loaded with so much loss that it’s almost numbing – but the ending still manages to cut to the bone.
With his tendency for melodrama and the delight he seems to take in making viewers uncomfortable, Ryan Murphy is an odd choice to bring this story to the screen – and the resulting film is uneven and at times heavy-handed. But he’s also the only guy in 30 years who could get the movie made at all. I’ll gladly take this flawed but occasionally beautiful Normal Heart over no Normal Heart at all.
HBO’s ‘The Normal Heart’, Matt Bomer, Mark Ruffalo Emmy-Worthy Performances, A Reminder of Darkness in Ignorance, Highlight Hollywood News May 26, 2014
Matt Ruffalo’s performance in HBO’s “The Normal Heart” topped what is already a career known for high-points. Matt Bomer was better in this than anything before. And he’s also an extraordinary actor. A film HBO was able to produce, after decades of icons such as Barbra Streisand attempting to get it done, Ryan Murphy really captured the essence that was the fear in the 1980s, of a mysterious death cutting down men in their prime, and a nation, one-half hysterical in fear, and the other, including government at the highest levels, apathetic. This film captured it all in its entirety.
“The Normal Heart” was a rousing call to action, designed to carry the American public out of their ignorance, complacency and seats to demand justice, and funding, for all.
Now, after years of languishing in development purgatory, it has been turned into a film. Directed by Ryan Murphy, who worked with Kramer on the adaptation, and featuring a remarkable cast that includes Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer, Julia Roberts, Alfred Molina and Jim Parsons, “The Normal Heart” debuts Sunday night on HBO.
It is a moment of fury and grace and wonder that this “Heart,” in which a brutally specific story is deftly re-tailored for another medium and time, loses none of its original passion or pointedness. Where the play sought to make the personal political, this “Normal Heart” steps back enough to make room for characters to develop as fully as the message. The political comes full circle and is personal once again.
The film opens on Fire Island, where Weeks is clearly uncomfortable with the summer bacchanal, and not just because he (like Kramer) has written a book criticizing the post-Stonewall gay movement for focusing so exclusively on sex. He is just not into it. The sun is shining, the music’s playing, the boys are beautiful and it is difficult not to see Weeks’ bleak outlook as prophetic. For soon many of these beautiful men will start dying.
Which they do, to the seeming consternation of no one save Dr. Emma Brookner ( Roberts, reminding us that she doesn’t have to own the story to own the screen). A polio survivor now bound to a wheelchair, Brookner understands the fatal flukes of disease. When she realizes that it is only gay men who are dying from illnesses that their bodies should have easily fought off, she seeks a leader to rally the gay community into a program of abstinence and education.
Weeks does what he can, which is not all that much. In saying what is obvious — that this is an epidemic, which the authorities and potential victims should do everything they can to end — he is met with doubt, silence and resentment.
Officials don’t want to hear it, and neither do gay men who fought so hard to achieve sexual freedom. As with any whistle-blower or prophet, Weeks is told that change takes time and diplomacy works better than demands. Which Kramer does not seem to accept any more now than he did then. That was very telling.
What Murphy did with this film is give the right balance of “hysteria” with the real-life ignorance that Americans embodied in a dark-era, where ultimately it took decades to move the public opinion away from disgrace and hatred and into acceptance and realism. It was a Civil Rights-like plight, and the only thing that changed the nation’s general psyche of not-accepting was this crisis and this scourge called HIV and AIDS crossing over into mainstream America.
The American people lived with racism after the end of slavery for 100-years. It was the evil of the Klan deciding that mainstream white America was also their target before they realized the plight of Blacks and Jews would be visited upon them. That’s when America even though half-heartedly took action. That’s what it took in the 1980s, and there’s a new generation of Americans, who now know what that was like, before they were even born.
‘The Normal Heart’: A Disaster Film About AIDS? By Melissa L. 5/26/14 11:20 AM
The Normal Heart starts like any other disaster movie — situation normal until it’s very f’d up. The long-awaited film adaptation of Larry Kramer’s searing play of love and loss in the time of AIDS, made by Glee and American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy aired on HBO and, while not perfect, it is definitely worth watching.
The film begins in 1981, at the start of the summer season on Fire Island. There’s a bacchanalian party, one man’s persistent cough and a few inexplicable sarcomas that won’t go away. Then, rising like the monster in Cloverfield, the disease moves from man to man, decimating an entire generation in its wake.
As the “gay cancer” spreads, perplexing the medical and gay communities, Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo), an activist and writer, who draws much from Kramer’s biography, meets with Dr. Emma Brookner (a poorly cast Julia Roberts), a doctor paralyzed by polio — another virus that was defeated by science — who lights a fire under Ned’s feet. When, Weeks’s friend (played by Looking star Jonathan Groff) collapses, frothing at the mouth, seizing and dying, the fire catches.
Dr. Brookner suspects the “cancer” is sexually transmitted and she wants Weeks to help spread the word in the gay community. “Where’s this big mouth I hear you’ve got?” she asks him. “Is a big mouth a symptom?” he retorts. “No,” she says. “It’s the cure.”
Weeks soon puts his big mouth to work, hoping to bully New York City, the White House, anyone, into helping stop the spread of the still-unnamed disease that is laying waste to his community. When he realizes that no one will help them, he fights harder, confounded by the Kafkaesque inadequacy of the government, as absent as the entire population in 28 Days Later. He helps found the Gay Men’s Health Crisis group, begging for change on the streets to fund research, all in between memorial services. “We’re losing an entire generation, young men at their beginning, just gone,” said Tommy Boatwright (Jim Parsons), delivering a eulogy at yet another memorial service. Tommy collects the Rolodex cards of his friends who have died of the virus, and they stack up quickly, multiplying over the course of the film as a visual reminder of the virus’s body count.
In many ways, The Normal Heart is a horror story — bodies fall at a vicious clip, felled by an invisible assailant on garbage-strewn streets. It’s like they are battling Predator with no weapons, but their voices. The intensity of the horror is compounded by the fact that no one is coming to help. While in Cloverfield, the military quickly moves in to isolate the monster, in The Normal Heart, the victims fight alone, while the world watches. It’s the true story behind The Running Man, but there is no winner who goes back to his family.
As his friends die around him, Weeks wages war against everyone, even attempting to out Mayor Koch in the hopes of forcing his hand to fund research or an awareness campaign. “I’m trying to understand why nobody gives a shit that we’re dying!” he roars at his brother (played by Alfred Molina). Every few minutes another dying body shows up at Weeks’s door, another man carries his partner over the hospital’s threshold one final time where nurses refuse to touch the men felled by the mysterious disease. It’s intense and claustrophobic, made even more so by the fact that it’s all based on a too recent history, ripped from the headlines of the memorable past, telling the story of a generation of men that is gone, leaving a gasping hole in their wake.
Weeks’s war becomes even more personal when he falls in love with New York Times reporter Felix Turner (Matt Bomer), who Weeks conscripts into battle, before he succumbs to the diseases let in by the awful virus. While Turner’s big reveal of his disease was easy to predict, it was no less harrowing to watch. Even though it was obvious, when he peeled off his shoe and showed Weeks the sarcoma that appeared on his foot — a centimeter wide death sentence — it was hard not to gasp in horror.
The film is heavy, but it’s easy to forgive Kramer and Murphy for it. Kramer’s play debuted in 1985 as the AIDS crisis was tearing through New York’s gay community and it’s hard to be subtle when alarm bells are ringing. Murphy’s take on the film, with all its frenzied, louring intensity, feels overwhelmingly Dramatic with a capital “D”. One scene finds the recently diagnosed Turner staring at a lesion-ridden man on the subway and it feels like a scene out of Jacob’s Ladder as if the sick man will sprout horns or lunge at him in the shadows. But it’s hard to blame Murphy for making a darkly grim tale that pulls more from his work on American Horror Story than Glee. Kramer’s play requires it — a subtle, quietly desperate film would not be true to the true horror of the source material. Would you watch a light-hearted film version of Stephen King’s The Shining? It’s a frightening story meant as a cautionary tale.
Watch at your own risk, but to not watch the film — or more importantly, learn from it — is an even higher risk.
‘The Normal Heart’ Reviews: Mark Ruffalo and Matt Bomer Are ‘Heartbreaking’ The HIV-AIDS crisis play was a hig on Broadway, but what about HBO Take? By Katie Calacutti, MTV News Staff 5/26/14
Last night, HBO premiered director Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of writer Larry Kramer’s play documenting the rise of the HIV-AIDS crisis in New York City between 1981 and 1984. Mark Ruffalo (who first confirmed his role to MTV in 2010) plays the film’s central character, Ned Weeks, a gay man struggling to rally together support to combat a then-unknown disease rapidly killing members of the gay community.
The star-studded cast also includes Taylor Kitsch as a closeted investment banker, Matt Bomer as Weeks’ lover, Julia Roberts as a wheelchair-bound doctor leading the charge to understand the illness, Alfred Molina as Weeks’ brother, and Jim Parsons as an early supporter. We tuned in and cry-snotted ourselves accordingly, but did critics have as visceral (and tissue-strewn) a reaction?
Read on for our round-up of “The Normal Heart” reviews:
It Should’ve Been a Miniseries
“…Even at two hours and 15 minutes, it’s hard for Murphy and Kramer to cram in all the years, tears and politics. Whereas the play could be more direct, a film needs to breath a bit, but this one can’t — it’s a wonder that HBO didn’t make this a miniseries instead.” – Tim Goodman, The Hollywood Reporter
Ruffalo and Bomer Crush It
“Indeed, the casting of these two men alone gives the play new life. Ruffalo is a performer of such depth he could, and did, infuse the Hulk with soul. Meanwhile, Bomer’s fine work on ‘White Collar’ has proved him the actor Hollywood believed for decades could not exist — an openly gay man who can still make women swoon playing a straight lead. Here, the pair are just heartbreaking.” – Mary McNamara, The Los Angeles Times
But Murphy’s Direction is a Smidge Heavy-Handed
“But if you do watch the film, just be aware that every few minutes you may wish that someone — anyone — other than Murphy had directed it. Murphy is a self-indulgent director and not particularly rigorous or disciplined. He serves his own muse, not necessarily the needs of the material, and though it’s a classic, Kramer’s play is also unwieldy and outright clumsy at time.” – Maureen Ryan, The Huffington Post
It Has a Universal Message
“Beyond portraying the dawning horror of AIDS, this is a story broadly about activism and what it takes to make change. Working inside the system or outside the system? Moderation or militancy? Raising sympathy or raising hell?” – James Poniewozik, Time
It’s Also a Story Filled With Hope and Love
“If anger and suffering were all there were to The Normal Heart, watching it would be torture. Luckily, it has heart to match its guts.” – Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture
The Normal Heart Review: 6.7 out of 10 By Jordan Ferguson on May 26,2014
Over the last half decade or so, the name Ryan Murphy has become synonymous with the words “uh oh” in my head. Murphy is quite good at some things, like working with performers or focusing attention on social ills, but he has never met a plot point or melodramatic flourish he couldn’t make less subtle or underline more overtly. The Normal Heart is something of a passion project for the director, who purchased the rights himself and shepherded it to the screen. But there is almost nothing as dangerous to a television project than a passionate Ryan Murphy.
The film, based on the play by Larry Kramer (who adapted his work for the screen), follows Kramer’s stand-in Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo) as he crusades for national attention and assistance during the early years of the AIDS crisis. Ned is a fighter first and everything else a very distant second, a passionate advocate whose unflinching focus and willingness to speak unpopular truths make him both an asset to the cause and a potential hindrance to getting mainstream funding. With the help of a doctor (Julia Roberts) who is treating many of the cases of “gay cancer,” and several other activists (played by Taylor Kitsch, Jim Parsons, and Joe Mantello, among others), Ned fights for a cure, or at least mainstream recognition and support, even as he falls in love with closeted pop culture writer Felix (Matthew Bomer).
The Normal Heart covers an era of the epidemic not often depicted in Hollywood (most AIDS films are set once more about the disease is understood, but this one opens when the first murmurs are being heard, the first diagnoses handed out), but the film is just as much about the political in-fighting within the gay community as it is about the massive loss of life that hollowed it during the 1980’s. When the film opens, Ned has written a book advocating for gay men to be less promiscuous, and when evidence starts to suggest the disease may be sexually transmitted, he is on the front lines of informing his community of a strategy for containment that undermines their very culture and the little freedom they had won from oppression.
This is all deeply powerful stuff, rendered incredibly strongly by the performers. But Murphy’s direction fights the performances, and the excellent script by Kramer (which preserves many of the lengthy, beautifully wrenching monologues from the play in ways that rarely expose their naked theatricality) at every turn. The early scenes are so busy establishing the gay scene pre-AIDS, and at getting us into the meat of the story, that they barely pause to introduce Ned or any of his friends (this becomes an issue later when some of them begin to succumb to the disease. Every time someone is announced dead, I found myself wondering who that was, exactly), and what little introductions we do get are through shoddy exposition about Ned writing against promiscuity or his prior attraction to a man we know is his best friend only because at one point he says “you are my best friend.” Some of these are problems with Kramer’s script, of course. But Murphy likely chose to shoot the Fire Island opening like the bacchanalia he does, and the decision to present a flashback to Ned and Felix’s first meeting as a salacious bath house advertisement is mind-bogglingly off-base and generates the kind of tonal whiplash inherent to most Murphy projects.
Murphy also tends to shoot around some of the most emotional and revealing moments in his film, cutting away from many monologues in way that obscure the performers giving them (both Parsons and Kitsch get great speeches that we virtually do not see them deliver in favor of montages that detract from the emotions of the scenes), and shooting some climactic emotional moments so that the style (or lack thereof) trumps the actual feelings he should be evincing. When a character collapses in the streets, Murphy shoots it in Dutch angle from a great distance, as if he wanted us to feel alienated or removed from the events, even as it is clear we are supposed to be deeply invested in what is going on.
It is easy to be down on The Normal Heart for what it isn’t, but there are many things it gets absolutely right. The film tells a moving story of a difficult iconoclast fighting a war on two fronts with almost no one at his side. It is full of excellent performances (Ruffalo and Bomer, in particular, are at their best here), and at its heights, it nails the pain, suffering, and heroism of its subjects. You can almost feel the material here fighting with Murphy for a chance to express itself properly, and while he is surely instrumental in the great acting, he also obscures as much as he assists throughout the film. There are hints of greatness throughout The Normal Heart, but they never become much more than traces of a better film hiding beneath the surface of what is often a mediocre melodrama. The writing and the performances elevate the proceedings as much as they can (and that is a lot), but they ultimately lose the struggle to create something more than another uneven Ryan Murphy production, one that is sure to line his shelves with those sweet, sweet miniseries Emmys, and to slowly drift out of the consciousness of everyone who sees it. It’s a message movie where the message is far greater than the movie, a brilliant story told adequately, a movie that is only pretty good when it danced so close to greatness.
‘The Normal Heart’ Review: An All-Star Cast in a Powerful Drama About AIDS By Tom Gliatto May 25, 2014 11:00 PM EDT 4 stars out of 4
The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s angry, urgent, hectoring play – first staged in 1985 and only now arriving as a film in an excellent production directed by Glee creator Ryan Murphy – has the strength of undiluted acid: It breaks down and eats away the insulation, built up over time, that allows us to place the onset of the AIDS crisis in history.
Even though it’s now nearly 30 years old, The Normal Heart (premiering on HBO Sunday at 9 p.m. ET/PT) is not a period piece or a cautionary tale. You are not meant to watch it and think, “Well, this will be useful for the next time.” It’s a bulletin from the front lines, an in-the-moment, heart-stopping report about the terrifying progress of HIV/AIDS as it sweeps through and decimates Manhattan’s gay population.
“Crisis,” in retrospect, was an oddly restrained word for this plague. It suggests policy and control – precisely the things that were absent, according to Kramer, as the political, medical and even gay establishments failed to act with the necessary hard-headed urgency.
There isn’t really much plot beyond the premise – a gay writer named Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo) tries to sound the alarm, both in the gay community and among officials, over the outbreak of a so-called gay cancer – but there isn’t much plot in The Hurt Locker, either. It isn’t necessary. The Normal Heart is polemical at heart. That’s its strength.
Ned and just about everyone else erupts in violent arguments, denunciations, accusations, counteraccusations, diatribes – these are searing, electrifying moments, furiously articulate and delivered with escalating passion by a cast that includes Jim Parsons, Joe Mantello, Denis O’Hare, Matt Bomer, Alfred Molina and (as a doctor who quickly understands the extent and severity of the epidemic) Julia Roberts.
Mantello, in particular, is given what in theatrical terms is a monologue so big – an aria of frustration and fear that ends with a near-physical collapse – that it could play as pure histrionics on the average television screen. But Kramer’s access to the emotions of that place and time are so direct and unfiltered that it works. It’s a pummeling, but a good one.
The only such “big” moment that falters is Roberts’ key scene, in which she’s denied the research funding her patients so desperately need. Roberts can be a daring actress when it comes to showing us a peremptory surliness or hostility – I would say she handily outmaneuvered Meryl Streep in August: Osage County – but here she’s allowed to seem proud of it.
That’s the thing: The characters in The Normal Heart don’t own their anger. It owns them or – Kramer makes no bones about this – it should. It must.
Ryan Murphy Grows Up With the Stunning, Heartbreaking ‘Normal Heart’ The ‘Glee’ creator has made something great, even despite his directorial excesses By Daniel D’Addario Sunday May 25, 2014 1:30 PM MDT
There’s perhaps no genre quite as mixed as the HBO movie. Some are high-quality but seem more apt for box-set gifting on Father’s Day than for actual viewing (“Band of Brothers,” “John Adams”). Some are perfectly fine for a tune-in but seem airily inconsequential, a would-be movie script that didn’t clear the bar for studio funding but, with a star on board, could definitely garner an Emmy (“Phil Spector,” “Game Change,” “Mrs. Harris”). And then some — a select few — take advantage of the intimacy and solitary nature of television viewing in a way that movies, by their nature, cannot.
“The Normal Heart,” airing this Sunday on HBO, is one of those. It’s probably an amateurishly made movie in parts, but that’s beside the point, because it’s great television, and the best movie HBO has broadcast since the similarly sentimental “Mildred Pierce.” For something this watchable and moving, one’s willing to forgive a lot.
The film is an adaptation of Larry Kramer’s play, which was written in the early 1980s and depicts Kramer’s, and others’, own work in the early fight against AIDS, back when the disease was known only as a mysterious gay cancer and when the president, a cosmopolitan Californian with gay friends, refused to speak its name aloud. That the play, and its adaptation, both feature lengthy and sometimes didactic politically minded monologues about gay rights is kind of revelatory. The movie follows one Ned Weeks (played, quite well, by Mark Ruffalo), a fellow we first see declining to doff his shirt at a pre-AIDS Fire Island beach party. Weeks is uncomfortable with other men but very comfortable with the notion of himself — politically, at least — as gay, and quickly becomes involved in a fight that hadn’t previously existed at all.
That Fire Island beach party, which starts the film, presents, at once, the best and worst of “The Normal Heart,” directed at great personal expense by Ryan Murphy after years during which Barbra Streisand, who held the film rights, reportedly refused to move forward. Murphy knows from TV: He has an Emmy for directing “Glee,” and his “American Horror Story” keeps on collecting acolytes. The anarchic, childlike spirit of early “Glee” infuses the opening scene in “The Normal Heart,” in which seemingly throwaway details, tossed off in vamping conversation between Weeks and friends played by Jonathan Groff and Taylor Kitsch, actually convey a great deal. And the luridness of “American Horror Story” rears its head as Groff’s character, amid the idyll, begins to cough, and then collapses; later, Ruffalo’s character happens upon a ménage in the Fire Island woods that looks like some twisted vision of Eden.
It’s through these two sets of skills — “Glee’s” knack for portraying communities coming together, and the “AHS” eye for the horrific — that Murphy makes a credible movie. When he indulges too far, it’s in overselling the terror of his story. To a generation that didn’t live through the AIDS crisis and to a generation that did, the telltale lesions are upsetting for entirely different reasons. They say enough — and two scenes, one in a hospital and another on a subway car, in which the camera careens around and the colors go super-saturated, do far too much to hammer us with the horror of AIDS.
That’s not to say the rest of the movie is subtle. From its obtrusive musical score to its recurring insert shots — of a chest being shaved early on, of a card marking a deceased AIDS patient getting placed in a drawer — “The Normal Heart” is baroque. But it’s earned the right to be, on the basis of its subject matter and of the universally strong quality of its performances. A poorly acted “Normal Heart” would be the worst sort of camp, but the actors’ performances convince us, throughout, that we’re in sure and steady hands, no matter how much the lights and colors change. Insofar as Emmys matter (they don’t), Mark Ruffalo is almost certainly going to win for his performance. It’s not easy to be a prophet, not least when one is running up against perpetual opposition, and Ruffalo shows us a man who’s at once sympathetic and very difficult to live with. Julia Roberts, continuing in her mid-career supporting-actress mode, is fine as a crusading doctor; better still are Matt Bomer, never before allowed a chance to do something as good as his AIDS-stricken lover of Ruffalo’s character, and Jim Parsons, who is as funny as he is in “The Big Bang Theory” but here is able to put his buoyant energy to work against a backdrop of something real.
Last Memorial Day weekend, HBO debuted “Behind the Candelabra,” a studio-quality movie (one that played at Cannes, for heaven’s sake!) that the studios turned down. “Candelabra” was beautifully made and had absolutely nothing to say. “The Normal Heart” would never work as a theatrical movie — it’s, frankly, 20 minutes too long, and not nearly as studiously tasteful in its address of AIDS as the Oscar-bedecked “Dallas Buyers Club,” which portrayed AIDS in the ’80s as a problem that hadn’t been solved just because a straight man hadn’t put his mind to it yet. But I dare the viewer of “The Normal Heart,” whatever its flaws, not to cry during the oddly prescient scene in which Bomer’s and Ruffalo’s characters are unofficially wed. Yes, it’s manipulative, but if “The Normal Heart,” with its flashy cinematic style and accomplished performances, is manipulating you, it’s in the service of memorializing those on the front lines of the AIDS crisis. And that is something worth remembering.
Zap2It
‘The Normal Heart’ Review: Ryan Murphy’s Labor of Love is Unfocused At Times By Sarah Huggins May 25, 2014
HBO Films’ “The Normal Heart” is truly a labor of love. Ryan Murphy directed the TV version and it wouldn’t have gotten made without him. After sitting in development limbo for decades, Murphy put up his own funds for the rights and recruited an all-star cast to fill the roles. His passion for the project is readily apparent.
“The Normal Heart” is an adaptation of the 1985 Larry Kramer play of the same name centered around the early days of the AIDS crisis. The story is loosely based on Kramer’s own experiences as one of the founders of the advocacy group the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. In the story, that role is the character of Ned Weeks, played by Mark Ruffalo. Ned is the biggest champion for the cause out of all his friends, but his passion at times is misconstrued. So much so that his colleagues think he is hindering their fundraising abilities and ultimately decide to part ways. Ruffalo nails the role of the uptight, headstrong Weeks perfectly.
Julia Roberts plays wheelchair-bound polio survivor, Emma, one of the only doctors searching for a cure for the deadly and mysterious “gay cancer.” Roberts comes off slightly cold in the beginning, but opens up in hour two. Rounding out the GMHC are Taylor Kitsch, who you see a side of you’ve never seen in any of his previous work; Jim Parsons, who reprises the role he played in the 2011 Broadway revival; and Joe Mantello, who played Weeks in the stage revival. They are all excellent in their roles and perfectly cast, but it is Matthew Bomer in the role of Felix who captivates you until the very end.
Bomer captures your attention instantly as a closeted pop culture reporter for the New York Times, shines as he and Ned fall in love and blows all the other performances out of the water as he fights for his life.
The actors are the best thing about “The Normal Heart.” While the play is focused and strong, some things get lost in translation in the movie adaptation. Murphy begins the film with a lengthy and lavish trip to Fire Island and then jumps right into a hospital scene where Ned meets Emma. The wouldn’t be bad except that it leaves the viewer without enough knowledge about the characters to get a true feel for them and form the connection needed to stay invested.
The film hits its stride in the second hour, with killer scenes between Ned and his homophobic brother (Alfred Molina) and several touching scenes between Ruffalo and Bomer in key moments, but ultimately the viewer is left wanting more.
“The Normal Heart” airs Sunday, May 25 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO.
Photo/Video credit: HBO Films
Why We Need ‘The Normal Heart’ By Rich Juzwiak May 24, 2014 1:13 PM
“Did you know that it was an openly gay Englishman who’s responsible for winning World War II?” asks Mark Ruffalo’s Ned Weeks during one of many emotional high points in Ryan Murphy’s HBO movie adaptation of The Normal Heart. “His name’s Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans’ Enigma code. After the war was over, he committed suicide because he was so haunted for being gay. Why don’t they teach any of that in schools? A gay man is responsible for winning World War II. If they did maybe he wouldn’t have killed himself and you wouldn’t be so terrified of who you are.”
This summarizes why we need The Normal Heart. We need gay people to tell us gay history because if they don’t, no one else will.
The Normal Heart movie was written by Larry Kramer, the same man who wrote the 1985 play on which it is based. It is an autobiographical account of the early days of AIDS and Kramer’s activism, which involved loudly condemning the pervasive promiscuity that was, for so many in the early ’80s, defining gay male culture, and forming the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the earliest AIDS service organization.
Kramer’s egocentrism is as obvious in Murphy’s film as it is in the play. Ned Weeks is Kramer’s barely fictionalized avatar and the only character who possesses much depth at all. All the rest of the characters file in and out as symbols—the victims, the lovers, the semi-closeted charmer whose great beauty supersedes politics and lands him the role of GMHC president (Taylor Kitsch as Bruce Niles), the guy who finally provides the monologue to explain why gay men were so willing to give up fucking even when it meant certain death (Joe Mantello as Mickey Marcus), the apathetic straights. Ned, like Kramer, is a brilliant hothead, a self-described “asshole” whose conviction and righteousness are thrust in your face at every turn.
“That’s how I want to be remembered: as one of the men who won the war,” says Ruffalo’s Ned in a line that has been altered from the original play for impact and self-righteousness (“That’s how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war,” is how it read originally). And with that, Kramer has written his own obituary. He’s not wrong, and if he didn’t, who would? Kramer’s egocentrism is well-earned and, in fact, crucial. The Normal Heart is as much a tragedy as it is an expression of pride.
When AIDS hit, it hit the gay community and no one cared. Not straight people, and not even a lot of gay people at first (until everyone around them started dropping dead). Major news outlets avoided the topic until it was clear that the disease had potential to ravage heterosexuals, as well, and those stories—in Newsweek, on ABC—focused on straights. As Jim Parsons’ Normal Heart character Tommy Boatwright puts it during a eulogy: “Why are they letting us die? Why is no one helping us? And here’s the truth. Here’s the answer: they just don’t like us.”
We are at a point where compassion for gay people is de rigueur for anyone with a healthy amount of sense, and so now is a good time to revisit The Normal Heart in the form of an event TV movie on a holiday weekend. It’s a good time to witness what was so easily ignored the first time around by mainstream society, which regarded gays as inherently lesser.
It’s a good time for people—any people, gay, straight, or whatever the kids are identifying as these days—to think about the utter horror of a nameless, sourceless killer sweeping in and chewing through an already disenfranchised community. It’s a good time to think about what it would be like if you spent your entire life hating yourself and being hated and then hating yourself more as a result of being hated only to find a group of people that accepted you and made love a possibility…and then started to drop dead, one by one. It’s a good time to think about the strength of gay men, who have been wishfully regarded as weak by the ignorant, and how time and time again, they have saved themselves.
Murphy’s The Normal Heart is regularly weepy and melodramatic, with broad performances from everyone involved (Julia Roberts plays Dr. Emma Brookner like she has placed an actual stick up her ass for the sake of method acting). Its declarative one-liners are so pat they often sound action-movie corny (“We have to do something. No one else will.”). The movie is essentially a Cliff’s Notes of the plague years, and the generality is so palpable it’s practically an aesthetic.
But it works as a 130-minute history lesson, and I think the subject ultimately calls for something as broad as The Normal Heart. When it hit, AIDS was (mostly) inconceivable. As much as any force that humankind has faced in the past century, it was larger than life. It follows that this movie is as well.
Murphy’s Heart zips and lags and zips and lags. It covers several years and lots of political fighting (the GMHC had to practically break down the door to get a meeting with anyone in the office of the mayor, Ed Koch, a shamefully closeted homosexual), but also spends a lot of time driving home Ned’s relationship with Felix (Matt Bomer). These scenes begin to feel repetitive, but this, too, is forgivable—that relationship was doomed by a malevolent force beyond human control. By cultivating that relationship, even in doing something as simple as having Ruffalo and Bomer cuddle on the couch while eating ice cream together, we understand how AIDS made the political personal in the most intimate way.
Even in our age of antiretroviral medication, in which AIDS is no longer considered a death sentence but a chronic ailment, there’s a lot to relate to here. Shame and apathy continue to hinder gay men from joining the fight for total equality. Clear voices that criticize the community, or merely point out its truths, are met with attempts to silence them. There’s a scene early on in The Normal Heart, in a prologue set on Fire Island that wasn’t part of the original play, in which Ned walks down the beach and a bitchy queen calls out to him, “Weeks, you suck. Why do you even come here anymore? We don’t want you.”
Kramer received similar open hostility in the wake of his 1978 novel Faggots, which satirized the wanton promiscuity that Kramer witnessed as a participant in gay male culture. Kramer was roundly criticized for his perceived Puritanism, for giving away gay men’s secrets, for daring to question what so many other gay men did not. Kramer’s words reverberated for years—a sure sign of their power. In 2000’s The Trouble with Normal, Michael Warner describes Kramer as a “ranting moralist” whose rhetoric can be reduced to: “If others are having sex—or too much sex or sex that is too deviant—then those people have every reason to be ashamed.” I don’t think that Warner’s wrong here, and my contemporary views are much more aligned with his than Kramer’s.
And yet, I cannot deny that Kramer was right, especially back then. When a bottom’s mortality is considered during a climactic fisting scene, Faggots predicts an imminent reckoning. That was not an overreaction; it was an appropriate reaction, it turned out just a few years later. Kramer’s early fury at heterosexuals’ apathy about AIDS, as captured in The Normal Heart, was similarly appropriate. As Christopher Bram writes in his history of gay writing, 2012’s Eminent Outlaws:
In terms of what was known about the illness at the time, Kramer was overreacting. Yet he turned out to be right. His sexual anxiety enabled him to see things that others were not yet ready to recognize, just as a color-blind person can see patterns not immediately visible to the color sighted. And his injured pride and loose-cannon temper enabled him to say what others were slow to express. His anger was partly a rhetorical device, but one that put him back in touch with real anger…
Today, gay men’s situation isn’t as dire. Things aren’t perfect—as Kramer rightfully pointed out in this week’s Times profile of him, “We have achieved very little…We have no power in Washington, or anywhere else”—but they’ve gotten much better, and in the process, young gay men have become less considerate of the struggle. The great irony is that were it not for those like Kramer who struggled, the young gay men wouldn’t be able to have that apathy. They might not even be alive to have it.
Gay men today have so many options, due in no small part to the ones who came before us and cleared the path. That so many of the last generation are no longer here has perhaps created more options. Unlike in the heterosexual world’s squeaky clean nuclear family, there is no model to aspire to. You can settle down at 20 and find a way to have kids. You can get married and be open. You can act like an 18-year-old at 50. Other gay guys are going to judge you, sure, but society as a whole still doesn’t have any idea what to do with you and isn’t breathing down your neck with obligation. Historically, gay men have succeeded on their own accord, using self-generated inspiration. If you don’t understand this or feel somewhat deficient in your general knowledge of gay history or just need a refresher, close your apps, put down your phone, watch this fucking movie, and be so grateful that you live the life you do.
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
From Stage to Screen, ‘The Normal Heart’ is Profoundly Disturbing, Heartfelt By John Doyle, May 25, 2014 9:09 AM EDT
One day in January at the TV critics press tour in Los Angeles, Len Amato, president of HBO Films, sounded especially proud as he opened his presentation of a specific and major HBO production.
He said: “In 1981, an unknown disease began to ravage the gay community in New York City. Leaders and bureaucracies on both the local and national level were indifferent to the growing epidemic. In 1985, Larry Kramer debuted his groundbreaking play about those early years of the AIDS crisis, The Normal Heart, detailing the heroic struggle of a handful of people who knew the disease intimately and were determined to do something about it. And almost 30 years later, director Ryan Murphy has brought Larry Kramer’s screenplay The Normal Heart to the screen for HBO.”
Murphy is the co-creator of Glee and American Horror Story. He’s clever, inventive and possibly the best person possible to adapt Kramer’s play. The Normal Heart (Sunday, HBO Canada, 9 p.m.) is angry, heartbreaking, shocking, sometimes overcooked and sometimes poignant. All of those things. This production is also star-studded, with Jim Parsons of The Big Bang Theory in a leading role, along with Mark Ruffalo and Julia Roberts.
This fine film, like the play, is about both the apathy of authorities and the tortured panic in the gay community as AIDS spread. It’s about pain, loss and fighting back. Ruffalo plays the key character Ned Weeks (who represents Kramer himself), a gay man we first meet during one of those bacchanalian romps that still happened in 1981. Soon, we realize the days of romps are ending because, as Weeks realizes, many of his friends are becoming ill, and horrendously so.
Ned visits Dr. Emma Brookner (Roberts), an abrasive figure, wheelchair-bound from childhood polio, who is one of the few New York doctors treating early sufferers of HIV-AIDS. She has a blunt message for him: “I want you to tell gay men to stop having sex.” The reality of HIV is slowly becoming clear to Weeks – it’s spread by sexual contact. But there is no proof of that yet, and gay men are dying. Still, nobody really wants to know: The gay community is paranoid, resistant to change; the medical community is indifferent.
Weeks’ task, he knows, is to set off alarm bells. He is angry, frustrated and full of rage as more men die and New York mayor Ed Koch and the Reagan administration remain unresponsive.
There are a handful of occasions when the movie’s stage origins become clear – angry speeches are made and the drama is far from subtle, though heartfelt. But the main point is crystal clear: The initial panic could have been mitigated, and the establishment response was flavoured with cruelty. The Normal Heart is profoundly disturbing to watch.
Parsons, far from his Sheldon character on Big Bang, is at the emotional core of the drama, playing activist Tommy Boatwright, who’s involved with the Gay Men’s Health Crisis organization. He also played the role on Broadway, and it shows. Although new material has been added, Parsons is utterly at ease in what are some of the film’s most searing scenes.
Back in January at the critic’s tour, Parsons was asked about being an openly gay actor working mainly in mainstream TV. “Am I surprised to be able to be successful and on TV or whatever, a public medium, and be gay at the same time?” he asked back. “No. It’s not that I didn’t think about it, going into this career, but if I’m thinking about it in those terms, I guess I was really only ever anxious about the moment that the conversation would happen, and ‘Is this still a deal?’ It’s a deal. It’s a deal. And then it happened, and the conversation, it was out there as it was, and it was: ‘Well, it’s a deal like anything else, but it was no big deal.’ And that was a relief, you know, because it was no big deal for me, obviously. Not to be general or glib about it, but you don’t think of yourself as bringing gay qualities or straight qualities to a role.”
At that point Julia Roberts interrupted with: “I’m just shocked that you’re gay.” Which brought the house down. And Parsons replied, “Oh, shut up.” It was a light moment in a serious discussion about a serious subject, about death and despair and how, for a time, as The Normal Heart illustrates, nobody cared much.
HeldenFiles: ‘Normal Heart’ tops the week’s viewing By Rich Heldenfels Beacon Journal, Popular Culture Writer May 24, 2014 9:00 PM ET
Rage fuels The Normal Heart and especially its main character, Ned Weeks. It is rage against indifference, rage against fear, rage against inaction, rage against homophobia. And the fury the production conveys should be all too understandable.
Premiering at 9 tonight on HBO, the adaptation of Larry Kramer’s play of the same name looks at the ’80s beginnings of the AIDS epidemic; its effect on gay men, particularly those in New York City; and all the things that were not done even when it was abundantly clear that a plague was on the loose.
While that may sound like ancient history, consider some of the comments made about Michael Sam, or the anti-gay remarks earlier this year by the star of The Bachelor, or the controversies around the Winter Olympics in Russia.
Consider, too, a recent report in the journal Nature that “antipathy towards homosexuality has hampered efforts to curb HIV” in some African countries, and that “because of cultural prejudices, gay people in Africa are often unable to access information on how to protect themselves from HIV, and those who become infected are often denied treatment.”
Then The Normal Heart seems all too current.
It is also for the most part very well done. The director, Ryan Murphy, has a decidedly uneven record in that role (Running With Scissors was almost unwatchable) but manages to succeed with The Normal Heart. Graphic visually and verbally, it has an underlying rawness that moves ever closer to the surface as events unfold.
Yes, the script, adapted by Kramer from his play, has moments when the dialogue is too expository. It is still more often a powerful emotional piece. Then there are the excellent actors at work, starting with Mark Ruffalo as Weeks, the production’s version of Kramer himself. (Many characters are renamed and fictionalized versions of real people — but there is also a good bit of real-name dropping, especially when it comes to institutional villains.)
The list goes on: White Collar’s Matt Bomer as Weeks’ lover, Felix Turner; Jim Parsons of The Big Bang Theory as activist Tommy Boatwright (a role Parsons has also played on Broadway); Friday Night Lights’ Taylor Kitsch as Bruce Niles, a gay man who is far less comfortable with aggressive activism than Weeks; and Julia Roberts as a physician trying to treat the growing number of AIDS patients in her community.
Roberts more than matches Ruffalo in outrage over the epidemic. Bomer is beyond touching. Parsons is stunning with a funeral monologue that is central to the production as a whole. Kitsch ably shows the ambivalence in his character as the counterpoint to Weeks’ certainty. And they all serve a production that needs to be seen, and discussed.
Elsewhere: At 9 p.m. Monday, the History channel premieres The World Wars, a three-night blend of documentary and dramatization to tell the story of “a generation of men who come of age in the trenches of World War I, only to become the leaders of World War II. The lessons they learn on the frontlines shape them as they rise to power — and haunt them as the deadly fighting breaks out again. Some become heroes, forged in courage under fire. Others emerge as the most infamous villains the world has ever seen.” Jeremy Renner narrates. It continues on Tuesday and Wednesday at 9 p.m.
Turner Classic Movies continues its Memorial Day Weekend marathon of military movies today and Monday. Today’s selections include Mister Roberts at noon and No Time for Sergeants at 8 p.m., while Monday brings The Red Badge of Courage at 6 p.m., Sergeant York at 7:30 a.m., Twelve O’Clock High at 8 p.m., The Best Years of Our Lives at 10:30 p.m. and more besides. See http://www.tcm.com for a full list.
A new round of TV programming is upon us, with NBC alone premiering five shows in the days ahead: new seasons of American Ninja Warrior at 8 p.m. Monday and America’s Got Talent at 8 p.m. Tuesday; and series premieres of medical drama The Night Shift at 10 p.m., comedy Undateable at 9 p.m. Thursday, and pirate drama Crossbones at 10 p.m. Friday. I briefly sampled the new shows and, in spite of some intriguing performers (John Malkovich is in Crossbones), none held my interest for long. The Night Shift in particular — with its bright but rules-breaking doctors — made me invoke the 10-minute rule: if by then you have more than five cliches, or no decent hook, I am out.
Fox is also putting on some fresh programming, with new seasons of Masterchef at 8 p.m. Monday and So You Think You Can Dance — a favorite in some parts of the House of Heldenfels — at 8 p.m. Wednesday.
If that is not enough reality TV for you, Lifetime premieres Little Women: LA, about “smart, sexy and funny girlfriends … who all happen to be little people,” at 10 p.m. Tuesday. And WE tv at 9 p.m. Friday offers Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars with Trista and Ryan Sutter from The Bachelorette, JWoww from Jersey Shore with hubby Roger Farley, and others.
And coming Saturday at 8 p.m. to HBO is the 2014 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, three-plus hours of footage from the April event inducting Nirvana, the E Street Band, Hall & Oates, Peter Gabriel, Linda Ronstadt, Cat Stevens, KISS, Brian Epstein and Andrew Loog Oldham.
Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and Ohio.com, including the HeldenFiles Online blog, http://www.ohio.com/blogs/heldenfiles. He is also on Facebook and Twitter. You can contact him at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.
‘The Normal Heart’ and Hope in the Battlefield of AIDS by Michael Musto May 24, 2014
There was a sense of standing together on the precipice, but holding each other aloft by sheer will, conjoined by rage. A giant rollerball was decimating us. We had to push back.
For a lot of the 1980s, I wasn’t the most political gay in the world, spending most of my time at premieres and nightclubs (though celebrating all that in print from a flamboyant gay angle was a political act in itself, I guess.) But suddenly, in 1987, I found myself at an ACT UP meeting, anxious to get inside the fiery new group that had been formed to combat AIDS and its resulting phobias.
I was about to get serious, though typically, my political galvanization came about for relatively superficial reasons. Future gay pundit Michelangelo Signorile and I had been approached by a really hot guy—in a bar—and told about the organization and how vital it was, as it brought the community together to fight the horrific side effects (both physical and social) of the burgeoning epidemic. Well, we thought that guy and his friend were absolutely dreamy, so there we were, hoping for some kind of sexy social event (while also being fraught with despair over what to do about the growing crisis. We weren’t that superficial).
Well, maybe I actually was that superficial. In fact, I vividly remember walking into the meeting expecting to be cheered and asked for autographs! After all, I was a big presence on the club scene, where I couldn’t step in the door without getting photographed and praised. “Why wouldn’t the same thing happen here?” I piggishly wondered, anxious for a whole new scene to conquer. But I was quickly humbled, as AIDS activism trampled over all the glitz and entitlement that pervaded the ‘80s after dark.
The attendees were civil enough, but this get-together wasn’t about schmoozing and mwah-mwahing. These people were furiously fixed on the mission at hand, which was to channel everyone’s rage and funnel it into something loud and productive that could change the global LGBT landscape. As facilitators gave speeches, attendees offered informed comments, and protest plans were made in a furor of expediency, the mood was electrifying, fraught with urgency and tinged with a deeply touching sense that a giant rollerball was decimating the community and we had to push back. As HBO’s adaptation of Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart—airing this Sunday—is being teased: “To win a war, you have to start one.” And these people were armed and in the trenches, ready to toss all sorts of grenades into the air to garner attention and progress.
The Normal Heart actually deals with the period of 1981-84, when the limitations of another group Kramer had been involved in—GMHC—deeply frustrated him, leading to his angry resignation. That eventually prompted him to jumpstart the way more political ACT UP, which wasn’t afraid to target enemies and make them squirm. That group’s creation was one of the first signs of hope in the battlefield of AIDS, the first horrific cases of which were reported in 1981. Back then, the illness was called “gay cancer” and was so unknown that buzz had it you could avoid getting it if you ate healthily and didn’t do Poppers. One of the first cases I knew was Hibiscus, a performer friend who was finding himself short of breath onstage and the next thing was laying in a coma in a hospital, where he died shortly afterwards. Then you’d hear stuff like, “That writer Henry has it.” Then, “That dancer has it. So did his boyfriend. He just died.” Then you’d run into your old friend George and he looked gaunt, grey, and wasting. Obviously he had it.
You’d be so shocked into submission by the growing awfulness that you’d numbly rip up card after card in your Rolodex, praying that this was just some real-life science fiction movie that would end soon so you could return to the mundanities of life. You wanted it to go away, and from the mass media’s lack of coverage, you might think it had, but it kept bubbling up, building, and destroying with a reckless vehemence. As more and more people succumbed to the grotesque symptoms and died in their prime, you were torn between grief, terror, and rage against the Reagan administration, which wasn’t treating this like the massive emergency it clearly was. In fact, they weren’t dealing with it at all.
By time the HIV virus was identified, sex became the devil—a scary prospect that made anyone who dared to make a pass at you seem like a diabolical villain. (This was before any knowledge of safer sex was ingrained in the culture.) On the club scene, people wore increasingly elaborate outfits, and I think the subtext was an attempt to ward off potential suitors. The more outlandish you looked, the less of a sex object you were, and sexuality became suffused into personal expression more than into actual sex as bohemia and the creative arts struggled to stay alive amidst the onslaught.
By 1985, when it was revealed that Rock Hudson was suffering from AIDS, it put a famous face on the illness and added visibility and meaning to it for many. But it was still thought of as a disease for gays and drug addicts, and that meant it was a constant struggle to give it anywhere near the spotlight required. By the time ACT UP came around to deal with the inertia, it seemed like a raging inevitability that hit with the force of a blaze.
Transformed, but still a nightlife/gossip chronicler, my column went schizophrenically from Pee-wee Herman parties and club bashes to ACT UP rallies and back again. In 1988, I spent an ACT UP weekend in Washington D.C., which was an eye-opening experience for both sides. Twelve hundred of us gathered to protest the FDA (urging them to release AIDS meds faster, for one thing), leading to chants, enactments, arrests, and lots of important publicity. There was a sense of standing together on the precipice, but holding each other aloft by sheer will, conjoined by rage. By weekend’s end, I knew I was way more than just a silly queen. ACT UP had changed my life.
The Ryan Murphy-directed version of The Normal Heart captures the dark early days of Kramer’s fury, keeping the heat of the play while opening it up the way a movie has the luxury of doing. The film doesn’t stint on the popping veins (burgeoning activist Ned Weeks—i.e., Kramer—publicly accuses the government of murdering the gay population via willful negligence), but there are also lyrical moments of love and clinging, usually between Weeks and his hot boyfriend, played by Matt Bomer. (Every play by a gay author tends to give the author character a hot boyfriend. But in this case, Bomer is soon covered with lesions and needing to be assured that Ned won’t leave him, as both fall prey to the criminal disinterest around them.)
Throughout the piece, Weeks chastises the politicos, the medical establishment, and the gay community itself—not to mention his own brother—desperate to turn the world on with his frown. His gruff cadences and seething frustrations are well captured by Mark Ruffalo, who even sounds like Larry, and the rest of the ensemble are pretty well cast too. Julia Roberts has the [original] Jennifer Garner role of the compassionate doctor with the guts to face off with the big boys. She brings her August: Osage County dourness to the role and delivers with a socko monologue that’s as close to “show biz” as Kramer ever got. Joe Mantello, who was Ned on Broadway, is brilliant as a GMHC activist who’s trying not to unravel over the fact that his message of empowerment through sexuality might be turning out to be suicidal. And Denis O’Hare—a memorable AIDS villain in Dallas Buyers Club—is a memorable AIDS villain once again. The result may not be as strong as the Broadway version, which seethed with immediacy, but it’s potent stuff that can easily be described as “cry out loud.”
Next up, Murphy is set to direct something dealing with a real horror. Reportedly, he wants to star Lea Michele in a production based on another ex-Streisand vehicle, Funny Girl. Oops, I’m starting to sound like a silly queen again.
TV review: ‘Normal Heart’ puts you at the vanguard of a plague Chris Vognar, Movies 24 May 2014 1:24 PM
In the early ’80s a powerful new virus began infecting and quickly killing gay men. Back then it was called the gay cancer, and it created waves of panic, confusion, fear, guilt and rage.
Larry Kramer was at the epicenter in New York, and his autobiographical play about the early days of the AIDS epidemic, The Normal Heart, premiered off-Broadway in 1985. Now, almost 30 years later, a new movie version will premiere Sunday night on HBO.
The Normal Heart hits hard, even when the excessive monologue riffs betray the film’s stage roots. Every scene is charged with the emotion of the moment, both historical, for the gay community, and personal, for Kramer’s surrogate Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo, whose intensity never falters).
You can see the real Kramer in the Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague, which almost plays like a sequel to The Normal Heart. He’s tenacious, relentless, not interested in political infighting or patient strategy. His people are dying, and he’s in no mood to debate.
Ruffalo taps into this restless spirit. The beginning of the film establishes Ned as an outsider, nervously watching from a distance as his friends drink and grind away the night on Fire Island. Director Ryan Murphy, the creator of Glee and American Horror Story, whisks us through Heart’s setup. We sense the paradise that will soon be lost and the urgency of the crisis to come.
It doesn’t take long for the body count to commence. The Normal Heart doesn’t flinch from the physical ravages of AIDS, the lesions and emaciation and wasting away first diagnosed in the film by a wheelchair-bound doctor (Julia Roberts, effectively brusque). Just as important, it maintains Kramer’s self-lacerating tone. Ned is abrasive and insistent, and his colleagues in the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, played by a cast including Taylor Kitsch, Jim Parsons and Joe Mantello, come to flinch whenever he enters the room. But it’s clear that he’s the kind of pain every activist group needs, the bullish agitator who charges through every wall built in front of him. Kramer may be self-lacerating, but he also knows he was important.
The Normal Heart packs in a daunting number of big moments, but it has the actors to pull them off. Matt Bomer, son of former Cowboys draftee John Bomer, steals many scenes as Ned’s lover Felix. Mantello delivers a wrenching breakdown that teeters on the line between chaos and control, driven by a terrifying uncertainty that Ned refuses to embrace.
I’ve never seen The Normal Heart onstage, but I can imagine the emotional impact it would have in a small theater space, especially in the midst of the era depicted. The immediacy is still there, as is a mordant sense of humor necessary to counterbalance the grimness. But now there’s also historical perspective that proves Kramer’s plague diagnosis was more than egomaniacal rhetoric.
The Normal Heart would make a fine pairing with How to Survive a Plague, which picks up after the crisis has been acknowledged and the goals have shifted to accessibility of treatment. Kramer, now 78, is the dominant figure in both films, the prophet who prefers answers and action to popularity.
It’s been nearly 30 years since playwright Larry Kramer wrote The Normal Heart, his incendiary, explosive work about the ’80s AIDS crisis. Yet HBO’s new adaptation feels as fresh, as raw, as passionate as it must’ve come across then.
The Normal Heart isn’t an easy piece of television to watch; it is straight-up painful at times. But director Ryan Murphy wants his viewers to feel angry, to feel hurt, to feel devastated by the many lives tragically cut short by the epidemic.
The movie centers around Ned Weeks (an incredible Mark Ruffalo), based on Kramer himself, who becomes an ardent activist pushing to raise awareness about the “gay cancer” striking down so many of his friends. He teams up with Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts), a flinty physician who is racing against the clock to find some kind of cure.
The Normal Heart boasts a sterling cast, and it’s hard to pick out who shone brighter. Matt Bomer (White Collar, Magic Mike) is excellent as Felix, Ned’s lover, who is diagnosed with the disease. The tenderness that he and Ruffalo show each other as Felix withers away is just heartbreaking. Bomer lost 40 pounds to play Felix in his last days, and it’s gut-wrenching to watch his transformation toward the end of the movie.
The Big Bang Theory‘s Jim Parsons oozes compassion and love as Tommy, a steely Southern gentleman who delivers a rousing, poignant eulogy in one scene. Parsons played this role in the stage revival in 2011, and his ease and familiarity with it are very clear.
Then there’s Friday Night Lights alum Taylor Kitsch, who proves he’s more than a pretty face as Bruce, who clashes with Ned over the direction of their organization, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Alfred Molina, Joe Mantello, BD Wong, Jonathan Groff — everybody is perfectly cast, everybody steps up to the plate.
If there’s anything negative to say about The Normal Heart, it’s that it sometimes feels a bit rushed. Perhaps HBO would’ve been wiser to order a two-part miniseries rather than cram everything into a 132-minute movie.
But that’s nitpicking. In the end, The Normal Heart is a thunderous omen, a reminder not to forget. For younger folks, it may feel like the AIDS crisis was a million years ago; many of them hadn’t been born. Advances in medicine have made the disease manageable. But that doesn’t mean it’s been eradicated, and millions continue to die from it.
And Murphy imparts such urgency through his direction, that you can’t help but feel like answering that call to arms. We’ve won many battles, but we haven’t won the war.
Emmy Chances for The Normal Heart
It’s a no-brainer that The Normal Heart will likely rack up quite a few trophies at this year’s Emmy Awards. We’d be shocked if it didn’t win the Best TV Movie category, especially now that it is lumped together with miniseries. The experts at awards-predictions site Gold Derby agree: They’ve all placed The Normal Heart in their No. 1 slot. The Trip to Bountiful, Lifetime’s adaptation of a Tony-winning play, seems to be a distant second.
he acting categories might be slightly tougher, as movies and miniseries still share the category there. But HBO’s decision to place True Detective in the drama race versus miniseries should ease congestion. (Perhaps The Normal Heart was a factor in that decision.)
In the lead actor category, Ruffalo has a nomination in the bag. But Gold Derby’s prognosticators place Billy Bob Thornton of FX’sFargo ahead ofhim. Ruffalo also has tough competition in the form of Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch and Thornton’s Fargo co-star Martin Freeman.
The supporting actor category is where things get really hairy. Bomer is a lock for a nomination, as is Parsons (he’s a three-time Emmy winner, so clearly the academy loves him). The many other fine actors in The Normal Heart — specifically Kitsch and Molina — will face an uphill battle to get one of the other slots. And Bomer and Parsons, as good as they were, may leave the Emmy ceremony trophy-less, as they face the likes of Freeman in Sherlock and John Goodman in Dancing on the Edge.
We’ll bet the television academy can’t resist the star wattage of Roberts, so she’ll probably land a nomination in the supporting actress category.
The Normal Heart premieres Sunday, May 25 at 9 p.m. on HBO.
‘The Normal Heart’ Review: Great Performances Anchor an Uneven Film
Maureen Ryan 05/23/2014 3:32 pm EDT
There are several things Ryan Murphy can do with panache. Murphy, the creator or co-creator of “Glee,” “American Horror Story” and “Nip/Tuck,” knows how to divine cultural trends and take on projects that capture the zeitgeist. He’s a past master at getting people to write about whatever he’s working on at the moment, and he knows how to give provocative interviews that will keep people talking (or gnashing their teeth, which is possibly more useful). He can engineer showy scenes that top actors can’t wait to tear into, and he takes chances with form and theme that savvily discombobulate critics even as they capture the passion of the public.
His skill in attracting top-flight actors to his films and TV shows converges with one of HBO’s prime talents: Getting A-listers to star in meaty projects with highbrow literary or theatrical roots. The combination of the pot-stirring Murphy and HBO, which masterfully runs press-magnet red carpets and relentlessly acquires awards statues for its stars, results in a powerful machine for creating buzz. Together, they are an avenging Transformer of media dominance.
Though subtlety and consistency have never been his strong suits, Murphy’s devotion to non-linear storytelling and offbeat, even radical characters often makes for memorable fare. “Nip/Tuck,” “Glee” and “American Horror Story” generally alternate crass, dumb, loud wtf-ery with moments of compassion for outsiders and arresting images that supply spiky, unexpected insights. His shows can be a mess, but they also occasionally achieve a kind of weird grace and transcendance. They’re not formulaic, anyway.
Speaking of inconsistent track records, HBO’s output in the movies and miniseries realm has been all over the map in the last few years. “Mildred Pierce” and “Parade’s End” often didn’t work, despite their high-gloss production values and fine casts, and “Hemingway and Gellhorn” is one of the most wrong-headed projects the network has ever aired, but you can’t count the network out when it comes to high-end, fancy-pants short-form productions. When the network throws a lot of money at the screen, as it did with “The Pacific,” or lets a disciplined director make the kind of film that is sadly not seen by Hollywood as commercially viable, as was the case with “Behind the Candelabra,” the results can be engrossing.
So where does the Murphy-directed “The Normal Heart,” an HBO adaptation of a stored Larry Kramer play, land amidst all this cultural cachet and branding firepower? Well, the film just about rises above its many flaws, thanks to a some committed and affecting performances from seasoned actors like Mark Ruffalo, Joe Mantello and a surprisingly effective Julia Roberts.
But if you do watch the film, just be aware that every few minutes you may wish that someone — anyone — other than Murphy had directed it. Murphy is a self-indulgent director and not particularly rigorous or disciplined. He serves his own muse, not necessarily the needs of the material, and though it’s a classic, Kramer’s play is also unwieldy and outright clumsy at time.
To say that the collision between the material and the director is often awkward and ungainly is putting it mildly. While watching a film, it’s not often that I alternate between weepiness and sympathy for the project’s editor, but that was largely my response to this work. (Murphy often makes inexplicable editing decisions within scenes, strange and off-putting choices that make me wonder about his aesthetic philosophy or whether he has one at all.)
Of course, “The Normal Heart” has an important story to tell: Kramer’s play and Murphy’s film trace the rise of AIDS within New York’s gay community in the early ’80s and the insufficient and bigoted response of many governmental and health organizations. “The Normal Heart” tries to tell both the story of a community and the tale of a group of friends affected by the disease, and it’s not always successful in integrating both sagas. (It’s especially awkward when it’s introducing or attempting to develop supporting characters, most of which are so underwritten that I couldn’t recall any of their names). Though it is understandable that didactic harangues would co-exist quite closely with intimate scenes from a romance in this kind of work, for much of “The Normal Heart,” it’s an uneasy co-existence.
So why watch? Well, you may want to stick with it for Matthew Bomer’s performance: He has never been better than he is here. Roberts’ controlled fury is compelling as well — she plays a crusading doctor whose alarming reports and advice are ignored by almost everyone. As Ned Weeks, the lover of Bomer’s character, Mark Ruffalo displays a font of passion and engagement that energizes the entire film. Weeks is journalist bent on waking up the world to the dangers of AIDS and highlighting the apathy of the authorities, and he isn’t a particularly subtle character — he’s often portrayed as the only brave man in New York. But Ruffalo makes Ned’s prickly drive and anger sympathetic, which is an almost unbelievable feat.
Jim Parsons and Taylor Kitsch play characters that either don’t quite cohere or don’t get the kind of layered writing they deserve, but as the bumpy, disjointed first half of the film gives way to the somewhat smoother and more moving second half, “The Normal Heart” shows signs of the open-hearted warmth and compassion that Murphy’s work occasionally displays. If you can get past the director’s tics and tricks, there are some bravura scenes from Mantello, Roberts and Ruffalo that are worth the price of admission.
Still, I can’t end this review without fervently recommending “How to Survive a Plague,” a Peabody Award-winning documentary on the AIDS era that displays a great deal of immediacy, discipline and elegantly channeled anger. “Plague” is now on Netflix, and it serves as a fine companion piece to this well-intentioned but uneven HBO film.
The first thing you notice about The Normal Heart are the bodies: beautiful Fire Island bodies in a Reagan-era summer. Rippled, defined, sculpted, hairless bodies. Bare-assed, cock-swinging bodies. Bodies colliding, caressing, kissing, sucking, fucking, cumming. The second thing you notice about The Normal Heart are the bodies: infected New York bodies in a plague season. Bruised, pallid, whittled, terrified bodies. Lesion-covered, self-sabotaging bodies. Bodies shitting, bleeding, crying, disappearing, dying, dead.
As adapted by Larry Kramer from his 1985 autobiographical play and reimagined for the screen by director Ryan Murphy, HBO’s The Normal Heart is a boldly corporeal expression of gay political consciousness. Within the source material’s polemical dramaturgy of eulogies, speeches, editorials, and picketing, Murphy constructs the lively, slightly frayed intimacy of barroom confessions and first-date reminiscences. The result is a film that pays homage to the history of grassroots organizing by which HIV/AIDS arrived on the national agenda while paying heed to the subsequent reverberations of that radical gay presence in American life. As writer and activist Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo) urges New York’s gay community to demand that the media, the medical profession, and the government respond to the emerging health crisis, The Normal Heart poses what may be an unanswerable question. What does it mean to be gay?
Ned, modeled after Kramer himself, disembarks the ferry in those sun-spotted opening minutes to find that his isn’t the desired body du jour. Ruffalo shrinks in defense, buttoning up and clutching tight as though girding the character with armor. Ned appears displaced here, even marginal. He hangs back from the garish colors and pounding rhythms of a beach party, watching the speedos and poppers and sweat with a certain faraway longing, and when he encounters an orgy on the garden path, Murphy composes the image in illicit, fading light. Ned, whose most recent book argued that promiscuity holds love at arm’s length, approaches sex as both twilit fantasy and shadowy fear.
When it comes to the “gay cancer” felling those in his circle though, Ned is no wallflower. “Where is this big mouth I hear you’ve got?” Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts) asks during an examination. His ability to vocalize fury is unmatched, and the lion’s share of tension in the film arises as Ned’s controversial tactics threaten to alienate not only bigwigs and the body politic, but also friends, family, and allies. Ruffalo and Roberts make a striking duo as outsiders shouting into the abyss, and the latter’s climactic rage against the National Institutes of Health machine achieves the same level of frustrated emotional intensity as her performance in another stage-to-screen adaptation, August: Osage County. Indeed, despite the dramatic limitations of The Normal Heart’s ideological thrust, the cast, which also features Jim Parsons, Matt Bomer, Taylor Kitsch, and Alfred Molina, mostly succeeds in maintaining the narrative’s interpersonal suspense.
What buoys The Normal Heart, however, is Murphy’s cacophonous style, which reflects and refracts the varied personal and political stances on display as surely as the chaotic early meeting in which Brookner states her case for a moratorium on sex and Ned proposes the formation of Gay Men’s Health Crisis over the shouts of those for whom sexual freedom is a moral imperative. As activist Tommy Boatwright (Parsons) observes, “Half these people just showed up to get laid.” Lurid shades of orange, indigo, and purple—the colors of disco, of flame—suggest a long night’s journey into day; the camerawork is antsy throughout, circling and jostling like a prizefighter. As we push past Roberts and Ruffalo from a low angle, on a breezeway to the ICU where she monitors her suffering patients, or close in on Ned and Bruce Niles (Kitsch) coming to blows over strategy in front of the NBC affiliate’s rolling tape, the sheer, aimless physicality of The Normal Heart becomes the foremost illustration of its historical moment. There was no single route for AIDS activists to take, particularly in those anxious early days, because being threatened by the body was anathema to gay men’s newfound understanding that social and political power lay in the body’s being out, being proud, and being here.
As is Murphy’s wont, The Normal Heart devolves periodically into mawkishness and rude distraction, and the decision to conclude the film with Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Only Living Boy in New York” is truly horrid. But within its admittedly limited universe of white, male, urban affluence, The Normal Heart levies questions that correspond closely with my own experience as a gay man—even though I came out at 19, in 2006, a quarter century after Kramer’s fight began. What does it mean to be gay? What does it mean to be defined by who you fuck, to be identified by “sexual orientation”? What does it mean to possess a label whose radical history is so rooted in using, proclaiming, presenting, and possessing a body, and what are the consequences when that body’s sexual subjectivity becomes the cause of its disintegration? Flawed but terrifically moving, The Normal Heart is a boldly corporeal expression of gay political consciousness because gay political consciousness was and is a boldly corporeal expression, a presence where once there was absence. Viewed from an era in which the dominant gay political issue, marriage, centers on an understanding that each gay body contains a normal heart, Murphy’s kinesthetic style and Kramer’s verbal ferocity seem messy, imperfect, unromantic. And maybe, at some level, that’s exactly the point.
CAST: Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts, Matt Bomer, Taylor Kitsch, Jim Parsons, Alfred Molina, Jonathan Groff, Denis O’Hare, Joe Mantello AIRTIME: HBO, Check local listings
‘The Normal Heart’ Takes a Brutal, Unflinching Look at the Impact of AIDS
May 23, 2014 05:58 PM ET by Liz Raftery
If The Normal Heart, which premieres Sunday at 9/8c on HBO, were a work of fiction, it would be tragic. But knowing that it’s rooted in actual events makes it nothing short of devastating.
Based on Larry Kramer’s 1985 play (which was revived on Broadway in 2011) and adapted for the small screen by Ryan Murphy, The Normal Heart takes a brutal, unflinching look at the onset of the AIDS epidemic in New York City in the early 1980s. The story is told through the eyes of a group of activists who founded the organization Gay Men’s Health Crisis to help patients living with the disease.
At the forefront of the fight is Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo), a character based on Kramer himself, who’s tasked with delivering a message no one in his community wants to hear: that one solution to the growing problem may be refraining from sex. At least that’s the opinion of the no-nonsense Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts, in one of her strongest performances to date), a wheelchair-bound physician, herself a victim of polio, who’s seen more than half her patients die from the mysterious illness. With the benefit of hindsight, the hostile counter-argument to her opinion — that promiscuity is a political statement by the gay community — is crushingly naïve.
Ned’s colleagues at GMHC include the organization’s brash, blonde and closeted president Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch, who’s excellent in a role that’s quite a departure from his career-making turn as Tim Riggins on Friday Night Lights); city worker Mickey Marcus (Joe Mantello, who played Ned Weeks in the 2011 play); and sweet, sassy Southerner Tommy Boatwright (Jim Parsons, in the same role he played on Broadway). Along the way, Ned also meets and falls in love with Felix Turner (Matt Bomer), a New York Times reporter who struggles to persuade his colleagues to cover the epidemic.
Ruffalo turns in an Emmy-worthy performance as the stubborn, fiery Ned — who spends most of the movie so consumed by frustration and rage that he looks as if he might explode at any moment. The angry passion Ruffalo puts on display in scenes where Ned rails against government officials, his colleagues at GMHC, and even his own brother (Alfred Molina) is matched only by his vulnerability in the tender scenes he shares with Bomer, whose physical transformation as Felix becomes a patient of Dr. Brookner is simply astonishing. The two actors shine together, and it’s the relationship between Ned and Felix that gives the movie its true weight.
In Murphy’s hands, The Normal Heart is a tour de force. The Glee and American Horror Storycreator thankfully refrains from his usual campiness here, and instead relies on more muted moments between friends and lovers to pack the most powerful punches. Yes, there are plenty of bodies on display throughout, and in varying degrees of nudity, but Murphy’s purpose is not (entirely) titillation. Rather, the contrast between seeing young men in their prime, reveling in a hedonistic Fire Island beach weekend at the start of the movie, and in subsequent bathroom scenes as the ravaging effects of the disease take their toll is successfully jarring. Per usual, Murphy’s musical choices, while not subtle — “I Will Survive” plays over a club scene early on, while the movie ends with Simon & Garfunkel’s plaintive “The Only Living Boy in New York” — are also hauntingly effective.
The Normal Heart is an important film, one that’s both a touching tribute and a cautionary tale. Despite advancements in the treatment of HIV and AIDS that would have seemed unthinkable at the time the events depicted took place, the movie concludes with the chilling reminder that 36 million people worldwide have died from AIDS, and more than 6,000 new people are infected with HIV every day. As an examination of a pivotal point in history, the film preserves the memories of thousands of people whose lives are gone but must not be forgotten, and will break more than a few hearts in the process.
The Normal Heart Channels Ryan Murphy’s Garish Energy Through Larry Kramer’s Keening Rage
by Richard Lawson May 23, 2014 12:27 pm
With its heavy speechifying and angry, agitprop tones, Larry Kramer’s seminal 1985 play The Normal Heart, a fictionalized account of the beginnings of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis during the onset of the AIDS plague, doesn’t seem a natural fit for a movie adaptation. Let alone one by Ryan Murphy, the pop stylist behind tart, idiosyncratic shows like Glee and American Horror Story and the director of two clunky literary adaptations, Running With Scissors and Eat Pray Love. Much to my welcome surprise, though, Murphy, with a screenplay by Kramer, has turned this urgent screed into a worthy film, which premieres on HBO on Sunday night.
Like the Tony-winning Broadway revival in 2011, Murphy’s film comes jam-packed with film and TV stars. Mark Ruffalo, having a great week between this and his Cannes success in Foxcatcher, plays the protagonist/Kramer stand-in, Ned Weeks, a writer who’s jolted into action when many of his friends fall sick and, soon enough, start to die one by one. Taylor Kitsch, doing by far his best work since Friday Night Lights, plays his ally and frenemy, Bruce Niles, a pretty-boy closet case who’s sworn to the cause but only if his name stays mostly unmentioned. Joining them are Matt Bomer, Jim Parsons, and Joe Mantello (the latter two appeared in the Broadway production), along with Julia Roberts, here dulling her innate shine to play Dr. Emma Brookner, a paraplegic doctor who seems to be the only person in the medical community to be seriously addressing this terrifying new epidemic. All this showy casting initially seems cynical, until you remember that this is such tough, decidedly gay material that maybe the draw of a bunch of familiar and likable faces is the best chance this movie has to reach a wide audience.
And reach people it should. Kramer’s furious inveighing against a government that seemed content to let gay men die by the thousands has plenty of bite left in it nearly 30 years later. In many ways, The Normal Heart has become an entirely necessary historical document, giving full-bodied life and spirit to a piece of recent history that’s all too often forgotten in our progressive, gay marriage-sanctifying present. The horrors of the play’s generation must be remembered, not just because H.I.V.-infection rates among young people are troublingly on the rise in this country, but because these stories crucially remind us how we got where we are now, how far we’ve come and how far we’ve yet to go. Murphy gets out of the way of this message, filming from a respectable distance as Kramer’s words flare and burn. But this is also an intimate movie, close and textured, made all the more so by the fine cast.
Ruffalo does a good job of calibrating Ned, letting us see not just his tenacity and stubbornness, but his fear and despair too. The mind reels thinking about what it must have been like, how horrifying and bitterly sad, to watch as friends and lovers and colleagues and heroes began to wither and disappear, alone and largely unrecognized. Ruffalo communicates that panic and rage with a blunt physicality, leaning forward, insisting himself into the room, in every scene. As Tommy Boatwright, a charmingly bitchy Southern boy with a mordant wit, Parsons gives a lovely performance, filling his scenes with wistful humor. In his big monologue (each main character gets a towering speech), Parsons exudes a defeated frailty that brings home the scope of just how terrible and disillusioning this era was for so many people. Roberts, meanwhile, hums with righteous, Erin Brokovich-ian anger. Between this and August: Osage County, she’s carving out a nice new niche for herself, playing brittle women who show their love and concern through explosive temper. In his own big scene, giving a long monologue about the clash between the sexual politics of the pre-AIDS gay-rights movement and the grim, punishing realities of the plague years, Mantello reminds us what a strong, naturalistic actor he can be. I know he’s found success and riches as a Broadway director, but it would be nice to see him do some more acting, intelligent and unpretentious a performer as he is.
With somber but lovely cinematography from Daniel Moder (who is married to one particular cast member), Murphy handles the play’s structural rhythms quite well. The film never feels as stilted as many stage-to-screen adaptations are, and he brings simple, flowing life to scenes that might otherwise be made rigid by Kramer’s pointed, expository writing. The dreamy idyll of the film’s beginning, a sunny weekend on Fire Island, is tinged with currents of sorrowful dread, while the dark stuff that follows never slides into outright melodrama. This is big, weighty, tragic stuff we’re dealing with here, but the film is often limber and graceful, navigating in and out of scenes with the hush and delicacy of breath and blinking. With such strong, important material to film, Murphy has found a necessary restraint, channeling his sometimes garish energy through Kramer’s keening rage. The Normal Heart is not a subtle film; Ryan Murphy doesn’t do subtlety, nor does Larry Kramer. But that’s O.K. The film’s message, that activism often needs to be truly active, is served well by Murphy and Kramer’s elegant broad strokes.
I hope that lots of people watch this film, as lots of people seemed to watch HBO’s similarly themed masterpiece Angels in America ten years ago. Because it’s a good movie, and because it roars with the fury of many ghosts who didn’t have to be ghosts. If only more people had said something, done something. At least Larry Kramer and others like him did, and The Normal Heart is a fine accounting of that noble history.
Review: The Normal Heart By Melissa Maerzon May 23, 2014 at 4:19PM
The Normal Heart (which airs May 25 on HBO) is the story of a great love. Not just the one between Ned (Mark Ruffalo) and his boyfriend Felix (Matt Bomer), who’s dying of AIDS, or the one that finds both men fighting to keep their friends alive during the early 1980s, before anyone really knew what this so-called “gay cancer” was. It’s the one that starts with the HBO project’s creator, Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story), and his infatuation with something he read back in college.
Murphy was first introduced to Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart as a student at Indiana University. First staged off-Broadway in 1985, more than a year before President Reagan publicly acknowledged AIDS for the first time, and later revived on Broadway in 2011, The Normal Heart is not only remembered as powerful theater, but also as an important work of advocacy. Kramer based the character of Ned on himself, semi-fictionalizing the years he spent forming the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an organization that helped educate the gay community about AIDS and lobbied for government support. Many other characters were inspired by real people too — the fantastic 2012 documentary How to Survive a Plague tells some of their stories — which made it feel both personal and political. When the play first premiered, it sparked so much discussion that there was soon talk of making it into a film, though it took decades for that to happen. Maybe producers worried that no one would pay money to see a feature about gay men dying of AIDS. Now, Murphy has solved that problem. After acquiring the rights in 2009, he largely funded the project himself, directing and co-writing it with Kramer, and wisely bringing the result to HBO, which has already helped raise AIDS awareness with groundbreaking adaptations like Angels in America and And the Band Played On.
Known for lending a spotlight to gay teenagers on Glee and giving a voice to misfits of all stripes with American Horror Story, Murphy seems like the ideal champion for a story about a group of social outcasts who refuse to stay quiet. Still, his affection for heightened drama and a color-saturated, Rococo filmmaking style threatens to turn this all-too-real tragedy into the stuff of fantasy. His version of Normal Heart begins with a scene that’s not in the play: Ned gets off a ferry in Fire Island, where he’s surrounded by men who are built like Grecian statues. (Murphy even films one of them from the neck down, like some headless Apollo.) Ned has come here to join his friend, Craig (Jonathan Groff) and Craig’s boyfriend Bruce (Taylor Kitsch), at some bacchanalian party where pretty young things sunbathe naked in deck chairs. That night, Ned is wandering through the blue-green woods when he comes upon four men, who are tangled up together like some multi-headed mythological beast. The next morning, on the ferry home, he finds this headline in The New York Times: “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” Before long, Craig is dead.
Many characters in The Normal Heart die very quickly, before we really get the chance to know them. In some ways, that lessens the emotional impact of losing them. When Craig collapses on the beach, the camera even swoops up into the air, as if we (or maybe the gods?) are willfully turning away. Of course, maybe that’s the whole point. By the time Ned forms the Gay Men’s Health Crisis with his friends — including Bruce, Felix (who is a lifestyle reporter at The New York Times when they meet), and self-proclaimed Southern “bitch” Tommy (Jim Parsons) — it seems that Murphy is deliberately trying to make us care about complete strangers, showcasing the anonymous men who lost their lives back when most people refused to fight for a cure, because they didn’t know anyone personally who’d died from the disease.
This is part of what makes watching The Normal Heart such a frustrating experience: Its biggest dramatic flaws are often politically justifiable. Julia Roberts is embarrassingly miscast as Emma Brookner, a polio-stricken doctor who fights to save AIDS patients — she’s all faux-dowdy hair dye and pursed-lip straight-talk, like Erin Brockovich in a wheelchair — but this movie probably couldn’t have gotten made without her name attached. Characters make long, passionate speeches that sometimes fail to register because they feel like lectures — though maybe Kramer’s message shouldn’t be so easy to hear. One scene finds Felix staring at a lesion-ridden man on the subway, and there’s so much carnivalesque imagery, Murphy threatens to turn this sick man into a sideshow freak. It’s a questionable choice for a director who often uses grotesquery as satire. (Remember Kathy Bates using human blood as anti-wrinkle cream on American Horror Story: Coven?) And yet, the scene is probably an accurate reflection of how the world looked at AIDS patients back then, when the shocking death toll no doubt felt surreal.
Murphy might not handle the grand gestures well, but he gets the smaller ones right. He captures the physical horror of sickness in a close, intimate way that a play never could, zooming in on body sores and flesh that wastes away to bone. Bomer lost 40 pounds for his role, and it’s impossible to tear your eyes away from him, not only because he’s so skeletal, but also because his delicate performance is quietly devastating. Other details are spot-on too: the trash heaps on the sidewalk from the 1981 garbage strike, the contact-high hedonism of the discos, the loneliness of hospital rooms where no nurse would dare touch an HIV-positive patient, the guilty-pleasure allure of the bathhouses. The only misstep? Felix’s memory of his first hook-up with Ned is recast as a cheesy 1980s commercial for a bathhouse, which threatens to turn their whole romance into a bad joke.
The New York that so many people remember is here, but Murphy also wants to remind us of what we’ve forgotten. One of the best parts of The Normal Heart is how well it preserves the debates that divided the community back then. When Dr. Brookner tells a group of gay men that they should stop having sex until AIDS has been contained, some argue that she’s forcing them to relinquish the rights they fought so hard to gain. Even within the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, there are arguments over whether it’s wise for Ned to publicly criticize the government, considering that the organization needs federal grant money. For anyone who didn’t live through those years, these debates can be illuminating, if only to show what issues have become outdated in this age of safe sex and research.
The Normal Heart is clearly a product of its time. Some critics have wondered why Murphy would want to revive it today, now that AIDS isn’t the public health issue it once was, and a diagnosis is no longer a death sentence. For his generation, which came of age with sex education classes and free condoms in restrooms, there’s a worry that if AIDS is no longer an eminent danger, Kramer’s struggle might soon disappear from the collective memory. And the fact that Murphy and The Normal Heart‘s stars, both straight and gay, are trying so hard to honor that fight is hugely admirable. But this flawed version of The Normal Heart already feels destined to be forgotten. Who knows, maybe that’s progress. If this story of heartbreak and paranoia is no longer quite so timeless, that just proves Kramer did something right. B-
Seitz: HBO’s Messy, Powerful ‘The Normal Heart’ Rages Against AIDS Amnesia
Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of The Normal Heart is set in the past, but not safely in the past. This in itself is remarkable. The film’s source material, Larry Kramer’s play about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, premiered in 1985 and was revived on Broadway in 2011. This HBO version — which stars Mark Ruffalo as a Ned Weeks, a Larry Kramer–like character raging against state-sponsored neglect and passive-aggressive bigotry — arrives after nearly three decades of failed attempts to adapt it to film.
Despite the elapsed years, nothing about the movie feels dated, neutered, or “official.” Kramer’s play was theater, but it was also journalism and agitprop. Kramer co-founded the activist organization Gay Men’s Health Crisis during a meeting at his apartment, to raise awareness and money to battle the epidemic at a time when nearly everyone preferred not to publicly discuss it. For all its poetry and vitality, the play was an extension of that rabble-rousing mission. The film has poetry and vitality, too, and its greatest virtue is that it seems not to give a damn if you approve of any of its creative choices as long as you connect with it emotionally and intellectually. It rips Kramer’s work out of the cocoon of received wisdom that might have otherwise entombed it by making it seem safe or “official.” It’s an account of life during an epidemic that might have been less brutal, or at least more dignified, had public officials behaved with more bravery, honesty, and compassion. It aims to rattle viewer complacency and re-create the sorrow, horror, and outrage of the early ’80s, when gay men were dying in droves after acquiring HIV and the dominant culture wrung its hands or folded its arms, with the ugliest among them (some of whom were employed by President Ronald Reagan’s administration) writing off mass death as the byproduct of poor lifestyle choices.
The Normal Heart was righteously pissed about this all when it first hit New York floorboards, just four years after the first cases were initially labeled as “gay cancer” and “Gay Related Immunodeficiency Disease.” The HBO film is pissed, too, but for different reasons. It seems angered by the possibility that this period might recede in the national consciousness or (just as bad) be distorted or whitewashed, by conservatives who want to deify Reagan and his people and excuse their inaction in the face of AIDS, or by straight liberals or closeted gay men who stuck their heads in the sand back then instead of saying or doing something that might’ve made a difference. At its best, the movie has the propulsive wildness of a late-’80s or early-’90s feature by Oliver Stone or Spike Lee. It comes out swinging with both fists, wildly. It’s the anti-Philadelphia. At times the movie seems to be even angrier at closeted ’80s gay men with political or financial power than at similarly privileged but inactive straight liberals, or at Reagan and his evangelical Christian-pandering minions. The late Ed Koch, New York City’s mayor during the Normal Heart years, is blasted as a hypocritical closet case who could have worked miracles if he’d had the courage to publicly self-identify as gay and treat medical research funding and public health initiatives as personal missions. “Why are they letting us die?” Weeks demands, a question to which every other character knows the answer.
The movie’s political agenda is clear: to carve out a “Never Forget” space in the national psyche. It wants the official governmental non-response to AIDS in the early ’80s to be placed on a list of the most contemptible acts of calculated neglect in the nation’s history. It knows the only way it can do that is to disregard everyone else’s sense of what’s appropriate or tasteful and work from the gut. To that end, Murphy’s movie is loud, lusty, sentimental, strident, despairing, viscerally nasty, unabashedly polemical, frequently infuriating, and often powerful. It’s a film about love, sex, illness, death, bigotry, and anger. It is imprecise in its effects and sometimes clumsy and overbearing, and there are times when you might wish it would just shut the hell up (particularly when a character launches into yet another statistics-laced speech that sounds far too obviously “written”). And yet all of these qualities make The Normal Heart an equivalent of the literary voice and offscreen personality of Kramer, who wrote the adapted script. I suspect that’s why critics by and large have been so kind to this production: because they see themselves in the not-Kramer characters, the ones who’re obsessed with saying things in the “right” way rather than hollering and cursing and pounding tabletops and shaming people until they act, or at least react.
At one point, Weeks, who’s been drummed out of his own organization for being a strident, self-aggrandizing, and often belligerent wild card, aligns himself with Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, and Alan Turing, who cracked the Germans’ Enigma Code. “These are not invisible men,” he says. He’s not wrong. His desire for the plague’s main victims to stop being invisible elevates the monologue beyond mere self-aggrandizement. Not that it matters what anyone thinks of Kramer/Weeks anyway. The historical distance between those lines’ first performance and their re-creation in a movie clarifies a point that Kramer was making from the very beginning: It doesn’t matter what you think of the messenger as long as you respond to the message, and that under such dire circumstances, merely to be a messenger is to be a hero. Weeks is personally invested in the course of the epidemic because he’s lost friends already and fears he’ll lose his lover Felix Turner (Matt Bomer), who’s infected and in physical decline. “I’m frightened nobody important is going to give a damn because it seems to be happening mostly to gay men,” he says. “Who cares if a faggot dies?” But he’s also coming to terms with his own identity, sounding a barbaric yawp across the rooftops of the world and exhorting others to do likewise.
Weeks is a consistently annoying and occasionally repulsive character, bulldozing those who disagree with his tactics, making inflammatory statements without consulting his colleagues, and impugning the motives and beliefs of people who disagree with him. (His showboating evokes a self-pitying rhetorical question posed by the arrogant cop hero of Year of the Dragon: “How can anybody care too much?”) But when you consider the magnitude of suffering around Weeks, the other characters’ tendency to tone-police him seems surreally misguided. He insists that a more genteel approach won’t produce results, and history has proved him right. Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts), a polio-paralyzed researcher who’s been studying the disease from year one, agrees with Weeks. Her despairing rant against National Institute of Health officials who won’t fund her research aligns her with the crusading pariahs of the world. (“Polio was a virus,” she tells Weeks. “Nobody gets polio anymore.”) As 1981 gives way to 1982 and 1983 and 1984, the verbal brawls over how to frame the message become more intense, sometimes turning physical. But over time we can see everyone’s resistance to extreme tactics collectively start to fade. Asking nicely is getting them nowhere. The only holdout is Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch), a banker who becomes an activist but never leaves the closet, even though his model boyfriend contracted HIV early on, then slathered foundation on his sores so that he wouldn’t get fired from runway gigs.
The film has sympathy for Niles and concedes that his “good cop” approach is valid, in its way — MLK versus Malcolm X, basically; but his inability to evince the sort of confident, outer-directed anger that Weeks displays ultimately marks him as an obstacle or foil, a guy who has good intentions but the wrong priorities.
Ryan Murphy is the perfect choice to direct this story. Although the social commentary in his TV shows (including Nip/Tuck, Glee, and American Horror Story) has often been confused or self-defeating, Murphy has never seemed more articulate and focused than when he’s identifying with beleaguered and marginalized outsiders. That’s why the second season of American Horror Story, subtitled Asylum, was the series’ best to date: Like Samuel Fuller’s 1965 film Shock Corridor — an admitted inspiration on Asylum that was also set in a mental hospital full of speechifying inmates — the story politicized the most painful experiences of its characters. The Asylum inmates were locked away and sometimes tortured and killed because of who they were and how they lived. They didn’t fit into the dominant culture, and they paid the price. That’s what’s happening in The Normal Heart. The film’s individual stories are earthbound, rooted in personal and historical fact, but Murphy and his cinematographer Daniel Moder (Enemy of the State) invest the scenes of infection, death, burial, and mourning with the foggy intensity of a 1970s fright film. The opening section, set at Fire Island in 1981, feels like the start of a supernatural horror picture about an ancient curse that has suddenly awakened. The delicate mood of bacchanalian bliss is destroyed when a handsome young man with a troubling cough collapses in the surf. As the story unfolds we see this again and again: handsome young men falling down, then slowly dying. The slick skin and lesions are lit and shot so that they seem at once real and metaphorical: The disease is destroying individual bodies, but also a post-Stonewall ideal that being able to love who you want will let you be who you want. Even some of Weeks’s compatriots in the GMHC worry that the disease is a judgment levied against them, if not by God, then by mainstream America. At first they’re disgusted by Weeks’s hyperbolic assertion that Reagan hasn’t said anything because he wants gay men to be extinct, but as the death toll mounts, they start to wonder if there’s maybe something to it. The film doesn’t wonder. It says, “Yes, that’s pretty much what happened. And if you say otherwise, you’re naïve or lying.”
If anger and suffering were all there were to The Normal Heart, watching it would be torture. Luckily, it has heart to match its guts. There’s always been a crackpot humanist sensibility in Murphy’s TV work, even when it was going for sadomasochistic violence or surreal kitsch. The love that, say, Glee lavishes on Kurt and his father always felt sincere, not faked, and when American Horror Story fixes its warped funhouse-mirror gaze on the suffering of anyone pegged as different and therefore worthless, you can feel the outrage flowing beneath the camp. Whatever emotions it’s conjuring up, you know the show’s not kidding. The Normal Heart isn’t kidding, either. It’s as bold as Kramer when it comes to the grand gesture. The film’s most emblematic image occurs during a fund-raising ball: a low-angled closeup of a glitter ball, each triangular plane reflecting a different pair of slow-dancing men. Every death in the picture seems to diminish its survivors, which makes the often-quoted memorial monologue by its sweetest character, Tommy Boatwright (Jim Parsons, brilliant), all the more wrenching. He refers to the Rolodex cards he saves after friends die as “a collection of cardboard tombstones, bound together with a rubber band.”
HBO’s ‘The Normal Heart’ is heartbreaking, hardhitting Four stars out of Four
By Gail Pennington gpennington@post-dispatch.com May 23, 2014 2:04 PM EST
Matt Bomer is the face of the AIDS crisis, the “gay plague” of the early 1980s, in “The Normal Heart,” Larry Kramer’s adaptation of his own angry play about the dark days when so many tried to ignore what was happening right in front of them.
Bomer is the body of the epidemic, too, playing a 35-year-old New York Times reporter reduced, in just months, from unbelievably beautiful specimen of humanity to emaciated, covered with cancer sores, sobbing in the arms of his partner. Dying.
Kramer, whose alter ego, writer Ned Weeks, is played by Mark Ruffalo, lived to tell the story of how public health organizations, the government and closeted gay men, among others, looked away while more and more young men fell ill and died.
“The Normal Heart” debuted on Broadway in 1985 and was revived there in 2011, with stars including Jim Parsons (“The Big Bang Theory”). It has been performed by theaters all over the country, but the movie will give it its largest audience ever.
Parson reprises his role, as hospital administrator turned activist Tommy Boatwright, in the HBO movie, directed by Ryan Murphy (“Glee,” “American Horror Story”) from Kramer’s teleplay. The impressive cast also includes Taylor Kitsch, Joe Mantello and Alfred Molina. If the story doesn’t feel timely today, that doesn’t make it any less important as a piece of history, and a cautionary tale about the perils of sticking our heads in the sand.
As the movie opens, it’s 1981. “Gay politics” mostly means free love, and men cluster on New York’s Fire Island on summer weekends to have as much free love as they can. Too soon, handsome Craig (Jonathan Groff) develops a cough, and before his friends know it, he’s dead.
Ned, who is personally and professionally abrasive, is also an intrepid reporter, and visits Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts, in one of the best performances of her career) to find out what might be going on. Brookner, in a wheelchair from childhood polio, doesn’t know yet, but she knows it’s bad, because of how many gay men are dying.
Ned goes on to co-found the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and tries to get the mainstream media interested in the story. At the New York Times, he meets Felix Turner (Bomer) and falls in love for the first time in his life.
“You’re too good to be true,” Ned tells Felix, foreshadowing what we would know is coming even if we hadn’t read about the production break during which Bomer lost 40 pounds, returning emaciated and driving director Murphy to tears.
“The Normal Heart” will drive any viewer with a heart at all to tears as well. As the epidemic escalates — dozens dead, then hundreds, then thousands — only Ned’s anger keeps us from dissolving into a puddle.
The entire cast of “The Normal Heart” is outstanding, but no one stands out more than Bomer, who is so much the handsome star of USA’s “White Collar,” in the beginning, then almost unrecognizable as the dying Felix.
Parsons, though, is almost as impressive, his quiet strength in important counterpoint to Ned’s fury. He leaves us with a graphic image that wouldn’t be possible today: stacks of cards, removed from his Rolodex one by one, as friend after friend dies.
‘The Normal Heart’: One of TV’s Best Portrayal of Gay Romances, Ever Ryan Murphy’s moving HBO film about the early AIDS crisis, unlike the play from which it’s adapted, runs on love, not anger.
Sophie GilbertMay 23 2014, 10:03 AM ET
Since it debuted in 1985, Larry Kramer’s incendiary play The Normal Heart has first and foremost been associated with rage. Its central character, Ned Weeks—a thinly veiled but egoless version of Kramer—channels the kind of blistering fury that ignites everything in its immediate path. Kramer wrote the play before President Reagan had ever publicly acknowledged the existence of AIDS but after several thousand men, a number of whom were his close personal friends, had died of a mysterious “gay cancer.” Ned’s rage at the apathy and hostility he encounters while trying to publicize the emerging plague is extraordinarily potent, but it still isn’t enough.
The Ryan Murphy-directed HBO adaptation of The Normal Heart, airing Sunday at 9 p.m., does its best to channel the intensity of Ned’s blinding, uncomprehending anger. Mark Ruffalo offers a tight, deliberately understated turn as someone who, in the midst of what feels like a war, finds true love and then loses it.
But Murphy’s unexpectedly rich portrayal of Ned’s love affair with Felix (Matt Bomer) ends up eclipsing rage as the defining emblem of the film. If TV doesn’t quite have the same potential as theater does for letting an audience tap into Ned’s anger, Murphy’s adaptation makes up for it by offering a much more detailed portrait of romance—one of the most emotionally honest depictions of two men falling in love ever seen on television.
Fuelled but not defined by the urgency of the plague around them, Ned and Felix meet, have a painfully awkward first date during which Ned manages to defy most standards for socially acceptable behavior, move in together, and even get “married” in an unofficial ceremony by Felix’s hospital bed.
And, yes, they sleep together. In an interview with the New York Times, Kramer alleged that the movie had been held up for so long because of squeamishness about portraying graphic sex scenes; Barbra Streisand, who owned the film rights and intended to play Emma Brookner, the doctor who treats some of the virus’s earliest cases, was apparently uncomfortable with the subject. Thank heavens for Murphy, then, who seems to understand how integral sex is to love. He draws raw pathos from Ned and Felix’s first night together, making it as much an emotional coupling as a physical one.
As the film opens, Ned is shown on the periphery of gay culture at a rowdy beach party on Fire Island. He’s shunned by some for a novel he wrote criticizing promiscuity, but he’s also a self-imposed outcast, uncomfortable and socially repressed in a new world of shaved chests, naked sunbathing, and gleaming, cartoonish muscles. When Dr. Brookner (an exceptional Julia Roberts) finally alerts him to the existence of a rare cancer that’s destroying the immune systems of gay men in New York, you could uncharitably argue that one reason for Ned’s urgent attachment to the cause is his discomfort with the liberated, hypersexualized culture his friends have embraced. Preaching the virtues of abstinence is nothing new for Ned, who wrote in his book that “having so much sex makes love impossible.”
It’s ironic, therefore, when Felix reminds Ned that they first met in a bathhouse, in a scene Murphy paints like an exquisitely awful ’80s porno, complete with shaky camera work, fuzzy graphics, and a tacky synth soundtrack. Back then, a repressed and presumably closeted Ned resisted the idea of love; now, Ruffalo’s tense physicality shows how desperately he yearns for it. The power of Bomer’s performance is in how believable he makes Felix’s attraction to the older, prickly, pathologically awkward Ned. Ruffalo smothers most of his natural charisma with glasses, dowdy tweed jackets, and crankiness, but there’s still something about his emotional integrity and slightly battered heart that’s deeply appealing.
Bomer’s 40-pound weight loss over the course of portraying Felix’s decline has been well-publicized, but what’s also remarkable throughout the film is how Murphy taps into his American Horror Story experience to show how viscerally AIDS decimated a community. The first man Ned encounters with the disease, in Emma’s office, is like a walking zombie, pockmarked with large red scabs all over his face. Later, after Felix has shown Ned the telltale mark on his own foot, he rides the subway and encounters the unsettling sight of a man covered with Kaposi’s sarcoma as the lights flicker on and off. It’s terrifying. And when Mayor Koch finally agrees to have a proxy meeting with Ned and his fellow activists, it’s in an abandoned, subterranean room filled with the wreckage of broken filing cabinets, not unlike somewhere someone might wake up in the Saw franchise.
The performances throughout the film are terrific. There’s The Big Bang Theory‘s Jim Parsons as Tommy, a volunteer who saves the rolodex cards of friends who’ve died, and whose desk drawer becomes a cemetery filled with tiny paper tombstones. There’s Alfred Molina as Ned’s wealthy older brother, trying as hard as he can to accept Ned’s sexuality. And there’s Roberts as the wheelchair-bound Emma, whose eyes offer glimpses of complexity not necessarily spelled out in Kramer’s script. It’s Emma who confronts the government, and when a bureaucrat declines her funding request and describes her research as “imprecise and unfocused,” her outburst makes even Ned raise his eyebrows.
Ned’s last scene shows him on the sidelines, again, as guest of honor at Yale’s gay week, after he tried to commit suicide there as an undergrad because he felt so desperate and isolated. As he watches the couples dancing under a canopy of balloons and twinkling lights, he’s alone but not lonely, heartbroken but consoled by the existence of love all around him. Ruffalo, crying and smiling at the same time, offers a glimmer of hope amid the more desolate imagery of Tommy’s desk drawer, Felix’s emaciated frame, and the sneering cruelty of those who did nothing. In an earlier scene, Ned describes Alan Turing as his personal hero: an openly gay man who saved the world and was crucified for it. “That’s how I want to be remembered,” he says. “As one of the men who won the war.”
James Poniewozik @poniewozik May 23, 2014 9:09 AM ET
Ryan Murphy teams with fellow provocateur Larry Kramer to adapt the passionate story of an AIDS activist who rages against the dying of many, many lights.
In Choire Sicha’s book Very Recent History, set among a group of young, mostly gay men in New York City in 2009, there’s a passage that describes the generational hole in the gay community, and the city, and the world, left by HIV/AIDS:
Some people were missing… Say at least fifty thousand men disappeared from the City over the course of John’s life. These were people who would have been coworkers, mentors, bosses, owners, millionaires, subway workers, neighbors, guys to pick up at bars, people at libraries, people on the Internet, people with advice, good or bad, or ideas, good or bad, or entrepreneurs, or adoptive parents, or stalkers on the Internet, or politicians, or knowing secretaries, or painters, or people in the next cubicle. But they weren’t there.
The Normal Heart, airing May 25 on HBO, is the story of that hole: how it opened, what it claimed, the rage and tears it took to keep it from swallowing even more people. When it debuted in 1985 as a stage play by activist Larry Kramer, it was an alarm bell for a fire fully blazing, demanding that people pay attention and unresponsive governments fight the epidemic. Now set on film by director Ryan Murphy (and Kramer, adapting his own play), after the disease his been dampened if not eliminated, it’s history–but an insistent, furious history, demanding that it not be shelved and forgotten, lest it repeat.
The film opens, like a disaster movie, on the last moments before calamity strikes: in 1981, on Fire Island, whose habitués are enjoying a sun-drenched weekend of sexual freedom. The sun slicks men’s toned flesh; Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” plays from a speaker on the beach. Then a seemingly healthy young man (Jonathan Groff) collapses in the surf. As the “gay cancer” spreads, perplexing the medical and gay communities, Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo), an activist writer much like Kramer himself, meets with Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts), who suspects the “cancer” is sexually transmitted. “Where’s this big mouth I hear you’ve got?” she asks him. “Is big mouth a symptom?” he retorts. “No,” she says. “It’s the cure.”
It’s a medicine that no one much wants to swallow, however–not the national and New York City government, slow to devote resources to the epidemic, nor leading gay organizations, who have made sexual freedom part of their identity and don’t want to hear a message of abstinence because “fucking can kill you.” Weeks is used to being an irritant; he already made himself unpopular with a novel that argued to gay hedonists that “having so much sex makes finding love impossible.” (The analogue here is Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots.) Now he’s an irritant with a cause, a hammer in a world full of nails, and Ruffalo plays him with blunt, barking energy.
Beyond portraying the dawning horror of AIDS, this is a story broadly about activism and what it takes to make change. Working inside the system or outside the system? Moderation or militancy? Raising sympathy or raising hell? Kramer’s script, true to his and Weeks’ philosophy, takes sides, refusing to on-the-other-hand the story as Weeks butts up against the moderate likes of Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch) a closeted war veteran chosen to be the palatable face of AIDS activism. Weeks may have a general predisposition to be That Guy–the one who yells, discomfits, outs people, triggers Godwin’s Law–but he also, in the light of history, has a damn urgent reason. A lot of people are dying, and a lot of people would rather think about something else.
The story of a provocateur is a good fit for Murphy, whose TV series (Glee, American Horror Story) treat provocation like a moral imperative; if something is worth saying, it’s worth saying with fireworks and maybe a musical number. Murphy’s direction here isn’t ostentatious or even especially distinctive (one exception is a flashback to the ’70s bathhouse era, shot in the style of a late-night adult-TV ad). But it’s unflinching: one sequence, depicting the indignities of an AIDS victim’s last hours alive–and first hours dead, wheeled to a hospital alley in a garbage bag–makes the poisonous combination of homophobia and fear raw and real. The film’s philosophical and visual mission is to make you look longer than you might–at seizures, at Karposi’s lesions, at fights that drag into ugly, anguished pathos.
At the same time, it’s a love story, between Weeks and New York Times reporter Felix Turner (Matt Bomer), whose relationship begins testy, grows sexy, and–as Felix contracts AIDS himself–becomes tender and tragic. (A scene in which Ned helps Felix shower after a bad episode heartbreakingly parallels their early, lusty encounter in the bathhouse.)
The Normal Heart is not a nuanced film; it would probably be a betrayal of the material to turn it into one. Compared with, say, Angels in America (memorably adapted for HBO a decade ago), there’s not much effort to make the antagonists three-dimensional; the film doesn’t much balance the merits of Weeks’ gay-community opponents’ arguments nor–given the story’s early-’80s timeframe–explore what results Weeks’ tactics yielded in the long run. It’s a first draft told by a first responder, with no time for niceties. But it is deepened and rounded out by some remarkable supporting performances, especially a fantastic Jim Parsons as Tommy, a warmhearted activist volunteer. As he speaks at a friend’s memorial–remembering the many, many other friends he’s memorialized–his kindly optimism gives way to despair at the waste of lives and inaction of the larger society, and it is devastating: “They just don’t like us.”
This movie’s answer is that this crisis, this moment, demanded people like Weeks, who didn’t much care if anyone liked him. The first time this story was told on stage, it was–to borrow the slogan of the group Kramer later helped found–a cry to act up and fight back. Some 30 years later, this movie–strident, passionate, frenetic, and aching–is a reminder, as Memorial Day weekend begins the summer, of all those empty spots the plague left on the beach.
Larry Kramer’s ‘The Normal Heart’ Brilliantly Brings Back A Dark Period in History: Review 22 May 2014 by Curt Johnson
Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart has taken quite a long road getting to the big screen. Barbra Streisand tried for many years, but thankfully Ryan Murphy took over putting all of his passion into bringing it to HBO as it was well worth the wait. Murphy can be hit or miss many times, but he has scored a brilliant direct hit bringing Kramer’s heartwrenching and very angry play to the small screen, and Matt Bomer’s performance will easily earn him at least an Emmy nomination not to mention a Golden Globe.
The Normal Heart was one of the few plays that captured the AIDs epidemic back in 1985 but went further to point fingers not only at the straight community but also the repressed closeted gay community who were just as responsible for remaining just as inactive. Some of these closeted people were in high up positions of power and could have made a major impact.
For anyone who grew up in the 1980′s, it’s hard to forget hearing about the ‘gay cancer’ and then seeing the pages of Entertainment Weekly fill up with deaths of people in their twenties and thirties.
For the new generations, this film is so important to remember what happened as this could easily happen again with the same results. History sadly has a way of repeating itself, and having people like Murphy make sure we don’t forget so important. Thankfully, this isn’t the usual HBO movie made by committee (where tons of known actors are shoved into a film with just a few lines), original playwright Kramer was brought onboard to make sure his passion, memorable characters and fury came along for the ride. The anger in The Normal Heart is what made is such a shocker onstage back in 1985, and the anger Mark Ruffalo and Bomer bring makes it just as shocking and compelling.
Ruffalo portrays Ned Weeks (basically Larry Kramer) and it kicks off with the fun of Fire Island summertime crowd just before everything changed forever in the gay community. Craig (Johnathan Groff) begins coughing immediately letting us know that everything is going to escalate quickly. Years ago, studios made Longtime Companion which showed a slower pace of AIDS, but this is not the case with The Normal Heart.
Thankfully HBO didn’t make it into a mini-series as this two-hour movie crams so much of the years and politics, the viewer will feel as overwhelmed as many of us in the gay community did when it hit. A mini-series would more than likely made it feel like the AIDS crisis was a slower simmering thing, but as the film shows, the death toll rose sharply, steadily and at an alarming pace you never new if you would see your friends again the following week. It was that fast during the years when no one would speak about it, but it did drive the gay community and people like Larry Kramer to push for change. I was a member of ACT-UP and got to work with Kramer, and I’m so glad that people will get to know about this activist who wound up having many in the gay community turn against him even though he was trying to save their lives.
I’m sure some will complain that there’s too much information to take in for a two-hour movie, but that is exactly how it felt during that very dark time in our history. For me, this film captures the urgency of that period while hopefully also making some realize that the numbers have been rising again with the new generation. Hopefully there’ll be another young Larry Kramer around to squelch it before it gets out of control all over again.
There’s no happy endings with this film but it shouldn’t stop you from watching this, especially if you have teens who think things like this would never happen to them.
Back in the late 1980s, the AIDS Memorial Quilt toured in its entirety, an epic expanse of cloth, lace, rhinestones, sequins, T-shirts, stuffed animals, and all kinds of symbolic whatnot. Walking among the clusters of grave-size panels, each one so personalized, so fringed with love, you couldn’t help but feel the enormity and cruelty of the AIDS epidemic. Unless you had a heart of stone, you had to mourn the lives taken, most of them in their prime, all of them under the aegis of an indifferent-at-best political administration.
It’s a profound memorial, one that continues to grow but that, alas, is no longer portable. But now here comes HBO’s “The Normal Heart,” Sunday at 9 p.m., another AIDS memorial of sorts, and one that’s easier to view. The powerful film, adapted from the 1985 play by Larry Kramer, joins the best of the genre — “Longtime Companion,” “Parting Glances,” “An Early Frost,” “Philadelphia,” the shattering documentary “Silverlake Life” — as a monument to the lives lost. It looks back to the first years of the virus (then “the gay cancer”) and the fear, desperation, rage, and, especially, national shame of that time, which, by the way, was only about 30 years ago.
In one of the many soul-wrenching sequences, director Ryan Murphy makes that shame unbearable. Doctors at an Arizona hospital refuse to examine the body of a man named Albert who has died from AIDS, and with no official death certificate the undertakers won’t take him. Albert winds up wrapped in a garbage bag on a car backseat heading to a sketchy crematorium, his mother wailing with horror. You won’t soon forget her primitive shrieks, which give full voice to the fathomless inhumanity of the situation.
Nor will you forget the exasperating, angry, relentless cries of Ned Weeks, the movie’s central character, amid the escalating emergency. Played by Mark Ruffalo and based on Kramer, Ned is one of the cofounders of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a New York organization created in 1982 to help those living with AIDS. But, as more harmless coughs devolve into disaster, as more Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesions emerge all over the gay community, Ned grows frustrated with the fruitless work-within-the-system approach of the other GMHC founders, especially since the system is homophobic. He lets his wrath explode during meetings with bigwigs, including a violent eruption at a Mayor Edward Koch aide played with excruciating disdain by Denis O’Hare as the face of institutional denial.
Ned’s GMHC colleagues aren’t passive, but their style is practical and optimistic. Taylor Kitsch is the semi-closeted guy who wants the organization to behave nicely in order to get funding, and Jim Parsons is the sweetly compassionate man who saves the Rolodex card of each friend who dies as a kind of shrine. Both actors are quite good, and so is Joe Mantello, who was nominated for a Tony Award for playing Ned in the 2011 revival of “The Normal Heart.” In one brilliant, riveting scene, Mantello goes off on Ned for his aggressive and accusatory attitude toward those who disagree with him, yelling, “I’m not a murderer.” His fury seems to rattle the screen.
In this way, as it explores differing styles of activism, “The Normal Heart” remains as timely as the fight for gay marriage. It’s a reminder of the rocky road that is progress. Most movements attract both dutiful pragmatists and disruptive idealists, the practical and the uncompromising, the patient and the impatient, with each extreme seeming to ultimately pull the other forward. But it’s a disturbing experience watching Ned, a forecaster of doom and a hurler of insults, collide with his friends, since we know all of them want the same thing.
Ruffalo’s Ned is sympathetic in his way, a man whose overbearing righteousness happens to be founded. In his relationship with Matt Bomer’s dashing Felix, he is lovably insecure, and when Felix gets sick and begins to lose hope, Ned’s pushiness toward him appears more obviously born of love and caring — what any normal heart would feel.
Bomer is, quite simply, devastating in this movie, his beauty adding resonance because it begins to fade so suddenly, as his cheeks protrude and lesions gather. He does the weight-loss trick that seemed to define Matthew McConaughey’s performance in “The Dallas Buyers Club”; the production of “The Normal Heart” broke for a few months while he dieted. But Bomer also acts behind his emaciated look, something I missed in McConaughey’s Oscar-winning turn. The convincing chemistry between Bomer and Ruffalo is among the movie’s strengths, too, as it provides a core of love and compassion amid all the acrimony.
Julia Roberts is also remarkable as Dr. Emma Brookner, a wheelchair-bound polio survivor who is willing to treat early victims. She is a no-nonsense type, using her wheelchair like a finger snap when people won’t listen to her warning cries, turning her back on ignorance in order to move forward. “You are all going to infect each other,” she plainly tells a room of gay men who feel that she is threatening gay liberation. “I hope she winds this up,” says one, “because I’ve got a tiny little orgy in New Rochelle.” The innocence of the crowd, still blocking out the looming catastrophe, still unable to hear the truth, is bittersweet.
I don’t think there’s much in “The Normal Heart” that we don’t already know about; the story of the plague has been told before, and it will and should continue to find new life. But “The Normal Heart” tells it with admirable honesty and plenty of emotion. While New York was steeped in the go-go 1980s, while President Reagan projected his grandfatherly charm to the world, this community pulled itself apart and together in order to fight a war.
Larry Kramer’s play “The Normal Heart” is “semi-autobiographical” in nature. In this case, that seems to mean Kramer ripped snippets out of his diaries and stitched them together into a story, with himself as both hero and bugbear. The play is pointy, scathing, abrasive; it bristles with the energy of outrage, and makes little outwardly evident attempt to pare and polish its narrative. The result leaves one’s heart feeling anything but “Normal” — bruised, maybe, and certainly inflamed, but that’s probably a normal response to a crisis the magnitude of the AIDS epidemic.
The film version replicates the play’s frenetic and scattershot execution. This is especially prevalent early on; as “The Normal Heart” commences, Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo) is arriving at Fire Island for a holiday with his friends, including pretty boy Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch), Bruce’s boyfriend Craig Donner (Jonathan Goff, of HBO’s gay boys in San Francisco comedy “Looking”), and closeted city employee Micky Marcus (Joe Mantello). We’ re shown, with far too much editorial fussiness, the first encroachment of AIDS on the lives of Weeks and his companions: Craig suddenly grows dizzy and weak, and collapses on the beach. Until now, all has been sunshine and hairless skin: Suddenly, its as though clouds have covered the sun, and the film’s look darkens accordingly, with shadows growing deeper and thicker (sometimes almost garishly so). In one scene, Weeks, wandering around at twilight, resolves from the dim like a ghost; before him the fleshy tableau of an orgy unfolds. Happy, liberated sex is now dangerous, and love between men risks being shoved back into the shadows. All of this transpires before the opening title.
Kramer’s play was first written in the 1980s and has only now been translated into movie form, thanks in large part to the persistence of “Glee” and “American Horror Story” creator Ryan Murphy, who directs. The film hews perhaps almost too faithfully to the play — which is not a surprise, given that Kramer himself adapted it for the screen.
But it does pose a challenge. The script retains a staginess about it that’s not immediately user-friendly to someone working in cinema. Murphy accepts that challenge, tweaking the film with inventive, if sometimes odd, touches — a flashback to a bath hour that plays like a sleazy, produced-on-video commercial, for instance. In another scene, a delirious patient, skin marred with KS splotches, begs for his dog; the camera pushes up to his ravaged face, his eyes dead black in the room’s sickly light, and the sound of sirens out on the street floods the soundtrack. A first date veers from political rant to impulsive, greedy kiss in the space of an eye blink. A fractious gathering of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis concludes with the festive glimmer of a disco mirror ball.
Such directorial choices reflect the same mixture of friction, terror, and poignance of the crisis itself, not to mention the combination of humor and pugnacity that Weeks exhibits: Even in his most intense confrontations, Weeks is capable of dry, sometimes cutting humor. Fight or flight is his default setting… without the flight, that is. Weeks is a natural, and tenacious, fighter.
As his friends start growing sick and dying, Weeks grows more upset and befuddled at everyone’s meekness. Sharing his sense of profound concern — and his blunt manner — is Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts), a physician who works closely with New York’s gay population as the new disease spreads and who first sounds the alarm that the mystery illness might be sexually spread. What Weeks wants is for for gay men to get up and make a loud, public noise in order to safeguard their lives; what Brookner wants is for gay men to stop sleeping around. Hers is not a message that’s welcomed by a generation that has made hot, unapologetic sex a political statement, if not an ideology in and of itself.
Bookner is Weeks’ equal, and his complement; Conflict may be his natural condition, but hers is loneliness. He despairs that others aren’t fighting; she can’t see why it’s unacceptable to ask men to refrain from sex. Then again, one senses that the doctor herself lives a solitary life, one that’s confined to a wheelchair ever since a childhood bout of polio. The two may have different responses, but they are on the same emotional wavelength. They are like chalk and chalk. When they share the screen there is a definite, if platonic, electricity and a grouchy tectonic warmth.
But even New Weeks has a heart, and he loses it to Felix Turner, a New York Times reporter Weeks initially pressures to write about the disease. His romantic interest in Turner takes root as gruffly and bluntly as any other strong emotional tie does for the fledgeling activist. Eventually, the two move in together, and here’s where the movie finally finds its center, gaining a sense of pace and rhythm. The frenetic and somewhat choppy first half of the story gives way, by degrees, to a more controlled second half, characterized less by Week’s rages than by quieter moments that carry far more power.
By that point, the film’s structural and stylistic flaws hardly matter; the story’s raw emotional power has taken over. (The play operates in much the same way.) What you’ll come away with is the film’s poignant urgency, still resonant and necessary today. “The Normal Heart” airs at 9:00 p.m. on Sunday, May 25, on HBO.
by Ed Bark May 22, 2014 5:21 PM HBO’s ‘The Normal Heart’ revisits the onset of the AIDS epidemic via Larry Kramer’s strong-worded play
Premiering over the Memorial Day weekend, HBO’s The Normal Heart stands as its own memorial to the more than 36 million people worldwide who have died from HIV/AIDS since the epidemic began in 1981.
That particular postscript to the film has its own jarring afterlife. Thirty six million!!! In that context, the film’s protagonist, Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo), has every right — and then some — to spew rage and invective throughout a good part of The Normal Heart. Adapted from Larry Kramer’s same-named original 1985 off-Broadway production, it debuts on Sunday, May 25th at 8 p.m. (central) with a running time of just over two hours.
Weeks, founder of the New York-based Gay Men’s Health Crisis advocacy group, is pretty much an autobiographical stand-in for Kramer himself. He’s first seen on a 1981 boat excursion to Fire Island, where big gaggles of uninhibited gay men drink and party pretty furiously while also eagerly coupling with established partners or new acquaintances.
Although he’s openly gay, this is not Weeks’ style. An early scene finds him watching from afar as a single, loveless, lonely man.
But other gay men are starting to get very sick in a hurry, crowding the offices of wheelchair-bound, polio stricken Dr. Emma Brookner (a deglamorized Julia Roberts). As the death toll mounts, Brookner urges Weeks to speak out and “tell gay men to stop having sex” in hopes of curbing this mysterious attack on immune systems.
At a subsequent meeting, she encounters outrage from a large group of vocal naysayers who contend that the gay political movement was built on the freedom to love and make love openly.
“Doesn’t common sense tell you you should cool it for a while?” Dr. Brookner asks. The answer is a resounding no.
Directed by Ryan Murphy (creator of Glee and American Horror Story), the film is unafraid to initially portray gay men as largely hedonistic pleasure-seekers. Screw everyone else; we’re too busy screwing each other. But the nuanced characterizations begin to kick in when Weeks approaches gay New York Times reporter Felix Turner (Matt Bomer from USA’s White Collar series), who covers gay artists without revealing their sexual orientation in print.
Turner is reluctant to write about the rampaging “gay cancer” afflicting and killing gay men. He is, however, willing to date Weeks. They’re soon the loves of each other’s lives while Weeks continues as a perceived loose cannon within the Gay Men’s Health Crisis group. Its president, pretty boy Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch from Friday Night Lights, remains a closeted investment banker who lost his latest boyfriend to AIDS. There’s also Tommy Boatwright (Jim Parsons reprising his 2011 Broadway revival role), who’s openly gay, outwardly prissy but in many ways the backbone of the organization.
Alfred Molina likewise has a key role as Ben Meeks, Ned’s older, straight and successful attorney brother.
“You guys have a dreadful image problem,” Ben tells Ned in reference to the sexual promiscuity coursing through the gay community.
Still, the brothers have remained pretty close until Ned eventually blows up over Ben’s refusal to “acknowledge me as your equal, your brother!”
Ned verbally explodes a lot. Roberts’ Dr. Brookner also gets a chance to go ballistic in the face of continued under-funding of her work. And another advocacy group member, mayoral assistant Mickey Marcus (Joe Mantello), rages and weeps at length before Parsons’ Tommy Boatwright quietly persuades him to leave the office.
Parsons doesn’t have all that many scenes. But he has one of the more effective ones while delivering his latest church eulogy and adding the deceased’s name to his growing pile of Rolodex cards.
“Why is no one helping us?” he asks, sobbing as his quiet anger mounts. “And here’s the truth. Here’s the answer. They just don’t like us.”
There’s another quiet scene that also resonates. It’s when Ned Weeks meets Dr. Brookner at her apartment and urges her to get out of her wheelchair for a little dance. “Don’t scratch my Mathis,” she says with perfect delivery as he puts Johnny Mathis’ “Chances Are” on the turntable. But the tender moment passes after he describes himself as a “terrible leader” of the gay activist group before she instantly retorts, “And terrible dancer. Put me back.”
The Normal Heart grows in poignancy as characters we’ve come to know are affected or afflicted by AIDS. Ruffalo’s Ben shoulders a good deal of the emotional pain while also becoming unbearable to his activist friends.
The film has uniformly strong performances but lacks the instant impact of NBC’s trailblazing 1985 film An Early Frost or the more far-ranging depth of the 1993 HBO movie And the Band Played On, which also depicted the outset of the AIDS epidemic and the deaf ears turned to it.
The Normal Heart adds to this catalogue without flinching or pulling punches. It’s polemical to be sure, but why shouldn’t it be? There’s really no other side to a story about an epidemic that was ignored for far too long because the people it killed were deemed expendable by way too many among us.
Written, directed and acted with a passion that radiates off the screen, The Normal Heart is drama at its most incendiary, a blunt instrument that is also poetic and profound. Larry Kramer wrote the 1985 play in a white heat, recalling a time when the AIDS epidemic was ignored by doctors, politicians and many gay men. Seen on Broadway in a Tony-winning 2011 revival, The Normal Heart is now a full-out, see-it-feel-it-touch-it film, available on HBO from May 25th. Directed with ferocity and feeling by Ryan Murphy (Glee), this American horror story is indispensable viewing, still vital and relevant. As Ned Weeks, the gay activist based on Kramer, Mark Ruffalo gives a virtuoso performance of loneliness, terror and fearsome resolve. His skill is matched by Julia Roberts as a doctor immobilized by polio, another virus, but whose mind never stops stirring things up. Matt Bomer cuts deep as Ned’s closeted lover, and Alfred Molina stings as Ned’s lawyer brother. As gay men in crisis, Taylor Kitsch, Jim Parsons and Joe Mantello (who played Ned onstage) all excel. But it’s Kramer, still raging over what’s not being done, who tears at your heart.
‘The Normal Heart’ Still a Powerful Call to Action
By Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times May 22, 2014 7:30 PM
As the great Cynthia Ozick once observed, “In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.”
In the early 1980s several things were obvious to writer Larry Kramer. Gay men were literally dropping dead and neither the government nor the medical establishment seemed to be doing much to stop it. Moreover, no one, outside of other — increasingly terrified — gay men, seemed to care.
So Kramer wrote “The Normal Heart,” a blunt instrument of a play debuting in 1985 in which his thinly disguised avatar, a New York writer called Ned Weeks, watches friends die, helps form the Gay Men’s Health Crisis center and does a lot of yelling. About homophobia and the Holocaust, about the perils of the closet, about society’s unforgivable hypocrisy and gay men’s own self-destructiveness.
“The Normal Heart” was a howling call to action, designed to push people out of their ignorance, complacency and seats to demand justice, and funding, for all.
Now, after years of languishing in development purgatory, it has been turned into a film. Directed by Ryan Murphy, who worked with Kramer on the adaptation, and featuring a remarkable cast that includes Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer, Julia Roberts, Alfred Molina and Jim Parsons, “The Normal Heart” debuts Sunday night on HBO.
It is a moment of fury and grace and wonder that this “Heart,” in which a brutally specific story is deftly re-tailored for another medium and time, loses none of its original passion or pointedness. Where the play sought to make the personal political, this “Normal Heart” steps back enough to make room for characters to develop as fully as the message. The political comes full circle and is personal once again.
When “The Normal Heart” first debuted, Kramer’s refusal to choose cunning, to cloak his rage in metaphor or sneak up on the audience with sentiment, offended many. It will no doubt do so again.
As in the original, Kramer excoriates the Reagan administration, then-mayor of New York City Edward Koch, the medical community and the New York Times for their slow response to the crisis. But Reagan, who famously did not refer to the disease by name until 1987, also blamed gay men themselves, particularly activists, for their circumstance since they refused to change their sexual behavior.
Time, and rewrites, have softened some of the play’s stridency. More important, the romance between Weeks (Ruffalo) and his lover, Felix (Bomer), is given a more prominent role as is Felix’s death spiral, giving the story power both broad and intimate.
Indeed, the casting of these two men alone gives the play new life. Ruffalo is a performer of such depth he could, and did, infuse the Hulk with soul. Meanwhile, Bomer’s fine work on “White Collar” has proved him the actor Hollywood believed for decades could not exist — an openly gay man who can still make women swoon playing a straight lead.
Here, the pair are just heartbreaking.
The film opens on Fire Island, where Weeks is clearly uncomfortable with the summer bacchanal, and not just because he (like Kramer) has written a book criticizing the post-Stonewall gay movement for focusing so exclusively on sex. He is just not into it. The sun is shining, the music’s playing, the boys are beautiful and it is difficult not to see Weeks’ bleak outlook as prophetic. For soon many of these beautiful men will start dying.
Which they do, to the seeming consternation of no one save Dr. Emma Brookner ( Roberts, reminding us that she doesn’t have to own the story to own the screen). A polio survivor now bound to a wheelchair, Brookner understands the fatal flukes of disease. When she realizes that it is only gay men who are dying from illnesses that their bodies should have easily fought off, she seeks a leader to rally the gay community into a program of abstinence and education.
Weeks does what he can, which is not all that much. In saying what is obvious — that this is an epidemic, which the authorities and potential victims should do everything they can to end — he is met with doubt, silence and resentment.
Officials don’t want to hear it, and neither do gay men who fought so hard to achieve sexual freedom. As with any whistle-blower or prophet, Weeks is told that change takes time and diplomacy works better than demands. Which Kramer does not seem to accept any more now than he did then.
With the many recent shifts in legalities and attitudes — fittingly, “Normal Heart” debuts just days after Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cam (Eric Stonestreet) tie the knot on “Modern Family” — it’s tempting to view “The Normal Heart” with pained nostalgia, as a cinematic monument to an Unfortunate Period in Our History.
It is not that at all.
Despite the wonders of “Modern Family” or Murphy’s own groundbreaking “Glee,” the closet still confines Americans of all ages. Yes, let’s celebrate Macklemore’s Grammy win for “Same Love,” but as the song says, many still suffer often fatal physical and emotional abuse. AIDS too, is alive and well and claiming millions of lives worldwide, as a bit of alarming text at the end of the film makes clear.
In the film, just the sight of Kaposi’s sarcoma on men who soon dwindle to bone and ashen faces triggers memories of a terrible time and all those lost. And, yes, the TV audience can now comfort themselves with a silver lining — the gains made by the LGBT community most certainly arose from the crucible of AIDS.
But the themes Kramer shoved in our faces almost 30 years ago are not matters of history. In one of the story’s most effective, and affecting, subplots, Weeks confronts his brother (Molina) for refusing to admit that being gay is not a defect, for loving Weeks despite who he is, an attitude still prevalent today among even those who consider themselves enlightened.
Those disenfranchised for whatever reason remain at risk of being harmed or dying in great numbers before society, or the world, reacts. Silence can still very much equal death, and body counts alone don’t ensure action.
Windy City Times @WindyCityTimes1 43s
#TheNormalHeart saw it in chicago tonight. Wow. It is incredible. Do not miss this film on @HBO . Kudos to actors and @ryanmurphy24
The New York Times
Raging Amid Tears in a Gathering Storm Mark Ruffalo Stars in Larry Kramer’s ‘The Normal Heart’
By NEIL GENZLINGER MAY 22, 2014
“The Normal Heart,” Larry Kramer’s impassioned j’accuse about the early years of the AIDS crisis, is an entirely different thing from what it was when first staged as a play at the Public Theater in 1985. Back then, it was, above all, a political statement about continuing indifference toward the gathering storm of AIDS; those strident speeches that the central character, Ned Weeks, delivered onstage could just as appropriately have been shouted on the sidewalks outside City Hall or the White House.
The film version of the play that’s being shown Sunday on HBO allows us to view “The Normal Heart” instead as a sort of documentary of recent history, a cousin, oddly, of the just opened National September 11 Memorial Museum. It invites us to pause and reflect: “Here is a version of something incredibly traumatic and transformative that we collectively went through. This take on it may be imperfect, but it’s a subject worth contemplating, because we were all changed by it, in ways that we probably don’t yet fully realize.”
The movie, adapted by Mr. Kramer and directed by Ryan Murphy, simultaneously exposes some of the play’s flaws and finds alternate sources of power in the story. Mark Ruffalo plays Ned, the main character (and a stand-in for Mr. Kramer), who sounds an early alarm among gay men in New York about the mysterious disease that is beginning to claim lives in the opening years of the 1980s.
Mr. Ruffalo makes Ned incredibly irritating (as he’s supposed to be) as he harangues everyone in sight, trying to get his fellow gay men to reconsider their sexual behavior and the political establishment to pay attention to the crisis. But this Ned is all annoyance, all the time; no empathy for him allowed, even though, at this point, we know he is on the right side of history. Presumably, that’s the portrayal Mr. Kramer wanted, but it’s a little off-putting on television, which is full of nuanced characters who can be simultaneously disliked and loved. Ned’s preachy speeches seem preachier than ever.
The film also underscores the manipulative parts of the piece, especially when characters we barely know die. Characters die all the time on television, of course, but these days, it’s generally to jolting effect, because we have come to know them over multiple episodes. This “Normal Heart” can feel a bit dehumanizing, as if it’s introducing characters only to kill them in hopes of wringing some tears out of us. Television viewers today are not likely to cry on command like this; they’re used to fuller portrayals.
There is one amazing exception: the character of Felix, Ned’s lover, a reporter at The New York Times. We do come to know Felix, and Matt Bomer, who portrays him, makes sure we understand just what AIDS meant to this character and, by extension, to thousands of gay men who suffered and died in this period. Shooting on the film reportedly stopped for some time while Mr. Bomer lost 40 pounds to portray Felix after he has come down with the disease. It’s a frightening thing to see, and an example of how Mr. Kramer and Mr. Murphy take one of the play’s strong points and, through the flexibility afforded by film, make it even more powerful.
The medium is also put to good use in other ways. The film opens with a visit to Fire Island that conjures the gay scene and anything-goes attitude of the period in a way difficult to do onstage. It has bits of sex, nudity and intimacy, all of them appropriate to the subject matter. And where, in the play, a character might describe an experience, here we can see it. A monologue about a flight home with a sick friend can be compelling, but being inside that airplane — a hermetically sealed tube full of people, fear and ignorance — is harrowing on a whole other level.
The cast is full of stars, and all of them make contributions without letting their stardom draw attention away from the subject. Julia Roberts does fine work as Emma Brookner, the doctor who, from a wheelchair (a result of polio), realizes that something terrible is happening among her patients and tries to fight on their behalf. Jim Parsons of “The Big Bang Theory,” reprising a role he played in a 2011 Broadway production, is amusing and, ultimately, heart-wrenching as Tommy Boatwright, who signs onto Ned’s crusade early. Alfred Molina, playing Ned’s brother, has some fine scenes opposite Mr. Ruffalo, and one small but pivotal one late in the film with Mr. Bomer.
Other big Hollywood names are attached to this film behind the scenes, and everyone involved hopes the movie will bring “The Normal Heart” to audiences that might not have access to the kinds of theaters that would stage the play. Not all of these audiences are going to be comfortable with seeing a story about gay men, even three decades after AIDS first came to public consciousness. But that, perhaps, is part of the point of making this film at all. Just as those early alarm sounders warned, AIDS has turned out not to be exclusively a gay men’s issue or something that the straight world could safely ignore. Complacency and indifference are always the default responses to things that seem on the surface like someone else’s problem. But they’re rarely the right responses.
The Normal Heart
HBO, Sunday night at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.
Produced by Plan B Entertainment and Blumhouse Productions in association with Ryan Murphy Productions. Directed by Ryan Murphy; written by Larry Kramer, adapted from his play; Mr. Murphy, Dante Di Loreto, Jason Blum, Brad Pitt and Dede Gardner, executive producers; Mark Ruffalo, co-executive producer; Scott Ferguson, producer.
WITH: Mark Ruffalo (Ned Weeks), Matt Bomer (Felix Turner), Taylor Kitsch (Bruce Niles), Jim Parsons (Tommy Boatwright), Alfred Molina (Ben Weeks), Julia Roberts (Dr. Emma Brookner), Joe Mantello (Mickey Marcus), Jonathan Groff (Craig), Denis O’Hare (Hiram Keebler), Stephen Spinella (Sanford), Corey Stoll (John Bruno), Finn Wittrock (Albert) and B. D. Wong (Buzzy).
The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
‘The Normal Heart’ Packed with Memorable Performances
By Mark Dawidziak, The Plain Dealer on May 22, 2014 at 12:00 PM, updated May 22, 2014 at 12:24 PM
CLEVELAND, Ohio — It’s a gorgeous summer day on Long Island, N.Y. It’s a perfect day.
The sky is crystal blue. The sun playfully adds glistening highlights to the gentle waves.
Nothing but smiles and laughter on the ferry making its way out to Fire Island. What could possibly go wrong on a day like this?
The shadow of impending tragedy briefly makes itself known as two friends walk along the beach. A football is being tossed around. One of the players starts to cough. Then he collapses in the surf.
He quickly recovers. The spell is casually dismissed as too much sun — just feeling a little lightheaded, you know.
The stricken man is gay. He has a disease that is yet to be named. It is 1981.
This is the prologue to HBO’s powerful, heart-rending film version of “The Normal Heart,” Larry Kramer’s Tony-winning play about the onset of the HIV-AIDS crisis in New York City. It’s a richly cinematic scene that takes full and immediate advantage of the jump to a new medium.
It hauntingly sets up everything that is to follow. So there’s increased resonance to that moment in the play when people start dying and growing fear wrestles with a sense of disbelief.
“It can’t happen this fast,” one character says.
“It just did,” answers another.
As marvelous as this opening is, the transition from stage to screen is not always smooth. This has more to do with Ryan Murphy’s uneven direction than it does with the writing or the performances.
Adapting his semi-autobiographical play for HBO, Kramer makes a consistently admirable attempt to open up an unapologetically polemical work designed for the stage. In doing so, he sacrifices none of the play’s raw intensity, passion, pain, rage and, yes, outrage.
But Murphy, whose TV credits include “Glee” and “American Horror Story,” is not quite so adept at navigating the play’s deeply troubling emotional waters. There are times when his direction falters, tripped up by weirdly self-conscious touches. There are other times when those waters, and his film, just get choppy, making a jumble of what should be a sustained rumble of discontent.
That’s just at times, however, and Ryan is wise enough to keep things completely focused when great actors are making the most of great dialogue. That’s where “The Normal Heart” beats most furiously. It is a movie packed with sublime performances and searingly memorable moments.
Serve up enough great moments (and “The Normal Heart” certainly does), and Ryan’s occasional missteps are easily dismissed as mere annoyances, not major gaffes.
Leading the dramatic charge is Mark Ruffalo as the incredibly blunt, abrasive, irascible, combative and outspoken Ned Weeks. If you’ve ever heard Kramer interviewed, you’ll quickly recognize relentless Ned as his alter ego.
Ned is a fighter. He likes to fight. And when nobody takes the “gay cancer” seriously, Ned takes on everybody — including his friends. Working with an equally blunt doctor, Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts), he battles to raise awareness of this mystery disease.
She challenges him, although Ned doesn’t need much provocation.
“So where’s this big mouth I hear you’ve got?” she says.
It’s soon in full roar as Ned fights against ignorance, bigotry and denial. The last of those brings him into constant conflict with other leaders of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis organization.
“”We have to do something,” Ned says. “No one else will.”
But his confrontational personality and angry outbursts frighten and alienate friends. Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch), a closeted investment broker, encourages a more cautious approach.
And so the debate is played out as more and more time is spent going to funerals and memorials. If “The Normal Heart” were only about debate, however, it would be more of a pamphlet than a play. It is primarily and profoundly a character-driven drama, and the characters couldn’t be better realized.
Ruffalo is at the center of “The Normal Heart,” yet this is hardly a one-man show. There are sensational performances from, among others, Matt Bomer, Alfred Molina and, reprising his role from the 2011 Broadway production, Jim Parsons.
One of the most riveting and devastating moments in the film is Parsons‘ delivery of the “all the plays never to be written” monologue. It makes you weep for all those plays that will never be written, and it makes you grateful that this one was.
Published on May 22, 2014
Ned Weeks desperately tries to take action against a deadly new disease affecting the gay community. But the government and the medical community remain silent. So he decides to shout louder, threatening to alienate everyone close to him.
Starring Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts, Matt Bomer, Taylor Kitsch, and Jim Parsons.
Directed by Ryan Murphy
Written by Larry Kramer
Produced by Brad Pitt, Ryan Murphy, and Scott Ferguson.
Genre: Drama.
Network: HBO
Aaron, Zorianna, and Kevin discuss the topical drama, The Normal Heart.
Starring Aaron Fink, Zorianna Kit, and Kevin Taft.
Directed by Eric Howell.
Edited by Hayden Johnson.
Sound Design by Aaron Fink. Produced by David Freedman, Cooper Griggs, Aaron Fink, Kevin Taft, Pedro Raposo, Amy Taylor, Liz Manashil and Hannah Wade.
Slate
May 22 2014 2:05 PM By Willa Paskin “By 1984 You Could Be Dead” HBO and Ryan Murphy‘s Tremendously moving “The Normal Heart”
The Normal Heart, premiering on HBO this Sunday, is a blunt, effective instrument, a handsome, walloping cudgel that begins in gay paradise on the eve of the apocalypse: Fire Island, 1982. In the film, directed by Ryan Murphy and adapted by Larry Kramer from his 1985 play, Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo), closely based on Kramer, disembarks a ferry stuffed to capacity with gorgeous, lithe young men and walks to a beach house where hard-bodies lounge on beach chairs in joyful, frivolous camaraderie. Ned is already something of an outsider. He’s self-conscious about his body, buttoning up his shirt as he gets off the ferry. (If Ruffalo being anxious about his looks strikes you as implausible, you should see the hunks here assembled.) A critic, like Kramer, of the hedonistic aspects of ’70s gay life, Ned is skeptical of sex as an act of political freedom. So his Fire Island trip is uncomfortable even before a young man, seemingly the picture of health, collapses on the beach. The plague is upon them, and it turns Ned’s pugnacious, outspoken qualities into useful weapons.
Ferocious, strident, bellicose, out of the closet, Ned is politicized instantly. He heads to the doctor (Julia Roberts, her smile stapled into a frown) treating the cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma popping up all over the city. He lobbies his straight brother (Alfred Molina) for pro bono law work. He hectors Felix Turner (Matt Bomer), a gay style reporter at the New York Times, for coverage, and falls in love with him instead. He helps begin Gay Men’s Health Crisis with a group of his more politic friends (Taylor Kitsch, Joe Mantello, the particularly scene-stealing Jim Parsons). He writes scathing op-eds that are taken verbatim from Kramer’s own famous 1983 essay “1,112 and Counting”:
I am sick of closeted gays. It’s 1983 already, guys, when are you going to come out? By 1984 you could be dead. Every gay man who is unable to come forward now and fight to save his own life is truly helping to kill the rest of us.
The NormalHeart is not subtle in its dramaturgy, but it is affecting. The only real cure, Kramer restates, is to live not in fear, but in fury, to demand resources, respect, equality; Ned’s anger feels urgent rather than merely repetitive. If Ned and some of his friends have to repeat their mission statement over and over again, well, when your life’s endangered you scream for help until someone hears you.
Murphy directs with straightforwardness and sincerity and none of the camp fireworks of Glee or American Horror Story. This adaptation could have been a quarter as good and still would have induced tears; if it makes one sentimental to cry at the gross indignity of having your corpse disposed of in a garbage bag because of whom you love, let us all be sentimental. If some of this material—scenes of lesions and deathbeds, of men being denied the right to say goodbye to their lovers—is becoming a part of the tragedy canon, so be it: It belongs. Murphy lays all of this on, but not overly thick; he pays as much attention to his characters’ bodies in health as in sickness, in love as in death.
The Normal Heart was first staged at the Public Theater in 1985. It is hard to imagine just how bleak it must have been to see it that year, when a major accomplishment was getting Ronald Reagan to say the word “AIDS” out loud for the very first time. In 1985, $50,000 seemed like a lot of money for research, and a recent point of debate had been whether Gay Men’s Health Crisis should have been passing out information suggesting the disease was sexually transmitted. Given all of this, it is remarkable not just how righteous Ned and Kramer’s fury was, but how right.
From 2014, the absolute certainty of Ned’s positions just seem prescient—not, as they would have in 1985, mind-bogglingly, inhumanly, hubristically assured. Ruffalo, ever lovable, softens Ned further, as does the love story between him and devoted, hot, maritally inclined Felix. The fact—and complications—of Ned’s mulishness, necessary as it may have been, gets lost. It takes a late speech from Mickey (Mantello), shaking, infuriated, lunging at Ned for calling him a murderer, to remind us of the audacity of Ned’s now-vindicated position. But even this speech is not quite enough to make present-day sense of how Ned came to be kicked out of GMHC for being embarrassing and uncontrollable, with his former friends saying they were “more angry at you than ever towards anyone.”
The movie ends with Ned, alone and grieving, visiting Yale, where as a freshman, convinced he was the only gay student at the whole university, he tried to kill himself. It’s Gay Week, and the room is full of young men dancing cheek to cheek; from 2014, the moment feels hopeful, presaging a world where young gay men and women are free not just to dance but to marry. But in 1985, those college kids were about to enter a world in which a solution of any kind was still very far away. Kramer was two years from founding ACT UP (which, as the great documentary How to Survive a Plague shows, took years to be effective, though it began agitating immediately.) Many of them would be dead before the decade was through.
And yet despite the distorting distance of nearly 30 years, The NormalHeart feels relevant. We have made progress on the problem of AIDS and the matter of inequality, but we haven’t cured either. The Normal Heart, set in the 1980s, is not yet a period piece—maybe someday soon.
Effective Melodrama of HBO’s “The Normal Heart” with Mark Ruffalo
by Brian Tallerico May 22, 2014
Fantastic performances balance out Ryan Murphy and Larry Kramer’s melodramatic approach to the history of the AIDS crisis in HBO’s highly-anticipated “The Normal Heart,” premiering Sunday, May 25th, 2014. The creator of “Glee” and “American Horror Story” has always been a writer/director willing to yank at heartstrings; subtlety has never been a strong suit. And yet perhaps it’s time for a film about the AIDS crisis that’s this emotional, in-your-face, and even manipulative. Be moved. Be angry. Be ashamed at the way our country addressed the fact that an entire community of people were dying. And be appreciative of a cast that can find the truth in the melodrama. In the end, Murphy is a fascinating dichotomy in that he works expertly with actors and actresses (even in a mess like “Eat Pray Love” and undeniably in every season of “AHS”) and so the performances he draws from his inevitably-Emmy-winning cast play tug-of-war with his melodramatic leanings and, ultimately, win the fight enough to allow his film to resonate.
In a break from the play on which it’s based, Murphy’s film opens on Fire Island in 1981. In the opening scenes, naked men cavort, take turns shaving each other, and one falls down, coughing on the beach. Murphy nearly works in visual title cards: “These are gay men who are getting sick.” A scene that follows shows Ned Weeks (the always-great Mark Ruffalo) noticing a headline about a “rare cancer” killing homosexuals, and the stage is set for a drama about the early days of AIDS, how it was ignored, the brave men who fought for the attention needed to treat it, the tragic stories of men who died and those who loved them.
It’s mere minutes before Murphy is offering close-ups of lesions, and yet it is this direct approach that often serves the story and the emotion of the piece. “Don’t look away as so many people in power did in the ‘80s.” It also helps significantly to have an actor with the subtle gifts of Ruffalo front and center. Every time that Murphy threatens to drag the piece beyond the melodramatic pale, Ruffalo grounds it. Ned Weeks, a writer who clearly serves as a stand-in for Kramer himself, is a loud, proud, gay man, the kind of activist who pushed buttons, tried to pull people out of the closet for the cause, and believed in extreme measures to get attention. Ruffalo brilliantly plays Weeks as a man who is inherently shy and seemingly out of tune with his community (he’s often fighting with his friends and colleagues about how to approach the crisis and deal with their own sexuality) and yet he’s also the greatest champion of equality. Ruffalo finds a way to make him seem both insecure in his private moments and fearless in his public cause. He’s going to win an Emmy. Bet on it.
Ruffalo is ably assisted by a notable cast, including Alfred Molina as his brother, Taylor Kitsch as a friend and fellow activist, Jim Parsons as a colleague at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and Julia Roberts as the first doctor willing to address the cause. Not everyone works. Kitsch and Parsons seem a bit out of their leagues at times. But there are undeniably fantastic performances in here, particularly “White Collar” star Matt Bomer as Weeks’ boyfriend, a writer from the New York Times who is forced to cover fashion instead of AIDS, and Molina, who has a scene with Ruffalo that says so much about where we were with homosexuality and the AIDS crisis in the ‘80s in that Ned’s own brother just thinks his sibling is sick. Every moment between Ruffalo and Bomer has an undercurrent of emotional truth. We believe their relationship, making its inevitable trajectory all the more tragic. The star of “White Collar,” who underwent McConaughey-esque weight loss for this part, proves he will have a career far beyond the day that his USA hit has ended. (It should also be noted that Broadway vet Joe Mantello absolutely destroys a monologue late in the film as a man at his emotional and intellectual end, unsure how to even fight any more.)
The scenes between Bomer & Ruffalo or the blow-up with Molina are indicative of the critical dilemma at the core of “The Normal Heart.” As soon as you’re tempted to write off the soap operatic elements, an actor like Ruffalo finds the truth in the piece. Expect tears before the end of the first half-hour. Expect anger. Expect to be emotionally exhausted. We’ve seen subtle approaches to the embarrassing way our country handled the AIDS crisis of the ‘80s. Perhaps it’s time for a melodrama on the subject; time for a film made by a man willing to push the envelope and show not just the heartrending toll but the physical, bleeding, painful, horrible one paid mostly by the gay community but emotionally shared by us all.
Thursday, May 22, 2014 3:21 PM EDT
By:Richard OuzounianTheatre Critic, Published on Thu May 22 2014
The Normal Heart does far more than preach to converted Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of Larry Kramer’s landmark play offers scenes of raw sexuality and moments of human warmth.
Ryan Murphy’s film The Normal Heart, which has its exclusive Canadian screening at the Inside Out Festival on May 23 prior to its premiere on HBO Canada on May 25, is an important work for several reasons.
First, it means there is now a permanent record of Larry Kramer’s landmark 1985 play, which dealt with the reluctance of the world to initially admit that AIDS was systematically destroying a significant portion of the global population.
Second, at a time when (according to the New York Times) AIDS may have just ceased to be one of the Top 10 causes of death in New York City since 1983, it reminds us that narrow-mindedness and bigotry are more lethal than any virus.
And finally, thanks to a gifted cast and Murphy’s sensitive direction, Kramer’s sometimes harsh polemic has acquired an empathetic warmth that will see to it that this film does far more than preach to the converted.
The original play (recently revived successfully in Toronto by Studio 180) is still undeniably powerful, but it’s a lot like Kramer himself: tough, relentless and unforgiving. Although it can still bring an audience to tears, there are times when it has the relentless quality of a virtuoso debate.
Murphy serves notice from the beginning he’s doing something different. The first few minutes are a rhapsody to how glamorous and sexy and inviting the gay scene was in 1981. The battle with the police at Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Tavern in 1969 had led the way to gay rights, if not gay equality, and liberation was the order of the day for many.
Mark Ruffalo (playing the Kramer surrogate) rides the ferry to Fire Island on a radiant Friday afternoon in summer. Everywhere there is beauty, fun, camaraderie.
And then, in the middle of a frivolous game of volley ball, golden boy Jonathan Groff starts coughing, falls to his knees and keels over. He will prove to be one of the first to die of “the gay plague.”
From that sure-handed beginning, Murphy moves on, combining scenes that shock with their raw sexuality as well as moments that hold us with their human warmth.
Ruffalo goes through a variety of emotional hoops, totally engaging our sympathy, while Matt Bomer, as his journalist lover, manages to be heartbreakingly engaging as well.
Jim Parsons is perfection as a gay activist who is never more serious than when he’s being funny — and vice versa — while Taylor Kitsch’s journey out of the closet into activism is deeply moving.
You can see why Murphy wanted to make this project and reportedly spent a great deal of his own money to buy the rights after Barbra Streisand’s decades-long option on the material finally lapsed.
The end result is so good that the few flaws stand out too clearly. Julia Roberts, although the biggest name connected with the project, really isn’t tough enough as Dr. Emma Brookner, and although Murphy and Kramer worked closely on the adaptation, there are still moments when their two sensibilities don’t dovetail perfectly, with Murphy’s sentiment seeming at odds with Kramer’s polemics.
But The Normal Heart is well worth seeing. And, even more importantly, well worth heeding.
Chuck Barry, San Jose Mercury & Contra Costa Times Score=100
Lori Racki, Chicago Sun Times Score=100
Dave Wiegand, San Franscico Chronicle Score=100
Brian Lowry, Variety Score=90
Tim Goodman, The Hollywood Reporter Score=90
David Hinckley, The New York Daily News Score=80
‘The Normal Heart’ Plays it Safe with an ’80s AIDS Landmark Ryan Murphy’s adaptation is heavy on waterworks and light on imagination By Brandon Nowalk May 22, 2014 12:00 AM
C+
The Normal Heart
Director: Ryan Murphy
Runtime: 135 minutes
Rating: TV-MA
HBO’s new movie The Normal Heart is based on a quasi-autobiographical play by Larry Kramer about the early days of the AIDS epidemic in New York. The most breathtaking achievement of that play is its timing—it was produced in 1985 and covered the first half of the decade, before doctors had much idea what they were dealing with. That immediacy charges every scene. AIDS stories are never set that early. Angels In America and Dallas Buyers Club open in 1985. ACT UP, the activist organization founded by Kramer that is at the center of 2012 documentary How To Survive A Plague, was formed in 1987. Rent starts in 1989. But The Normal Heart goes from the first reporting on “gay cancer” and ends before President Reagan ever even acknowledged the plague. Of all these looks at the early days of the AIDS epidemic, The Normal Heart stands on the front lines, screaming at the top of its lungs that people are dying. Unfortunately, powerful as the play is, Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of it makes for a cinematic tearjerker that’s more relentless than it is masterful.
HBO’s adaptation of The Normal Heart opens at a Fire Island shindig in 1981. Craig (played here by Jonathan Groff) welcomes protagonist Ned (Mark Ruffalo), introduces his boyfriend Bruce (Taylor Kitsch), and at one point loses consciousness for a second on the beach. Ned, a writer and self-proclaimed asshole based on Kramer, had been warning the gay community against the psychological dangers of promiscuity but soon learns about the physical dangers as well: “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” reads the New York Times’ first mention of the disease. Craig dies almost as soon as he’s diagnosed, and Ned and Bruce begin an organization, Gay National Health Crisis, to make some noise about the disease—Bruce playing good cop to Ned’s bad. Also involved are Craig’s doctor, Emma (Julia Roberts), a closeted Times style writer named Felix (Matt Bomer), and a self-reported Southern bitch (whose performance begs to differ) named Tommy (Jim Parsons).
Kramer’s script is a landmark for its timing, but it necessarily ends before there is any progress—fracturing from lengthy conversations to a series of monologues as AIDS takes its toll. It also neatly winds Ned’s journey through a number of obstructions, the better to get the audience’s dander up. The federal government refuses to acknowledge AIDS, much less fund significant research. Ned’s brother, Ben (Alfred Molina), loves and supports Ned, but can’t bring himself to actually help—standing in for all the so-called allies who are the hardest enemies to see.
Most of all, there’s gay resistance. Closeted politicians try to sweep the issue under the rug so as not to call attention to themselves. The out-and-proud bunch refuse to keep their pants zipped, and Kramer’s script is as sympathetic as it is damning. After all, they’ve spent their lives fighting for exactly that sexual liberation, often at the cost of families and careers. How can they be asked to give that up? And if they do acknowledge the disease is a clear and present danger to the gay community, was all the work of the sexual revolution simply to transform them from “fags” and “sissies” to scapegoats for an epidemic? The Normal Heart is fundamentally a clash between two opposing ideologies, Bruce’s handsome, conventional, inside-the-box institutional appeasement versus Ned’s ugly, urgent, disruptive sausage-making.
In the sense that the script is an apologia for activist stridency and noise, it fits Ryan Murphy’s work like a key. The writer and executive producer’s high school dramedy, Glee, proudly waves its issue-of-the-week afterschool-special banner, especially when it comes to queer causes, and the series is never shy about asserting itself. Discrimination is a problem, Glee says, and here is exactly what needs to be done about it. And as one of the loudest voices behind gay issues on-screen in Hollywood, Murphy’s a natural for The Normal Heart.
But Murphy’s also a misanthrope fueled by some of Ned’s fire, and his Normal Heart is one long funeral procession. Perhaps he sees a kindred spirit in Kramer’s protagonist, but it’s rare to see much of Murphy’s mischief shine through the material beyond sparing flourishes, like a snap zoom or a gaudy barrage of action. One exception comes during a first date between Ned and Felix. Ned doesn’t remember they’ve met—indeed, they’ve already had sex—so Felix refreshes his memory. Suddenly the entire look of the show is transformed into a squarish VHS-quality ad for a bathhouse, all smeared colors and visible tracking. It’d be indistinguishable from a period commercial if not for a shot of two men, one in a towel and one in a jock strap, caressing themselves as the narrator advertises the facility’s remarkable versatility.
The performances are literally shaky, from wavering accents to tremulous monologues, but the movie’s such an overwhelming weepie that they fit right in. Even the good times are susceptible to falling anvils. The opening birthday scene plays like a slash of the grim reaper’s scythe. The only light at the end of this tunnel is 30 years away. In 1985 there was an urgency galvanizing The Normal Heart. In 2014, the animating force is melodrama—to give us all a good cry over what’s happened, and then at the end remind us that HIV still infects over 6,000 people daily. The film deserves points for the reminder that this isn’t just our elders’ fight, but HBO’s The Normal Heart won’t inspire an audience to act up at all. If only it had less of Murphy’s inner Bruce and more of his inner Ned.
Grade: C+
Directed by: Ryan Murphy
Starring: Mark Ruffalo, Taylor Kitsch, Matt Bomer, Julia Roberts, Jim Parsons
Debuts: Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern on HBO
Format: Drama feature
May 22, 2014 12:00 AM By Rob Owen / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
HBO’s searing adaptation of playwright Larry Kramer’s 1985 stage play “The Normal Heart,” directed by Ryan Murphy (“Glee,” “American Horror Story”), offers a stinging political indictment of the shameful attitudes toward gay men’s health in the 1980s and a touching evocation of the human losses suffered due to HIV-AIDS. And the film boasts winning, Emmy-bait performances all around.
“The Normal Heart” begins somewhat shakily as Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo) travels to Fire Island for a summer weekend with friends. He’s not entirely comfortable there because he previously wrote a book whose portrayal of gay men on Fire Island rankled some.
“All I said was having so much sex makes finding love impossible,” Ned says in his own defense.
In these early scenes, Craig (Jonathan Groff, “Looking”), the lover of Ned’s closeted investment banker friend Bruce (Taylor Kitsch, “Friday Night Lights”), coughs and falls down on the beach. It’s overly melodramatic foreshadowing and in the scenes that follow — Ned reads about this newfound “gay cancer” in The New York Times on the ferry back from Fire Island, the early meetings that will lead to the establishment of Gay Men’s Health Crisis — “The Normal Heart” sets up a bit of a “this happened, then this happened” rhythm that does not bode well.
But just as quickly, the film gets this historical crutch out of its system and begins to explore in greater depth the characters and their relationships, particularly the love loner Ned finds with journalist Felix (2000 Carnegie Mellon University grad Matt Bomer, “White Collar”).
With the help of polio-stricken, brusque Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts), Ned tries to galvanize gay support for promoting the awareness of HIV-AIDS (before the disease even had that name) but finds he’s shouting into the wind. Even Ned is daunted at the outset.
“You realize you’re talking about millions of men who have singled out promiscuity as their principle political agenda? How do you deal with that?” Ned asks Emma after she says he can help by telling gay men to stop having sex.
“Tell them they may die,” she replies.
“They think sex is all they have,” Ned responds, sounding momentarily defeated.
Clearly there are ways “The Normal Heart” is a product of its time — the film deserves creative points for beginning with the HBO logo from the 1980s — but it’s also a necessary reminder of the toll HIV-AIDS can take, particularly for a new generation of young men for whom safe sex is no longer the almost mandatory mainstream approach that it was in the late 1980s and 1990s. (A scene that may resonate more with gay youth today features a seemingly anachronistic pseudo-wedding of two gay men when one is on his deathbed.)
While “The Normal Heart” tracks chronologically the responses to the growing HIV-AIDS crisis, the film’s true focus remains on Ned. Whether he’s challenging his brother (Alfred Molina) to accept him as his equal or embarrassing GMHC figurehead Bruce with his polemical political declarations, the film is all about Ned’s passions.
The performances — including from co-star Jim Parsons (“The Big Bang Theory”) — are all-around terrific with Ms. Roberts a shoe-in for an Emmy nomination for a scene where her character delivers a fiery denunciation of a National Institutes of Health representative who refuses to fund her HIV-AIDS studies.
There are a few fleeting sex scenes but far more intimate are scenes of tender care and heartbreaking fights between Ned and Felix after Felix begins to show symptoms of the disease. These moments will make the normal hearts of viewers beat a little faster and encourage tears to flow more freely as the film approaches its emotional peak.
“THE NORMAL HEART” Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO Grade: B
Buoyed by A-list star power, “The Normal Heart” beats erratically for more than two hours, yet delivers a gut punch in its climax.
Mark Ruffalo (“The Avengers”), Matt Bomer (“White Collar”), Jim Parsons (“The Big Bang Theory”) and Academy Award-winner Julia Roberts are among those who elevate a choppy screenplay, Larry Kramer’s own adaptation of his Tony-winning, autobiographical drama about the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
Directed by Emmy winner Ryan Murphy (“Glee,” “American Horror Story”) and with such producers as Brad Pitt and Ruffalo, “Normal” suffers from the flaw of many adapted plays; it never escapes its stage roots.
Just about every character suffers a “meltdown moment,” a near-soliloquy in which he or she rants against the virulent discrimination gays faced in the early ’80s, the horrors of the virus and the government’s incompetent response.
Some hit harder than others, but most stop the story rather than keep it moving.
And when it turns personal, “Normal” can be baffling.
Political activist and writer Ned Weeks (Ruffalo), Kramer’s stand-in, can’t believe that somebody as good-looking as closeted New York Times reporter Felix Turner (Bomer) would want to date him.
And here’s the problem with the vanity casting: Ruffalo is hardly the Vice President of the Troll Club, much less a member.
His Ned Weeks, like Kramer in real life, must be abrasive to the point where we can understand — and even sympathize with — the other activists who ostracize him because of his attention-grabbing tactics, such as accusing then-New York Mayor Ed Koch of being a closet case.
Film production was halted midway so Bomer, who looks as if he carries zero percent body fat on his USA Network series, could lose weight to show the ravages of AIDS.
He reportedly dropped 40 pounds, and it’s horrifying to see him so emaciated — which is the point.
Roberts makes interesting choices as the hard-headed physician confined to a wheelchair because of a childhood case of polio. Alfred Molina (“Spider-Man 2”), as Ned’s conflicted brother Ben, and Taylor Kitsch (“John Carter”), as Ned’s closeted friend, deliver solid support.
A film coda reminds us that every day, another 6,000 people are infected with HIV.
“Who’s fighting for the living?” Ned demands at one point.
‘The Normal Heart’ is Flawed, but Beats with Passion
Robert Bianco, USA TODAY 3:53 p.m. EDT May 22, 2014
The film version of Larry Kramer’s searing play is imperfect, but still worth your time.
Sometimes the power of the message trumps the flaws of the messenger.
Succeeding where many others had failed, producer and director Ryan Murphy has brought us a long-awaited film version of The Normal Heart (HBO, Sunday, 9 ET/PT; ***out of four) — Larry Kramer’s searing 1985 play about the onset of the AIDS crisis. That’s a long time to wait, but Kramer’s work is as forceful and, perhaps, essential as it was the day he wrote it, and it’s worth sharing even in an imperfect film version.
On stage, Normal Heart was an educational tract, a love story and, more than anything else, a howl of righteous anger, capable of moving an audience both to tears and rage. This film will still move you. You will still learn lessons that should not be forgotten about the fear, foolishness, prejudice and intentional blindness that doomed millions to die who might otherwise have been saved. But the anger that lesson should provoke is either muted or missing.
Based on Kramer’s experience as co-founder of New York’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Heart stars Mark Ruffalo as the Kramer stand-in Ned Weeks. Ned has a message to spread: There’s a terrifying new disease out there that may be connected to sex. But it’s not a message a newly liberated gay community wants to hear, or one the brusque, arrogant Ned is best suited to spread.
He needs allies, and finds one in an equally brusque doctor, Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts). Most people ignore them, but a few listen — including Ned’s friend Bruce (Taylor Kitsch); a sweet Southern boy, Tommy (Jim Parsons, repeating his stage role); and a city worker, Mickey (Joe Mantello, who played Ned in a 2011 Broadway revival). And Ned finds both an ally and lover in Felix, a New York Times reporter played by Matt Bomer (a casting choice that, if nothing else, will flatter reporters everywhere).
In this age of star power, it’s possible the film would not have been made without Ruffalo and Roberts, and yet neither quite feels right in the role. They do well in their big scenes, but in others — as in a dinner they share — they’re charming approaching adorable, which undercuts their characters. The film works better when it’s being driven by Parsons (whose performance will be a revelation for some) and Mantello, whose breakdown leads you to wonder what might have been had he been allowed to repeat his starring role.
What Mantello projects, and the movie lacks, is a kind of raw, exposed-nerve drive. As a play, The Normal Heart was political theater: It strong-armed you, but it worked. The movie emphasizes the love story to the point where it borders on romantic fantasy. A story of love surviving all can be moving, yes, but it was already told by Longtime Companion.
That’s not where Heart’s power lies, and not the message it’s best suited to convey.
Actors find the Human Pulse in HBO’s ‘The Normal Heart’
Ned Weeks is stubborn, irascible and, at times, even unlikable — just the kind of soldier needed during the early years of the battle against HIV-AIDS.
Ned (Mark Ruffalo) is at the center of HBO’s The Normal Heart (Sunday, 9 p.m. ET/PT), a film adaptation of Larry Kramer’s 1985 play that centers on a group of gay men in New York who band together to fight a mysterious disease first identified as a “gay cancer” that eventually claims people from all walks of life.
Ned, a screenwriter and Kramer’s alter ego, is the raging voice in a cast of characters based on real people that includes his eventual lover, New York Times reporter Felix Turner (Matt Bomer); the closeted banker and military man Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch); and a deceptively steely Southerner, Tommy Boatwright (Jim Parsons).
Ned confronts everyone from government officials who don’t respond out of fear, ignorance or prejudice to his loving but homophobic brother, Ben (Alfred Molina), to other gay men, many of whom do not want to give up hard-fought sexual freedom in order to avoid infection.
“He was a prophet. He saw it as an existential threat in a way that nobody else did. … He’s running from person to person trying to relate the truth of what is coming and no one wants to believe it,” Ruffalo says. “What do you do but scream and yell and try to get attention? He understood that that was his place and it was brutal to him.”
At one point in the film, directed by Ryan Murphy from Kramer’s screenplay adaptation, Ned is thrown out of the activist group he started by its members. It’s led, instead, by the more discreet Bruce, who had lost his lover to AIDS and chooses to work quietly and cooperatively with potential allies.
Ned and Bruce “want to end up at the same point, but just have entirely different views and ways of getting there,” says Kitsch, adding that the disease takes an emotional toll on all of them. “Everyone there was dealing with their own demise, their own demons, their own fear, their own mourning.”
Ned and the others are joined in their fight by Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts), a dedicated physician who is familiar with the dangers of viral disease from her own struggle with childhood polio. Roberts had turned down the role, based on the real-life. Linda Laubenstein, in an earlier attempt to film the play, but the character finally connected with her after she watched a documentary on polio.
“I suddenly realized that the mystery, the fear, the pandemonium that polio caused, it was the same thing in her mind that was happening with AIDS. People didn’t know where it was coming from, how it was being transmitted, what was going to happen,” says Roberts. “Suddenly, I understood how she was so relentless and furious and (why she) just would not stop trying to fix it.”
As Ned wages his fight, he also falls in love with Felix, who is emboldened by his new partner even as he becomes sick with the disease.
“One of the things that’s so heartbreaking about their relationship is that they both have things that complement each other. Ned is a firebrand and his chutzpah enables Felix comes to terms with parts of himself that he might not have in a relationship that was more staid. And I think Felix’s patience and love tempers Ned’s fire,” says Bomer, who lost a dramatic amount of weight during a production break – “I stopped weighing myself (after dropping) 35 pounds” – in order to portray the physical ravages of AIDS.
Parsons felt a special sense of camaraderie with his colleagues in both the film and a 2011 Broadway production.
“While this is not a war movie in a literal sense, you are a group of people in battle together and every scene that you’re in with these other men and women, you are fighting for a united cause. You’re in it together,” he says.
The actors say they are honored to be part of Kramer’s work and to portray the real-life activists whose legacy goes beyond fighting AIDS.
“As horrific as the disease is and was, it did bring people together and created a voice that still resonates today. We need to recognize that we stand on their shoulders to have a lot of rights that we have today, like marriage,” says Bomer, who is married to Simon Halls and has three children. “We owe so much to Larry. He was somebody who stood up at a time when it was massively unpopular to do so.”
Three decades after it was written, The Normal Heart has been turned into an HBO film, and its stars say the play still beats loudly with a message of outrage, sadness, tenacity and, in the end, hope.
The adaptation of Larry Kramer’s 1985 play (Sunday, 9 ET/PT) chronicles the terror of the HIV-AIDS crisis in New York in the early 1980s and the resolve shown by a group of gay men who fought ignorance, panic, prejudice — and sometimes each other— to raise awareness and spur treatment of a disease that would eventually claim millions of lives.
The story of that struggle remains important today, especially for younger people who may not be familiar with the era, says Julia Roberts, who plays Emma Brookner, a doctor and activist who treated and advocated for patients.
“It can keep reminding people that it wasn’t so very long ago, and we were not there for each other in a way that is really shocking,” she says. “To forget is to make the same mistake again. … It’s great to remind people, to say, ‘Yes, this is what happened, so let’s be mindful of each other and be loving and compassionate.’ ”
In the film, the AIDS toll is underlined when activist Tommy Boatwright (Jim Parsons) catalogs the deaths by removing cards from a Rolodex file and adding them to an ever-expanding stack in his desk drawer.
“When you see something as simple as a Rolodex card being taken out because the person is no longer with us, it says more than the grandest gesture ever could,” Parsons says. “You don’t have to be gay and you don’t necessarily have to have known anybody who’s gotten sick to understand the depth of what’s being told here and the heartbreak of it.”
Amid the horror, however, Heart also depicts the indomitable spirit of the men, from the irrepressible catalyst (and Kramer alter ego) Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo) to the closeted and more diplomatic Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch), and those who supported them, including reporter (and Ned’s eventual lover) Felix Turner (Matt Bomer). Under Ryan Murphy’s direction and Kramer’s adapted screenplay, Heart evolved from the piece of political “agitprop that it had to be … to shake people out of their stupor” in 1985 to an expanded look at human nature, Ruffalo says.
In the end, “what was so surprising was how much about love this actual story ended up being. It was love in every different manifestation: Brotherly love, sexual love, love of comrades in arms, the love of a culture, tough love, the love of honesty,” he says. “It went from a movie about AIDS to a movie about love and human experience.”
The Hollywood Reporter
‘The Normal Heart’: TV Review
10:59 AM PDT 5/21/2014 by Tim Goodman
Ryan Murphy Collaborates with Larry Kramer to bring his acclaimed, searing drama about the onset of AIDS in America to small screen.
You might wonder what a film version of Larry Kramer’s acclaimed, Tony-winning play “The Normal Heart” – which first premiered in 1985 and was then revived on Broadway in 2011 – could really add to the story or why, even, HBO decided to green-light it.
But director Ryan Murphy makes it very clear from the onset – the movie is a way to not forget. The movie is a way to take something revered in theater circles and give it wide release with a cache of bright stars. It’s a movie that will get seen and the message about the horrible history of the beginning of the AIDS epidemic won’t be forgotten.
Adapting his own play, Kramer keeps the anger front and center – more than one character in the movie shouts or cries or both, with startling clarity, a question that cuts to the bone – “Why are they letting us die?”
For those people who didn’t see the play or, more important, weren’t witnessing or reading about the onset of what was first described as “gay cancer,” The Normal Heart works best as modern history. Knowing what we do now, it’s hard to fathom that so many people looked the other way. And so many facets of government – from major cities (this is set in New York) to the White House – were years late in acknowledging the spread of the disease, worsening its impact.
The Normal Heart beats with Kramer’s anger and disappointment and is not afraid to point fingers at those who stuck their heads in the sand. What makes the story so powerful in many ways is how those in the gay community were resistant to the notion that a “plague” was underway and those who were closeted and in positions of power (and did nothing, initially) get the deepest scorn.
Starring Mark Ruffalo as Ned Weeks, essentially a stand-in for Kramer, The Normal Heart kicks off in 1981 with a look at Fire Island summer frolics in the gay culture, but almost instantly turns dark with the first coughing signs from Craig (Jonathan Groff), the lover of Bruce (Taylor Kitsch), a closeted investment banker.
From there, it’s a quick escalation – even at 2 hours and 15 minutes, it’s hard for Murphy and Kramer to cram in all the years, tears and politics of a multi-year battle (whereas the play could be more direct, a film needs to breath a bit but can’t in this situation — it’s a wonder that HBO didn’t make this a miniseries instead).
But at least with the escalating pace, there’s never a flagging sense that the AIDS crises just simmered without much damage – the number of victims rose steadily and alarmingly and Kramer and Murphy make that statement swiftly. But even with the mounting funerals and sense of community-wide devastation that gives the film its deepest sense of sorrow, the “outside” world didn’t take much notice, and that ends up being the most harrowing factor of looking back at history. It’s always the inaction that seems most profoundly shocking in retrospect.
The Normal Heart manages to work both sides of the issue – the anger at inaction and those complicit in turning a blind eye, and the personal toll the disease takes.
Ruffalo gets to embody both equally as Ned is the rabble-rouser calling the community to action but also in love with Felix (Matt Bomer), a New York Times reporter who gets the disease and withers away slowly and sadly while Ned watches. Bomer is excellent here and, among a star-studded cast, truly stands out.
Jim Parsons is also excellent and adds both compassion and humor as he revises his role from the play. The Normal Heart also stars Julia Roberts as Dr. Emma Brookner, Alfred Molina as Ned’s brother Ben, plus Joe Mantello, BD Wong and Finn Wittrock.
While a miniseries might have truly been something to behold – allowing the slow helplessness to really penetrate viewers, there’s something to be said about making a big, loud noise and getting the message out – again. In that sense, both Murphy and Kramer do the play justice (as you would expect) and have created a powerful modern history reminder for those too young to understand the all-too-recent past.
HBO will debut The Normal Heart this SUNDAY, MAY 25 at 9:00 p.m. (ET/PT) on HBO. The drama stars Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer, Taylor Kitsch, Jim Parsons Julia Roberts, Alfred Molina, Joe Mantello, Jonathan Groff, Denis O’Hare,Stephen Spinella, Corey Stoll, Finn Wittrock, and BD Wong.
Directed by Ryan Murphy and written by Larry Kramer, adapting his groundbreaking Tony Award-winning play of the same name, THE NORMAL HEART, tells the story of the onset of the HIV-AIDS Crisis in New York City in the early 1980s, taking an unflinching look at the nation’s sexual politics as gay activists and their allies in the medical community fight to expose the truth about the burgeoning epidemic to a city and nation in denial.
Reviews for the highly anticipated film are coming in – let’s see what the critics have to say!
David Hinckley, NY Daily News: Matt Bomer shines as Felix Turner, a reporter who gets involved with Weeks. Taylor Kitsch plays a more cautious activist; Julia Roberts matches Ned’s rage as Dr. Emma Brookner, a doctor banging her head against walls, and Alfred Molina has a splendid turn as Weeks’ conflicted straight brother Ben. This reincarnation of “The Normal Heart” raises all the right disturbing questions.
Brian Lowry, Variety: In its totality, this represents a powerful piece of work, with Ruffalo overcoming the prickly aspects of his character to convey his pain, and Jim Parsons delivering a wonderful supporting turn, including a sobering scene in which he talks about eulogizing fallen friends.
David Wiegand, SFGate: Watching Ryan Murphy’s HBO adaptation of “The Normal Heart” isn’t always easy, but there are reasons you should watch – millions of them, in fact… The Normal Heart” seethes with rage, truth and love in every single performance by an A-list cast. You should watch because Larry Kramer’s play is so much more than an agitprop relic from the early years of AIDS – it is a great play that has become an even greater television film.
David Zurawik, The Baltimore Sun: The power of this HBO movie starring Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts and Jim Parsons is such that you can forget about turning off the TV after the final credits roll and going to bed as you might with most made-for-TV movies. This one, adapted by Larry Kramer from his Tony Award-winning 1985 play, will keep you up for hours in an emotional churn thinking about life, love, loss, death and politics.
Chuck Barney, San Jose Mercury News: Although Murphy broke ground with his depictions of gay relations on television, he’s known more for heightened, over-the-top fare than sobering drama. But here he has tamped down all his baroque tendencies in favor of a sure-handed, straightforward approach. What he delivers is a film with piercing emotional honesty that feels rough and real, intimate and truly full of heart.
Carla Meyer, Sacremento Bee: “Heart” is a quality production throughout. Mark Ruffalo gives a complex performance as Kramer’s alter ego, Ned Weeks, leading a fine cast whose biggest name is Julia Roberts.Though Roberts plays only a few notes as a physician/researcher, she plays them well.
HBO has a storied tradition of movies and miniseries tackling gay issues (and not incidentally, timing those high-class productions toward the close of the Emmy-eligibility window, ensuring they’re fresh in the minds of voters). Add to that honor roll “The Normal Heart,” a meticulously cast adaptation of Larry Kramer’s play about the early days of the AIDS epidemic, directed with equal passion (and a characteristic lack of subtlety) by Ryan Murphy. Anchored by Mark Ruffalo’s forceful performance as Kramer’s angry alter ego, the movie is big, loud, messy and emotional — a fitting bookend to 2003’s “Angels in America.”
Ruffalo stars as Ned Weeks, a writer introduced during a Fire Island romp in 1981, which essentially offers a last-call glimpse of the freewheeling times that preceded the outbreak. Soon, friends begin falling ill, as Ned seeks help from a polio-stricken doctor (Julia Roberts) and pushes to form the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an organization intended to sound alarms within the gay community as well as to lobby for government support, initially from aloof New York mayor Ed Koch, and later the Reagan administration.
Ned’s anger — he considers closeted gays a huge part of the problem, failing to stand up and have their voices heard — makes many fellow advocates uncomfortable, starting with Bruce (Taylor Kitsch), who resists Ned’s confrontational philosophy. Ned’s campaign also brings him into contact with a closeted New York Times reporter (Matt Bomer) who, like Bruce, is reluctant to speak out, but does become the ill-fated love of Ned’s life.
Aside from chronicling the indifference of authorities as the epidemic spread, “The Normal Heart” is at its core a sustained debate about tactics. At first, the gay community sees the warnings about the “gay cancer” as just another effort to restrict them, forcing them to sacrifice the liberating gains they’ve fought so hard to win.
To Ned, though, the confounding lack of answers concerning the illness — and the fact, “Nobody gives a shit that we’re dying!” — is exacerbated by the failure of his contemporaries to fight, even if that means himself being pugnacious to the point of dismissing his own organization’s leadership as “undertakers.”
Murphy being Murphy, he can’t resist throwing in moments that drift toward an “American Horror Story” vibe, such as a subway sequence where dramatic lighting flashes in and out on a lesion-pocked face. The translation from stage to screen also yields speeches that probably played better live, although the director has for the most part opened up the Tony-winning material into movie form.
In its totality, this represents a powerful piece of work, with Ruffalo overcoming the prickly aspects of his character to convey his pain, and Jim Parsons delivering a wonderful supporting turn, including a sobering scene in which he talks about eulogizing fallen friends.
Politically, of course, anything that rehashes President Reagan’s failure to publicly mention “AIDS” until his second term will raise hackles, but in a larger sense, the movie offers a pretty good road map for where the steadfast lobbying efforts of Kramer and others lead.
Perhaps foremost, HBO once again straddles the cinematic line, providing a character-oriented drama with theatrical talent and values that would face challenges finding much purchase at the modern-day multiplex. And while there’s a premium-channel calculation in that strategy, the result is a movie, for mostly better and sometimes worse, that wears its heart on its sleeve.
TV Review: ‘The Normal Heart’
(Movie; HBO, Sun. May 25, 9 p.m.)
Production
Filmed in New York by Plan B Entertainment and Blumhouse Prods. in association with Ryan Murphy Prods.
Crew
Executive producers, Ryan Murphy, Dante Di Loreto, Jason Blum, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner; co-executive producer, Mark Ruffalo; producer, Scott Ferguson; director, Murphy; writer, Larry Kramer, based on his play; camera, Danny Moder; production designer, Shane Valentino; editor, Adam Penn; music, Cliff Martinez; casting, Amanda Mackey, Cathy Sandrich Gelfond. 132 MIN.
Cast
Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer, Taylor Kitsch, Jim Parsons, Julia Roberts, Alfred Molina, Joe Mantello, Jonathan Groff, Denis O’Hare, Stephen Spinella, Corey Stoll, Finn Wittrock, BD Wong
AM New York: ‘The Normal Heart’ starring Mark Ruffalo: 3 stars
By ROBERT LEVIN May 20, 2014
Given the recent progress in HIV/AIDS research and gay rights, it’s a bit disquieting to return to the Tony-winning Larry Kramer play “The Normal Heart” in this movie treatment premiering on HBO Sunday.
The film chronicles the early days of the HIV/AIDS crisis, when the pleas of the gay community landed on resoundingly deaf ears.
It’s a different kind of horror story for director and “American Horror Story” co-creator Ryan Murphy, a picture about activists struggling to be heard (it’s centered on the founding of Gay Men’s Health Crisis) while their community is ripped apart by an inexplicable plague.
Kramer co-founded GMHC and was heavily involved in this early period. The protagonist here is the fictional Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo), based on Kramer himself, and the movie finds its dramatic center in his profound outrage at both the ignorance and disinterest of the wider world and the non-confrontational tactics of his fellow activists. The film feels a tad stage-bound but the acting is terrific and the reminder of how far we’ve come — and how much further there is to go — is essential.
‘The Normal Heart’
3 stars Airs on HBO on Sunday at 9 p.m.
The San Jose Mercury News
Review: HBO’s ‘The Normal Heart’ hits the right notes By Chuck Barney Posted: 05/20/2014 12:01:00 PM PDT
It took much too long for “The Normal Heart” to make the jump from stage to screen, but thanks to the triumphant efforts of director Ryan Murphy and an A-list cast featuring Mark Ruffalo and Julia Roberts, the wait was worth it.
Based on Larry Kramer’s searing 1985 play, HBO’s “The Normal Heart” tells the harrowing story of the early days of the AIDS crisis when gay men in New York, San Francisco and elsewhere were dying of mysterious diseases while many, including some in the gay community, turned a blind eye to the burgeoning epidemic.
Ruffalo plays Ned Weeks, whose boyfriend, Felix Turner (Matt Bomer), becomes fatally stricken. As the body count rises, so too does Ned’s indignation. Assisted by Emma Brookner, a doctor disabled by polio (Roberts), and a group of activists, including Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch), and Tommy Boatwright (Jim Parsons), Ned launches a ferocious crusade to seek answers and demand help.
While the film is ultimately a story of love amid tragedy — and of prejudice and human rights — much of its focus is on the dueling tactics used in a battle for which the combatants have few weapons and no historical context at their disposal. Everything is terrifyingly new and unknown and baffling.
Ned believes that one must speak loudly to be heard. Brash, abrasive and fearlessly blunt, he’s a bundle of dynamite poised to explode in the faces of indifferent politicians and journalists, and medical officials who seem to be in denial.
“We have to do something. No one else will,” he says, trying to rally his colleagues to a more forceful demonstration of outrage.
But his friends, many of them closeted, fear that Ned’s belligerence will only further alienate those who already look down on them. They stick to the view that “you get more with honey than with vinegar.”
Even as he runs into roadblocks, Ned’s passion remains relentless. But there is heartbreak and disappointment at every turn, especially in clashes with his older brother Ben (Alfred Molina), an aloof lawyer who refuses to accept Ned as his equal.
It’s hard not to shower praise on Ruffalo, who brings the proper amount of edge and energy to the role and rocks the heck out of his combative scenes. But he’s also magnetic in the quieter moments, especially when he’s tenderly caring for Felix, who is wasting away before his eyes. It’s then we see that his character’s fury is fueled by a deep-rooted fear of loneliness.
Bomer, who went on the Matthew McConaughey plan and lost 40 pounds for the film, plays Felix with impressive warmth and vulnerability, and his chemistry with Ruffalo is striking. Then again, this entire cast shines, including Roberts, who plays Emma with substantial empathy and passion, and Parsons, who reprises his role from the 2011 Broadway revival.
But perhaps the real surprise is the behind-the-scenes work of Murphy, the co-creator of “Glee” and “American Horror Story.” Although Murphy broke ground with his depictions of gay relations on television, he’s known more for heightened, over-the-top fare than sobering drama.
But here he has tamped down all his baroque tendencies in favor of a sure-handed, straightforward approach. What he delivers is a film with piercing emotional honesty that feels rough, and real, and intimate, and truly full of heart.
SUPER TV?: Your local cineplex has been riddled with superheroes and other comic-book-inspired characters for years. And now TV is geeking out as well.
Last week, the broadcast networks unveiled their new lineups, which included a stunning number of shows taken from the pages of comic books. Coming your way on The CW are “The Flash” and “iZombie,” both based on DC Comics characters.
Meanwhile, Fox added “Gotham,” a Batman origin series; NBC will air “Constantine,” based on the “Hellblazer” series about demon hunter John Constantine (Matt Ryan); and ABC has “Agent Carter,” a drama derived from a Marvel Comics saga starring Hayley Atwell (“Captain America”) as a 1940s secret agent.
These shows, of course, are in addition to returning series, “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” (ABC) and “Arrow” (The CW).
Is it way too much? Probably. Then again, who needs another derivative cop or doctor show?
‘The Normal Heart review: a million reasons to watch ‘
David Wiegand DAVID WIEGAND
Published 11:21 am, Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Watching Ryan Murphy’s HBO adaptation of “The Normal Heart” isn’t always easy, but there are reasons you should watch – millions of them, in fact.
You should watch the 132-minute film, premiering Sunday, because “The Normal Heart” seethes with rage, truth and love in every single performance by an A-list cast. You should watch because Larry Kramer’s play is so much more than an agitprop relic from the early years of AIDS – it is a great play that has become an even greater television film.
Kramer, one of the founders of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York City, first saw his play performed in 1985. At the time, it was considered an important work, but viewed more in terms of its advocacy than as great theater. The play made enough of an impact to spark a discussion of adapting it for film or TV, but for nearly 30 years, nothing happened. One reason for that was doubt that a theatrical film about gay men dying of AIDS could make money. Another was the growing misperception that AIDS was no longer the public health and political issue it was in the years before medical advances made it possible to live with the virus that causes it.
Murphy clearly saw that “The Normal Heart” was not trapped in the amber of a few brief years in the early 1980s. His film, with an adaptation by Kramer, captures the conflicting attitudes and emotions in the New York gay community as indifference and denial turned to panic, anger and despair, but it also recognizes that “The Normal Heart” tells a human story far beyond both its subject matter and the time in which it is set.
1st cases overlooked
In 1980 and ’81, a few cases of a previous unknown disease began popping up in New York among gay men. News stories about the new illness were either ignored or buried by most newspapers, making them easy to overlook, especially by gay men, who had emerged from the sexual “wars” of the ’60s and ’70s believing not only that they had a right to be loud and proud, but that expressing their sexuality was as important as saying aloud, “I’m gay.”
Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo, “The Kids Are All Right”) is an abrasive activist-slash-writer who tries to rally gay men toward awareness of the growing health crisis and lobbies in vain for the New York Times to give the issue appropriate coverage.
Soon enough, the situation is impossible for gay men to ignore, although the straight world would do its damnedest for several years. When Ned urges sexual abstinence as a way of stopping the spread of the so-called “gay cancer,” he may as well be advocating a mass return to the closet by the entire gay population of New York.
He finds a powerful ally in Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts, “Erin Brockovich”), whose childhood battle with polio has left her in a wheelchair as an adult but has also taught her that health crises demand urgent and focused response.
As Weeks steps up pressure on the Times, he meets a lifestyle writer for the paper named Felix Turner (Matt Bomer, “White Collar”) who becomes his lover.
Moment in history
Murphy’s film captures so much about this moment in history, not the least of which is how AIDS would politicize gay men and, in many ways, lay the groundwork for the growing acceptance of LGBT people in our own century.
Although out in some ways, some of the characters in “The Normal Heart” are still living double lives, such as Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch, “Lone Survivor”), an investment banker who becomes the first president of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Weeks continues to press GMHC toward greater urgency and action, to the point where he is viewed as more harmful than helpful and is expelled from the group.
He is motivated not only because he believes in the ACT-Up battle cry “silence equals death,” but for personal reasons as well: Turner is infected. Feeling as helpless as Weeks, we watch as Turner grows more gaunt, his life draining slowly but inevitably away.
It’s impossible not to be moved by the sense of anger and frustration that infuses “The Normal Heart,” but Kramer’s screenplay corrects the play’s imbalance between political issues and the humanity of the characters. Because of that, the play has developed an even more universal appeal as a television film. Anyone who has sat at the bedside to hold the hand of a loved one whose life is slipping away, can identify with the abyss of pain and helplessness that men like Weeks experience.
Superb directing
Murphy’s direction is superb, especially in the performances he elicits from this cast. Ruffalo seethes with rage and impatience as Weeks. With this single performance as Turner, Bomer handily demonstrates that he is so much more than a smooth pretty face. He begins as the Matt Bomer we know from “White Collar” – handsome, serene, seemingly unflappable. As his body shrinks and his eyes and cheekbones become sunken, we feel Turner working so hard to maintain that outer serenity, to mask the terror and growing hopelessness inside him. It is a performance of singular power and beautifully modulated complexity.
Entire cast noteworthy
Others of note? Well, truth is, that would include the entire cast. Jonathan Groff (“Looking”) as Craig, felled by illness before he or anyone else knows what hit him; Kitsch as the serial monogamist Bruce Niles; Jim Parsons (“Big Bang Theory”), as sweet-natured Tommy Boatwright, quietly tracking the tragic progress of AIDS through his own Rolodex cards. Alfred Molina (“Spider-Man 2”) is memorable as Week’s lawyer brother; stage director Joe Mantello (“Take Me Out”) delivers a soliloquy of anger that becomes a dramatic fulcrum in the play; and Roberts, sour, steely and unglamorous, makes Brookner the cold-hard-facts foundation of the play.
Artists often respond to cataclysmic moments in history, but only a relative few works transcend their own eras to a level of timeless greatness. In the now 33 years since AIDS was identified, novels such as Dale Peck’s “Martin and John,” Bill T. Jones’ “Still/Here” and the play and film of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” occupy a different tier than, say, the film “Longtime Companion.” It isn’t just that the more memorable works transcend their time – it’s that they are first great works of art and, as such, provide enduring emotional and thematic touchstones to any viewer, reader or listener.
“The Normal Heart” belongs among those great works, as both a play and now as an unforgettable television film. It is emotionally raw, harrowing, and a thing of such singular horrific beauty, it will move you, exhaust you and, almost paradoxically, thrill you at the heights television drama can attain.
The Normal Heart: Made-for-TV film. 9 p.m. Sunday on HBO.
Larry Kramer’s fiery account of AIDS plague gets a vivid re-creation starring Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer and Julia Roberts
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 2:00 AM
Larry Kramer’s 1985 AIDS play “The Normal Heart” is most effective in a good stage production, because it seethes with a visceral anger best felt in the physical presence of the actors.
But this new Ryan Murphy adaptation comes close, thanks in large measure to the fury that Mark Ruffalo gives to lead character Ned Weeks.
Murphy, justly reputed for the quirky twists he brings to shows like “Glee” and “American Horror Story,” plays it much straighter here, so to speak.
He gives little embellishment to Kramer’s snapshots of the 1980s New York gay community, even in the brief early scenes before too many people start coming down with the incurable illness often grimly called the “gay cancer.”
Kramer, and this production, unblinkingly examine how various responses intersected.
With virtually zero help or even acknowledgement from the Ed Koch and Ronald Reagan administrations, the gay community is left to its own fractious devices.
Weeks becomes the voice of outrage, demanding friends and foes alike acknowledge the urgency of this plague.
Matt Bomer shines as Felix Turner, a reporter who gets involved with Weeks. Taylor Kitsch plays a more cautious activist; Jim Parsons is the quiet fatalist who says, “They’re letting us die because they don’t like us.”
Julia Roberts matches Ned’s rage as Dr. Emma Brookner, a doctor banging her head against walls, and Alfred Molina has a splendid turn as Weeks’ conflicted straight brother Ben.
This reincarnation of “The Normal Heart” raises all the right disturbing questions.
TV review: HBO’s ‘Normal Heart’ succeeds with emotional intimacy By Carla Meyer cmeyer@sacbee.com Published: Monday, May. 19, 2014 – 9:32 pm
The personal always outshines the political in “The Normal Heart,” a moving HBO adaptation of writer/activist Larry Kramer’s autobiographical 1985 play set in New York City at the onset of the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Directed with uncharacteristic emotional acuity by Ryan Murphy (“Glee,” “American Horror Story”) and debuting at 9 p.m. Sunday, “Heart” is a quality production throughout. Mark Ruffalo gives a complex performance as Kramer’s alter ego, Ned Weeks, leading a fine cast whose biggest name is Julia Roberts. Though Roberts plays only a few notes as a physician/researcher, she plays them well.
But many moments designed to stir – those in which the fiery Ned decries government inaction toward a health crisis then so new it was called “gay cancer” – lack the power of more intimate scenes. This is partly timing, partly writing.
“Heart” must really have been something in 1985, when it debuted at New York’s Public Theater as a call to action as well as a play. Its debut preceded by three months Rock Hudson’s acknowledgment he had AIDS – an announcement that brought home the reality of AIDS to many Americans. President Ronald Reagan and New York Mayor Ed Koch, Kramer’s main critical targets in the play for not doing enough, still were in office when it debuted. Another target, The New York Times, reviewed it.
The film sticks to the play’s 1981-84 timeline. Given what has come since – not just in HIV/AIDS awareness and treatment, but other screen depictions of ’80s AIDS activism – the film’s political element seems frozen in time.
Love and ‘The Normal Heart’ By Richard Cohen, E-mail the writer
Eddie called himself a private detective, although all he really did was repossess cars. He would show up around 4 p.m. at the cafe where I worked after school, have his usual cup of coffee and tell me a thing or two about what we used to call “real life.” One day he told me how he used to load his coat pockets with brass doorknobs, which he used to “put out the lights” of homosexuals. I was 16 and getting an education of sorts.
That was long time ago. America then was steeped in bigotry of all kinds, but homophobia was not even on the radar. We knew of racism and anti-Semitism and, in a dim way, sexism. Yet gays were supposedly in a different category, which is to say no category at all. Whoever they were — and wherever they were — they deserved what they were getting. Besides, who even knew any?
Well, I did, but I was not aware of that at the time. Now I have male friends who have married other male friends and female friends who have done the same. I still have momentary vertigo figuring out who the husband is and who the wife is, but I exult in a social revolution that has shattered all sorts of arbitrary categories and recognizes the power and universality of love.
This revolution has been so long in coming — and yet so quick in arriving. HBO on May 25 will air Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” a movie version of his play. It is semi-autobiographical and about the onset of the HIV-AIDS epidemic and the adamant refusal of some political leaders, most prominently President Ronald Reagan and New York Mayor Ed Koch, to even acknowledge what was happening. An epidemic was sweeping the gay community, men were dying hideously and often at a very young age — and no one much gave a damn.
The HBO movie is rough on Reagan and Koch. They earned it. Reagan had gay friends and associates and was in no way a bigot. But he was clearly afraid of alienating his conservative base. The Moral Majority’s Jerry Falwell characteristically said later that “AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals.” Reagan did not even mention the word AIDS until the disease was impossible to ignore and his friend Rock Hudson had died from it.
As for Koch, mayor of a city hugely impacted by the epidemic, the movie flat-out declares him to have been a closeted homosexual — afraid to acknowledge the reality of AIDS lest his own secret be revealed. Koch always put his private life off-limits. He was entitled to this — but not at the price of ignoring a public health menace that needed immediate attention. The tendency then and somewhat still today was to blame gay men for their plight. The proposed remedy was to deprive them of their sex life — a remedy some felt was worse than the disease.
“The Normal Heart” is heavy on politics but heavier still on love. There’s plenty of male-male sex in it and some nudity. But by far its message is about the love the Kramer character shares with his partner who dies from the very disease they’re both fighting. AIDS mocks the poet. It’s a messy death.
This love of men for men and women for women is no different and no less powerful than the love of men for women and women for men. It can drive any of us mad, turn us into operatic cliches, cause us to endanger careers — take long walks on the Appalachian Trails of our choice. It’s the stuff of songs. It’s the stuff of life.
It is this love that is at the heart of the same-sex marriage movement. It was an appreciation of this love that got the politically odd couple of uberlawyers David Boies and Ted Olson to defend same-sex marriage. They are both, at heart, admirably romantic.
HBO’s “The Normal Heart” has concussive power. It is a gripping drama — some of it downright shocking — but it is, for all of that, just another love story. That it can be seen this way testifies to how far America has come since Eddie the private eye told me it was good sport to beat up gays. See “The Normal Heart.” If you are the least bit homophobic, it will change yours.
Review: Ryan Murphy Finally Finds the Pulse of ‘The Normal Heart’ in an Uneven but Devastating Adaptation
BY BEN TRAVERS MAY 19, 2014 10:45 AM
There’s a lot of weight behind Ryan Murphy’s HBO film “The Normal Heart.” Not only was the adaptation of the Tony award-winning play a top Emmys contender before anyone ever saw the dailies, but the stark story of gay activists fighting for awareness (and survival) during the HIV/AIDS epidemic carries with it the burden of history, both from its past as a play and the real life stories that inspired it. Knowing Larry Kramer, the playwright who based much of “The Normal Heart” on his own experiences, and having an opinion one way or another on his role in gaining awareness for the crisis is bound to effect how the film is seen. Arguments have been made already, before even seeing the film, based on its history instead of what it’s become. And what Ryan Murphy and Kramer have crafted together is a truly devastating portrait of a dark mark in American history.
For most audiences, “The Normal Heart” is a star-studded true life drama, and the questioning of characters and their intentions will begin and end with what’s on screen. It’s best to view the film this way. Waiting to lay judgment actually pays off in a number of ways, both in allowing the film to tell its story and giving it time it to find its groove.
Murphy, a writer, producer, and creator of multiple touchstone television programs, has struggled when sitting in the director’s chair. His two previous feature films have been train wrecks, more or less, and both are adaptations of cherished novels, giving fans of Kramer’s original play reason to worry. “Running With Scissors” was…well, terrible, and “Eat Pray Love” has become a cliched retort without ever having the respect of similarly ridiculed films (like “Titanic” or “Kramer vs. Kramer”).
His imperfections are apparent during the first hour of “The Normal Heart,” which clocks in at two hours and 15 minutes. Pacing issues are an early problem, with a few jarring transitions from scene to scene not having the desired effect of paralleling the random, rapid, and crippling effect of the disease on its subjects. The issue subsides as the film unfolds, but early character questions go unanswered for so long they could prove impossible to overcome for viewers akin to snap judgments.
Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts), one of the few doctors who will see and treat gay men with the disease at its onset, in particular is difficult to watch. In an early meeting set up by Ned (Mark Ruffalo), Brookner lectures a large group of worried men about their lifestyle, calling on them to stop having sex because it could kill them. The goal of the scene seems to be to show the divide in mentality among those most at risk with the group snapping back at her and walking out, but Brookner steals focus with her brash attitude. Is she upset and stubborn as a doctor or a person? Does she use direct, rather harsh communication because she sees the situation as clear cut as life vs. death, or because she has a problem with the gay lifestyle? It’s unclear and distracting this early, and though it is an interesting dynamic to ponder, it’s not in line with Murphy and Kramer’s central theme or what we come to learn about her character.
Other early scenes suffer from directorial mismanagement or poorly considered decisions. The death of Bruce’s (Taylor Kitsch) boyfriend feels rushed, though Ned and Felix’s (Matt Bomer) relationship is well developed until their first date — Murphy actually uses the line “Do you think we can start over?” as well as the shot of fingers intertwining during a rather dull sex scene. Both are conventional, dated choices in scenes begging for more inspiration.
All that considered, once “The Normal Heart” hits it stride, it hits hard. Murphy still makes a few all too obvious choices (a long-awaited meeting with the mayor’s aide uses shadows so blatantly they may as well have just turned the lights on for the good guys and off for the bad), but the sheer power of the story overwhelms some of the minor mistakes. Numbers — truly frightening numbers — are brought up repeatedly to emphasize the growing urgency of the pandemic, but they also are an effective tactic in grounding the story and placing each part of it in a quickly relatable timeline. This structuring paired with raw emotion make the second half come alive and deliver on the powerful film pushed by HBO these last few months.
Generating that strong sentiment is a cast who’s working hard to make every moment count. Lead by Mark Ruffalo, each character is given their time to shine and each actor steps up to the plate (with the odd exception of Jim Parsons, the only actor returning from the cast of the play — he’s solid in his supporting role, but is given an awkward eulogy to deliver that doesn’t work). The standout is Matt Bomer, whose weight loss is thankfully only one of the reasons his efforts deserve praise. Bomer’s Felix goes through a careful, contextualized transformation of mind and body, avoiding many possible pitfalls along the way. His character is unique and well defined, and Bomer doesn’t shy away from creating the persona with subtle and extreme gestures.
But reactions to the “The Normal Heart” will boil down to the man behind it all, Ned Weeks. Ruffalo’s portrayal of Kramer’s fictional stand-in is impressive, but its the presentation of the man himself that stands out. Rather than feeling pushed to believe Weeks is in the right and ahead of the curve in his crusade for gay rights, there’s a balance of views and respect paid to the people who struggle to step into the limelight.
Bruce, who’s publicly closeted despite being a strong supporter of the movement, is verbally attacked by Weeks, but he’s still given time to convey his side, allowing the audience to understand his reasons — reasons, which are not condemned. In a particularly unsettling scene, Bruce tells Ned of his efforts to take his dying boyfriend home to see his mother. We’re placed in his shoes during the story, and we see how he handled it as opposed to how Ned would have in the same circumstances. Neither is portrayed as wrong or better. It’s honest, and without the history attached to the story, it makes “The Normal Heart” a harrowing reminder of the need for equality, then and now.
Grade: B+
/bent a queer blog
REVIEW: HBO’s ‘The Normal Heart’ Is an Overdramatic Mess and a Missed Opportunity
BY PETER KNEGT MAY 19, 2014 10:39 AM
There are essentially endless histories tied to the nearly 35 years that the world has been aware of AIDS. Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” — whether his 1985 play or the new HBO film which he adapted himself — is just one. A largely autobiographical depiction of Kramer’s experiences in New York City during the first few years of AIDS (which was then simply called GRID — Gay Related Immune Deficiency), “Heart” offers a singular perspective of how the crisis was handled by the gay community, by government authorities, and by Kramer himself (via the slightly fictionalized character of Ned Weeks). And there’s nothing wrong with that. Especially since Kramer’s perspective is a unique and authentic one that felt passionate and necessary on stage. Which is part of the reason why it’s so unfortunate that after years and years of trying to get “The Normal Heart” made into a film, it’s been handled as poorly as it has by almost everybody involved, including Kramer himself.
ANOTHER TAKE: Ryan Murphy Finally Finds the Pulse of ‘The Normal Heart’ in an Uneven but Devastating Adaptation
In one the few sequences that delves considerably from the play, the HBO version of “Heart” begins in the summer of 1981, with Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo) heading to Fire Island to meet up with a group of his friends, including closeted Bruce (Taylor Kitsch) and Bruce’s current flame, Craig (Jonathan Groff, who between this and “Looking” is having a very gay year over at HBO). It aims to set up two of the core narratives of “The Normal Heart”: That Ned is an outsider to the gay community with self-hate issues (he scoffs at the beach party-meets-orgy vibe of Fire Island, even though it’s clear he secretly wishes to feel a part of it), and that a mysterious, unbelievable something is going down in the health of gay men (Groff’s Craig collapses on the beach for no apparent reason, followed up shortly by Weeks’ reading a piece in The New York Times about a “gay cancer”). With campy dialogue and obvious narrative devices, it’s a somewhat forgivably lazy introduction to the world we’re about to spend two hours in, but it’s also the first indication that while Kramer struggles to wholly transition “The Normal Heart” from stage to screen, he could have clearly benefited from working with a director with the capability of knowing how to scale things back a bit, which Ryan Murphy absolutely does not.
Ryan Murphy has had a substantial and at times admirable career with television series. “Popular,” “Nip/Tuck,” “Glee” and “American Horror Story” are all series that have at least in part shown that Murphy has substantial talent. But as a filmmaker, his pre-“Normal Heart” contributions have been two sincerely terrible adaptations of memoirs — Augusten Burrough’s “Running With Scissors” and Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat Pray Love” (the latter of which I’d personally regard as one of the worst movies of the past decade). Unfortunately for anyone with high hopes for “The Normal Heart,” it’s filmmaker Murphy that seems most present here. With someone that had a little more restraint, Kramer’s excessively theatrical script could have blossomed into a rare and powerful example of AIDS depicted in film. But Murphy exaggerates everything even further, from the scenes to the sets to the lighting to the performances, mostly diluting “The Normal Heart” of the emotional resonance so apparent in the history its depicting. Case in point is that initial Fire Island sequence, which complete with consistently cheap and fetishizing close-ups of scantily clad men on the beach briefly feels like a gay version of “Girls Gone Wild” (a flashback sequence at a bathhouse and a scene set a fashion show are similarly horrible).
The film follow Ned from Fire Island back to New York City, where he forms a pioneering interest in AIDS, building a relationship with one of the few doctors interested in the cause (Julia Roberts, on the hunt for an Emmy), and forming the Gay Men’s Health Crisis — a social activism group where he quickly butts heads with every member (including Taylor Kitsch’s still-closeted Bruce and a sassy Jim Parsons as Tommy Boatwright) because of his aggressive tactics (“We’re doomed if we do it your way,” someone yells at him at one point, and they might as well be doing the same for half the movie). We also see him fall in love with a New York Times reporter named Felix Turner (Matt Bomer), who he meets trying to convince to be more aggressive in reporting on the vastly underreported disease. All of which progresses from 1981 to 1984 as the urgency of AIDS intensifies, and every actor gets an overemphasized, grandiose speech that feels made for a clip reel at an award show. Ruffalo, Roberts and Bomer are all for better-or-worse game for this, though Parsons and Kitsch are nearly laughable in their big dramatic moments, suggesting either both were woefully miscast or that Murphy is just too bad a director to show them where to go.
Don’t get me wrong — a film dealing with the onset of AIDS absolutely warrants some dramatics. It was clearly a terrorizing time of gruesome hopelessness and profound paranoia (this film could have just as easily been called “American Horror Story”). But that’s why there was no need for “The Normal Heart” to spend so much time going over the top. The drama is already there, and what the film needed to above all else was humanize it. Which Murphy’s lack of restraint aside, isn’t helped by how Kramer mostly underwrites every character that isn’t his alter-ego (which puts a lot on Ruffalo’s shoulders, and he admittedly does a commendable job with what he’s dealt).
This isn’t to say that “The Normal Heart” isn’t without its moments. It has some smaller, intimate sequences scattered throughout that almost feel like they belong in a different film — and work quite well. Like the courtship between Ruffalo’s Weeks and Bomer’s Felix, which is raw and tender, effectively revealing with more depth the issues Weeks has with his own sexuality. Or a heartbreaking scene set years later where Weeks has to take care of a now AIDS-stricken Felix (Bomer’s physical transformation in the film is notably stunning), holding his skeletal naked body in the shower and scrubbing off the feces he accidentally got all over himself. Or the narrative between Weeks and his high-powered lawyer brother (an excellent Alfred Molina), who ignorantly refuses to do all in said power to help him.
These scenes are where the physical and emotional brutality of AIDS is expressed most truthfully, with the writing, directing and acting all finding uncharacteristic moments of control. If only that could have been the norm for “Heart,” which could have made it a forceful introduction to the impact and history of the disease that stood alongside its exceptional cinematic counterparts “Angels in America” and “How To Survive a Plague.” But it’s not. Instead, it’s messy and disjointed, never confident in its tone and failing to live up to its epic potential. Hopefully if Kramer and Murphy do indeed team up for a sequel, they find a way to make it up to us (maybe by hiring someone else to direct it?).
Grade: C
ANOTHER TAKE: Ryan Murphy Finally Finds the Pulse of ‘The Normal Heart’ in an Uneven but Devastating Adaptation
“THE NORMAL HEART” (8 p.m. Sunday, HBO): Larry Kramer adapts his Tony Award-winning play by the same name in this unflinching look at the dawn of the HIV-AIDS crisis in early ’80s New York City. Three decades and 36 million worldwide deaths later, the film tells the story of a government, medical establishment and public — both gay and straight — that were deep in denial about this burgeoning epidemic. It’s also an intimately personal tale of Kramer’s heartbreaking first-hand experience with the disease. Directed by Ryan Murphy, it’s bound to put Emmys in the hands of a remarkable cast that includes Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts, Alfred Molina, Jim Parsons and Matt Bomer (“White Collar”). Rating: ★★★★
Larry Kramer adaptation among best in TV history on HIV/AIDS
May 17, 2014|By David Zurawik | The Baltimore Sun
HBO’s “The Normal Heart” will do something to you that TV rarely does: rock you to your emotional roots.
The power of this HBO movie starring Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts and Jim Parsons is such that you can forget about turning off the TV after the final credits roll and going to bed as you might with most made-for-TV movies. This one, adapted by Larry Kramer from his Tony Award-winning 1985 play, will keep you up for hours in an emotional churn thinking about life, love, loss, death and politics.
Oh, yeah. It’s political.
I’m not sure you can make an honest movie about AIDS and not get political. And “The Normal Heart,” which opens in 1981 with the onset of HIV/AIDS and its deadly spread through New York’s gay community, makes no apology for its politics.
After a profoundly touching final scene steeped in melancholy, the blank screen fills with a postscript.
“President Ronald Reagan mentioned AIDS publicly for the first time Sept. 17, 1985, vowing in a news conference to make AIDS research a ‘top priority.’ Reagan’s proposed budget for 1986 actually called for an 11 percent reduction in AIDS spending. By the end of 1986, there were 24,559 reported deaths.”
God bless HBO for still making great movies fired by fierce social conscience — movies that refuse to let American TV viewers conveniently forget some of the more disgraceful aspects of our national past, like the Reagan administration’s response to HIV/AIDS.
Reagan’s not alone. Kramer angrily points a finger at the administration of then-New York Mayor Ed Koch, a largely insensitive medical establishment, the press, some gay leaders, and anyone and everyone who looked away while this epidemic started to rage. And good for him.
Good, too, for director Ryan Murphy, of “Glee” and “American Horror Story,” who not only mounted a brilliant artistic production, but is also upfront about his political intentions.
“I have always felt this movie is more than a movie,” he says in an HBO interview. “It’s a movement to a certain degree. It’s a call to arms. That’s how Larry wrote the play, and that’s what the movie is.”
Murphy says one of his primary goals is to try and make sure younger people know the history of HIV/AIDS.
In that sense, “The Normal Heart” joins a short but surprisingly strong list of TV productions that have told that story with power and passion. I say surprisingly strong, because the conventional wisdom is that TV, a medium largely controlled by Madison Avenue since its birth in the late 1940s, has a history of avoiding controversy — especially at the network level.
But one of the first and finest dramatic explorations of HIV/AIDS, “An Early Frost,” appeared as a prime-time movie on NBC in 1985. Aidan Quinn starred as a young attorney who returns home to tell his parents, played by Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands, that he is gay and has HIV/AIDS. Quinn was never better, and D.W. Moffett and John Glover were superb in supporting roles.
NBC estimated that it lost $500,000 because advertisers didn’t want their products associated with the film, but it earned 14 Emmy nominations and an audience of 34 million viewers. Ron Cowen and Baltimore native Daniel Lipman, who would go on to produce “Queer as Folk” and “Sisters,” won an Emmy for their screenplay.
No channel, though, has told this story more intelligently and compellingly than premium-cable HBO, with documentaries like “Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt” (1989) and “The Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter” (1993).
I called “Common Threads,” which used the AIDS Memorial Quilt to sensitively tell individual stories of those who lived and died with the virus, the “best nonfiction TV program of the new season” when it premiered. I hailed it for telling “the massive and awful story of AIDS better than all the news shows on all the broadcast networks during the 1980s.”
“The Broadcast Tapes” tells the story of Peter Jepson-Young, a physician who finds out at age 30 that he has HIV/AIDS and starts taping a weekly video “diary” on Canadian television of what it means to have the virus. While the film chronicles the physical decline of Jepson-Young, it also charts his spiritual and poetic growth as he nears the end.
No AIDS documentary rocked me like “Silverlake Life: The View from Here,” which premiered on PBS in 1993 and included video of a man in the last moments of life and first seconds of death.
“’Silverlake Life’ is the video diary of a gay couple dying of AIDS,” I wrote when it debuted in 1993. “Sound grim? Be warned: It’s more than grim. At times, it’s grueling to watch. But it’s also one of the greatest love stories TV has ever told. It celebrates the commitment of this gay relationship in a way that should shame anyone who thinks marriage is only possible for heterosexuals.”
That’s the highest end of the AIDS-and-TV tradition in which I place “The Normal Heart.” It deserves inclusion with such landmark productions for its artistry and fearlessness.
Ruffalo is overpowering as Ned Weeks, a gay writer and a voice of moral outage demanding a response to HIV/AIDS from the political, medical and media establishments. The Emmy for best actor in a miniseries or movie is not only sure to be his, but you are going to have to go back to Al Pacino’s win in 2004 for his performance in HBO’s “Angels in America” to find as worthy a winning performance.
(That was another high point in TV’s depiction of AIDS. HBO has definitely told this story better than anyone else in television.)
You can also pencil in Roberts and Parsons for Emmys as best female and male supporting actors. Roberts instantly makes you believe in and trust the character of Dr. Emma Brookner, a childhood polio survivor now providing medical care to those affected by the HIV/AIDS virus.
And what a surprise Parsons is going to be to those who only know him from his work in “The Big Bang Theory.” I know about his Emmys for the sitcom, but wait until you see him in the role that he performed onstage in a Broadway revival of Kramer’s play. His eulogy over a friend’s coffin — cataloging the monumental toll AIDS was taking not just the gay community but to the cultural life of the nation — is unforgettable.
But for all that tremendous acting muscle, it’s the writing of Kramer and directing of Murphy that provide the film’s ultimate transcendence. The final scene at a gay dance at Yale University is almost too bittersweet to bear as it reminds viewers of the distance Weeks has traveled since the start of the film in 1981 — and articulates without a word the awful price he has paid for his newfound wisdom.
“The Normal Heart” will do something else to you that TV rarely does these days: show you how much we share with one another once we get past the superficial differences and points of disagreement that so many media outlets seek to exploit in the name of niche programming.
sorry I have no idea what it said there) 2013, she begins a brushing with Superman star Henry Cavill, their overnight romance of 10 days fizzling out as “no matter where we went he stole the show”.
The Normal Heart
The Bazinga Cast 