The Normal Heart (HBO)

The Normal Heart, first a stage play in 1985, now an HBO film, is about the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic in New York City in the early 1980s and a group of men who set out to right it. Sadly, it is not dated. Sadly, it holds up. Sadly, we are still in the grip of it, albeit slightly loosened.

Ned Weeks, portrayed by Mark Ruffalo, is a founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (as was Larry Kramer, who wrote the play as well as the teleplay), and simultaneously the sole voice of reason and a social pariah. He does not have time for his friends’ argument that standing in front of someone and screaming at them to help will result in the government’s actual help in the search for a cure to the then-nameless plague that is taking the lives of his acquaintances, one by one. He is prone to shouting matches and making bold accusations, and at times he is hard to take, but as the movie makes clear, who else is doing anything to help? Not the government, certainly. Remember, these are the Reagan years, before he was lifted onto the pedestal as the Great Republican Savior. These are also the Koch years, and the lack of attention he paid to the killer sickness that decimated his city is on full display here.

Matt Bomer, as Felix Turner, a NY Times reporter and the main character’s boyfriend, is near perfection. Initially he looks remarkably like his character on White Collar, in his suit, Sinatra-blue eyes, and salty wit. Ultimately though, we watch as Felix struggles to die with a bit of dignity left, worn down to a shadow of himself, purple welts covering his bone-thin back. This is not a surprise; many characters in The Normal Heart do not survive, as so many gay men in the early 1980s and on did not. Bomer’s Felix is the stand-in for the audience’s friends lost to AIDS in the 80s. We watch him fade as we watched our family friends fade. I was a child again, watching people disappear into themselves, not arrive at the playground with their children, become old so quickly. Felix is our friend, and Bomer makes sure that we know him well. The moment he shows Ned (and us) the bruise on his foot, we start saying our goodbyes. That fucking bruise that “doesn’t go away.”

Dr Emma Brookner is a hero of this play. Stricken by polio as a child, she fought back against that disease, and now fights against a new one from her wheelchair. The stage portrayal of Brookner by Ellen Barkin in 2011 was such a masterpiece, all blistering anger, fear, desperation, and love, that Julia Roberts’ showing here is a bit of a letdown. She does a fine job, to be sure, but there is a rage that should be present in this character that was not present. This Brookner crept to a boil a few times, but she should be simmering all the way through.

For whatever reason, people don’t pay enough attention to Taylor Kitsch (aka Tim Riggins). Rather, they continue to cast him in utter bullshit (see Battleship, Savages, John Carter). With that in mind, it is incredibly refreshing to see him here as Bruce Niles, doing some really fantastic work. Niles is a closeted lawyer and former soldier with enviable and much-remarked on good looks. He is in the decidedly unenviable position of having lost multiple boyfriends to “the gay cancer.” His performance is subtle and shattering. We watch him fall in love twice, and have his loves removed from him twice, far too early.

Tommy Boatwright, played by Jim Parson, reprising the “Southern bitch” role he played on Broadway, is given more opportunity to become a whole character here than he was in the stage version. This is due in part to the magic of the movies, where monologues can be seen as well as heard. Tommy is a loner as far as we know, and has a heart-breaking ritual that he performs whenever another friend is killed by AIDS. It is not a ritual that can be performed anymore, unless you are in possession of a Rolodex. Tommy is the yin to Ned’s yang, a calm and quiet mouthpiece for GMHC, wondering why no one wants to save his friends’ lives. He answers his own question in a eulogy: “They just don’t like us,” he says. Us, of course, are the gay men, the very ones being ripped apart by this vicious disease, singled out by the government as not being worthy of protection or cure.

In the years since 1985, when The Normal Heart was first staged, GMHC has expanded enormously and AIDS has become less of a stigma. Less of one, but not “none of one.” We have learned more about it, but we have not cured it. It can be staved off, but it has not been stamped out. We still walk for it and dance for it. What we must never do is forget it.