Tropic Sprockets Goes Streaming / The Normal Heart

By Ian Brockway

Ryan Murphy adapts Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” produced by HBO. The film is a stirring analysis of the AIDS epidemic during start of the 1980s. It is emotional and blunt, full of heart and a tense spirit.

Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo) is plunged into the technicolor flesh of Fire Island. There is sun, light and tanned male bodies everywhere. Muscles flex and stretch. But it seems that that Ned prefers to be solitary. Oddly, during a pensive moment someone faints. He scans the paper. 41 people are stricken with a rare cancer.

A week later in New York, the same young man from Fire Island has a seizure.

Weeks knows something is happening. As a precaution, he gets a checkup and meets Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts) who tells him that the virus is sexually transmitted. She tells him to take special vigilance.

He has meetings with his friends who violently balk at his suggestion to abstain from sex, reasoning that they might be further vilified by Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. Ned tries to enlist the help of his lawyer brother (Alfred Molina) to try broadcasting concern about the virus, but he is without success.

Then he meets the handsome New York Times journalist, Felix (Matt Bomer) and becomes reinvigorated both in romance and purpose. Ned starts the Gay Man’s Health Crisis (GMHC) to dispense medical information to the gay community and to expose government ignorance of the virus, along with the ignorance of Mayor Koch regarding AIDS.

The acting is first rate. Ruffalo is terrific as a socially inhibited man who also pines for romance, and becomes compelled in his cause. Jim Parsons co-stars as GMHC executive director and he displays energy and understatement.

The film makes for some difficult viewing as it details Ned’s circle of friend’s becoming acutely and graphically sick around him with sarcoma. Yet to its credit, the film does not hold back.

In one scene, Ned’s peers argue about the facts of the virus, exact circumstances of transmission and being cut off from activities. In watching the film, it is unavoidable not to think about our current condition with Covid-19.

President Reagan failed to publicly address AIDS until September 1985 some five years into the epidemic. Reagan’s federal budget in 1986 called for an 11% reduction. By then, there were 24,559 reported AIDS deaths.

“The Normal Heart” is pointed and wrenching with a sense of the haunted metropolis. It is a fine work from the inimitable Larry Kramer, the activist, reactor and tireless creator who died in May of this year.

This film is one of the Tropic’s Picks for the Pandemic. For more info, go to https://www.tropiccinema.com/event/picks-for-the-pandemic-more-streaming-recommendations/

Write Ian at [email protected]

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