The Normal Heart (2014)

A television film from 2014, directed by Ryan Murphy from Larry Kramer's 1985 play, concerning the arrival of the AIDS epidemic in New York and the men who shouted into the void while the institutions covering their ears. This is a work of furious testimony. Its central romance, between Mark Ruffalo's Ned Weeks and Matt Bomer's Felix Turner, carries the whole weight of the thing, and the film has no interest in softening or explaining its gay male subjects for outside comfort. The cast is stocked with openly gay performers, and the material belongs to them. The whiteness of that cast goes unremarked upon and unaddressed, a limitation the film simply inherits from its source and its moment.

Julia Roberts appears as Dr. Emma Brookner, a physician whose research grants are denied by officials who consider the disease beneath their attention. She is formidable and the film respects her. She is also not the point. The febrile energy of the piece belongs to Ned and his comrades, who argue endlessly about tactics: polite lobbying against public rage, discretion against confrontation. Those arguments are the film. Speeches are delivered at podiums, at dinners, in hallways, directly into other characters' faces, and the audience is meant to receive each one fully. Kramer's fury has been transported intact, which is either the film's greatest strength or its most exhausting feature depending on one's appetite for being addressed.

The government neglect, the medical bureaucracy, the airline that will not carry a dying man, all of it is condemned in the sharpest terms. None of that condemnation extends to a critique of capital as such, and the film has no interest in the body as a site of celebration or the mind as a site of variation. It documents wasting and death. It does not revise history so much as insist upon history that was ignored. What we have here is a monument to a specific grief, sincere, unrelenting, and entirely certain of its own moral clarity.