Early in Larry Kramer’s 1985 play, “The Normal Heart,” Ned Weeks—the Kramer stand-in—meets Dr. Emma Brookner, who is trying to get the word out about a disease that is killing her gay male patients. As she examines Weeks, a journalist, she says that she’s heard he has a big mouth. “Is big mouth a symptom?” he asks the doctor. “No, a cure,” she snaps.
“The Normal Heart” is not a nuanced play, and reading it in 2014, nearly thirty years after its première, you can feel as if fingers were jabbing at you from the page. But it’s witty and it’s alive. In the polemical tradition of Odets and Chayefsky, Kramer named names, gay and straight, major and minor: Mayor Ed Koch, who wouldn’t allocate enough resources to AIDS, and associated closet cases in high places; the Times, which would barely cover the disease (and which barred the use of the word “gay,” even in its review of the play); Ronald Reagan, who didn’t mention the disease until 1985; the “disco dummies” who wouldn’t stop screwing; and Kramer’s colleagues at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, too fearful to use anything but an acronym on their envelopes. Most painfully, there was Kramer’s straight brother, who loved him but refused to accept him as an equal.
Considering how much the world has changed in the past three decades, to the point where right-wingers now claim they’re being bullied by gay lobbyists, you’d think the play might be a period piece. It’s not—just read the news from Russia or Brunei, if you doubt that. But it captures a highly specific moment, full of panic and loss, when the plague transformed gay male identity, upending the celebration of the seventies. In an introduction to the script, Joe Papp praises Kramer’s “ardor,” and that’s the right word for this vexed, romantic, incendiary text, which galvanized Ryan Murphy, the creator of “Glee,” when he read the play, as a student at Indiana University. He lobbied hard to do an adaptation for HBO, paying “a very high price” with his own money, collaborating with Kramer and using his screenplay.
The two men are in many ways a natural match. Like Kramer, Murphy is a groundbreaker, a devotee of overkill with a streak of sentimentality. (Also like Kramer, he’s unafraid to piss people off.) His 2003 FX series, “Nip/Tuck,” felt like a modern update of Kramer’s 1978 novel “Faggots,” that satirical screed against drug-fuelled hedonism. His best series, “American Horror Story: Asylum,” was a grisly allegory straight out of Kramer’s handbook, condemning conformist institutions—medical, religious, and political—for the ways they scapegoated and tortured sexual minorities, often literally. For “The Normal Heart,” however, he’s chosen an earnest approach, without archness or irony. His adaptation, which airs May 25th, is grand and glossy, and even square at times. Yet this method is effective, and affecting, because Murphy’s own ardor is so transparent, his longing to celebrate the vitality of both the play and its trouble-making creator, that Big Mouth incarnate. At its best, the production captures not merely Kramer’s fury but the utopian vision within it, which has deep American roots, from Walt Whitman through the Radical Faeries: a longing for gay men to take what the world sees as their weakness—their tenderness for one another—and forge it into strength and unity.
The HBO film opens with a lush sequence—not in the play—that feels like a fable from a poisoned Eden. A helicopter shot brings us in, and we see Ned (Mark* Ruffalo) on the ferry to Fire Island, his expression flickering with pleasure and apprehension. On the pier, he ogles hot boys, then buttons his shirt, knowing he can’t live up to the “clone” ideal. Even pre-plague, Ned is a melancholic crank: he’s written a scathing satire of the hookup scene (his version of “Faggots,” one presumes), and, when he goes to the beach, two men shout that he’s not welcome there. Then a beautiful man coughs, and falls, and his friends circle around him, and the camera rises above—the first hint that something is wrong. At the White Party dance, men in tank tops kiss and dance, and wave to Ned. He won’t join in. Instead, he wanders away, down a path into blue-green shadows, where he finds a four-way in progress, men’s bodies posed like statuary. The sequence feels dreamlike, nearly underwater. Ned heads toward this orgy, into darkness. And then suddenly he is back on the ferry, lit up by the sun, returning to the city. He opens the newspaper and sees the notorious article: “RARE CANCER IS DIAGNOSED IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS.”
At this point, the mood changes, clicking from reverie into reality. The pacing of the film varies—a baggy scene is followed by a thrilling one—but the changes that Kramer and Murphy have made to the story are mostly smart ones, emphasizing emotion over agitprop, and tweaking, lightly, the politics of the original. Where an activist once joked, “I don’t believe in lesbians,” now one says, “Thank God for the lesbians.” There are visual re-creations of historical events, like a G.M.H.C. fund-raiser at which the Gay Men’s Chorus sings the Gershwin standard “The Man I Love.” Still, many of the most effective sequences come straight from the original, including Ned’s blunt confrontation with his brother Ben, who accuses him of having a victim complex. Ned says that he was born gay, while Ben sees homosexuality as an illness, a pathology created by their bad parents—and he insists that Ned must accept the difference of opinion. “But your theory turns me into a man from Mars,” Ned argues, in frustration. “My theory doesn’t do that to you.” He ends their relationship, storming out with what amounts to a thesis statement, a refusal to kowtow to those in power, or to accept intimacy that requires moral compromise, even from his family: “I will not speak to you again until you accept me as your equal. Your healthy equal. Your brother!”
As Larry Kramer’s avatar, Mark Ruffalo is more puppy than pit bull, but there’s heat to the romance between Weeks and the Times writer Felix Turner, who is played with elegant savoir-faire by Matt Bomer. The men’s tetchy, bookish first date remains intact, but we get more of their life together, including a flashback to an anonymous hookup, which Murphy brackets with a darkly funny ad for a bathhouse. We see the tender sex they have at home, and there’s fresh pillow talk about Ned’s history—the time he had sex with a woman, his suicidal years at Yale—as they cuddle, their bodies lit in gold. When Ned asks Felix to move in, he kneels on the West Village pier, the Statue of Liberty gazing down and black drag queens cheering—it’s a moment that tilts into pure kitsch, always a danger with such subject matter (though the play’s emphasis on marriage is strikingly prescient). But other scenes pay off, including a heart-clutching moment when an infected Felix, riding the subway, spots a man who is sicker than he is: skeletal, coated in lesions, a vision flashing in and out as lights flicker. The movie is at its best when it’s capturing this horror-film quality of the period, the physical vulnerability that the poet Thom Gunn wrote about so beautifully in his poem “The Man with Night Sweats”: the fruitless wish that “hands were enough / to hold an avalanche off.”
The sprawling ensemble is strong, and it includes numerous openly gay actors, as well as straight actors who are comfortable playing graphic gay sex scenes—itself an indication of how much has changed. (The original production starred Brad Davis, a closeted actor who died of AIDS, after a life twisted by Hollywood’s punishing demands.) Denis O’Hare, as Koch’s closeted aide, is funny and sinister; Joe Mantello shines as Mickey, the menschiest of the activists; and Jim Parsons is a scene stealer as Tommy Boatright, the self-described Southern Queen, who keeps Rolodex cards of the dead, like a rubber-banded tomb. The unfortunate exception is Julia Roberts, who gives a one-note performance as Dr. Brookner—although a line of Brookner’s, about how polio, the illness that crippled her when she was a child, is a virus nobody gets anymore, gains a new sting in an age of anti-vaccine foolishness.
There are grittier routes to the history of this period, including excellent documentaries such as “Gay Sex in the 70s” and “How to Survive a Plague.” There are more expansive books, like Randy Shilts’s “And the Band Played On,” and more richly philosophical plays, like “Angels in America.” Yet there’s something implacable and pure about “The Normal Heart,” not despite but because of its message-in-a-bottle specificity. Not for nothing was a 1994 book by Kramer titled “Reports from the Holocaust”; as a gay Jew, he saw one identity as a metaphor for the other, with a built-in warning system. When people began dying, the choice was clear: you could be the Warsaw resistance or you could be the American Jewish Congress, beggars who stayed behind the scenes, lobbying for help that never came. Even in 1985, Kramer knew the effect of this obsession on others. “All analogies to the Holocaust are tired, overworked, boring, probably insulting, possibly true, and a major turnoff,” Felix says. “Are they?” Ned replies.
In 2014, AIDS and gay identity are no longer tied together in a three-legged race. The idea of making real change through the system is no pipe dream, either: each day, more Bens switch sides, now that gay rights has become a safe, default liberal perspective. But Murphy’s adaptation is a useful time machine. It’s a corrective to complacency, a reminder of a period when rage itself was a necessary tonic, a caustic application that could burn through the misery of shame and isolation. What’s the use of an alarm, after all, if it’s not loud enough to wake people up? ♦
*An earlier version of this article misspelled Mark Ruffalo’s name.
