Laugh, cry, furious, proud

 

Emily Skeggs as Roma Guy in When We Rise

When I heard that ABC was going to do an eight-hour miniseries about the gay rights movement – a sort of Roots for the gays – I was shocked. Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar for writing Milk, was shocked, too, when he found out ABC was asking for LGBT-themed pitches. But he went to the meeting and proposed When We Rise, which took ABC’s primetime schedule the week after the Oscars (the one that ended with the first gay-themed Best Picture winner). It was an incredible investment of resources to an unflinching and honest portrait of the messy, upsetting, tragic, uplifting and subversive lives of LGBT Americans.

The series isn’t as groundbreaking as Roots and not as artful and sublime as Milk, but it’s a damn fine docudrama that should make you laugh and cry, make you furious and make you proud. If you missed when it was on live, you’re in luck: It’s sitting on Hulu in perpetuity.

When We Rise starts in 1972 with young activists converging in San Francisco and ends in 2013 with them celebrating marriage equality at San Francisco City Hall: Cleve Jones, a gay teenager from middle-class Phoenix becomes Harvey Milk’s aid and the founder of the AIDS Quilt; Roma Guy, a Peace Corp veteran, starts the San Francisco Women’s Building, raises a daughter with her longtime partner nurse Diane Jones and helps usher in citywide health care; and Ken Jones, a black Navy officer and Vietnam veteran runs a homeless center, becomes an addict, and then a central figure of the progressive queer church City of Refuge. All are real people who participated in the making of the series, which is officially “suggested by” Jones’ recently published memoir.

Cleve is played by Austin P. McKenzie as a young man, then Guy Pearce. Emily Skegs and then Mary-Louise Parker are Roma, with Fiona Dourif and Rachel Griffiths as Diane. And breakout newcomer Jonathan Majors and then Michael Kenneth Williams are Ken. (Various other historically important people are played by Ivory Aquino, TR Knight, Dylan Walsh, Whoopi Goldberg, Phylicia Rashad and Rosie O’Donnell.)

Clockwise: Austin P. McKenzie as Cleve Jones, Jonathan Majors as Ken Jones, Guy Pierce as Cleve Jones and Mary Louise Parker as Roma Guy, and Whoopi Goldberg as Pat NormanWhile the resemblances between the younger and older actors are minimal at best, with Cleve’s making the most sense and Roma’s almost none, the suspension of disbelief is earned over the eight hours of extraordinary plot both historical and melodramatic. As the three young activists get involved in local queer politics, they crisscross each other and find their voices, fall in and out of love, fight the power and each other, and then confront the epic tragedy of AIDS. The four of them survive, the men do it just barely, and then they all experience various forms of catharsis.

That all of these things happened over such a short period of time is amazing, but Black shows how organically they occurred, accidents of history abutting brilliant activism and masses of love and anger. He does not shirk the truth: There is gay sex, gay bashings, deaths from AIDS and fury at the people who let us suffer and die. Black’s dramatization occasionally takes shortcuts, both historical and emotional, and a few times the action feels forced and the tears manipulated. I cried through most of the second four hours: the deaths, the marriages, the redemptions. When I posted that on Twitter, Black liked it: He wanted me to cry.

I’m not sure if everyone will cry while watching When We Rise. Those of us who lived through it will likely have profound emotional reactions: the depictions of the events are true enough to, for lack of a better term, trigger floods of memories.

If we’re lucky, however, people who didn’t know it was all happening or weren’t born early enough to participate will see When We Rise and learn something, feel something and develop the empathy, understanding and anger needed to make sure we don’t go backwards. You should watch it, and you should watch it with the people who need to see it.

When We Rise
Written by Dustin Lance Black
Directed by Dustin Lance Black, Gus Van Sant and Dee Rees
Starring Guy Pearce, Mary-Louise Parker and Michael Kenneth Williams
On Hulu

Originally published in LGBT Weekly

On the effects of cultural discourses of addiction

If you’re not one of my Facebook friends, you may not know what’s going on in my non-film-critic professional life. I’m an anthropologist, remember? So: I finished my dissertation on the effects of cultural discourses of addiction on meth-using HIV-positive men who have sex with men San Diego, received my doctorate in anthropology from UCSD in June of 2013, immediately started a post-doctoral fellowship focused on HIV prevention research at UCLA, am now finishing that, and, with luck, will be gainfully employed by someone fabulous before July. But, chances are, my readers do know that. Or not. Hard to know.

However, even if you do know that stuff, you probably haven’t had the opportunity to read my fabulous dissertation or, as I do when I get a copy of a friend’s dissertation, check to see if you’re in my acknowledgement section. I was told that it was going to be the most fun to write, and it was, since every other section involved deep thoughts. The acknowledgments just required memory and synonyms for “thanks.” After three pages1, however, I ran out of time and space, and I left a lot of people, places, and things off the list. So, an addendum was in order, but I’ll just footnote that, too, because the main reason for this post to talk about where the research went2.

And since you haven’t read my dissertation — and I doubt more than four people have actually read the whole thing — you probably don’t know exactly what I was doing all that time I lived in San Diego. It’s fabulous, but I don’t suggest you read it. Since I finished the thing, I’ve done a great deal of work on large chunks of it, transforming three of the chapters into articles. Those have all been published now, and now I’m going to give you the 411 on them3.

Survival Tactics and Strategies of Methamphetamine-Using HIV-Positive Men Who Have Sex with Men in San Diego,” PLOS ONE, September 30, 2005.

In this article, two ways that HIV-positive drug users survive under the supervision of law enforcement agencies, community health organizations, and social welfare offices are differentiated. First, strategies are long-ranging and often carefully planned, and they involve conscious utilization and manipulation of bureaucratic processes. Second, tactics are short-ranging and often haphazard, and they are used to survive on daily or weekly bases, with entrenched problems and structural solutions avoided or ignored. Data from three years of ethnographic fieldwork with 14 methamphetamine-using HIV-positive men who have sex with men in San Diego, California is used to expand upon these two categories, explaining the different, often ineffectual, ways these men accessed care, services, shelter, drugs, and companionship. This article also examines the policy implications of taking in consideration these different kinds of survival methods, arguing for intensive client-specific interventions when working with long-term addicts with multiple health problems.

Pride, Shame, and the Trouble with Trying to Be Normal,” Ethos, December, 2015.

Methamphetamine use and HIV are large and intertwined problems in American gay communities. This is particularly so in San Diego, California, where both meth and HIV have been endemic for three decades. Because meth use is associated with not just the spread of HIV and other STDs, but also with petty and violent crime, the public health and law enforcement agencies have responded with substantial, but often ineffective efforts at turning meth addicts into “normal,” “productive members of society.” In this article, I examine the effects of these processes on the subjectivities of 14 meth-using HIV+ men who have sex with men (MSM) who were the focus of person centered ethnographies I performed from 2009 to 2011. All of the participants in my study wanted to be normal, and what constituted normalcy was an American – in both the last 20th century neoliberal and “homonormative” ways – ideal of self-reliance, employment, health, marriage, and home-ownership. This desire for normalcy was not just the product of living in the United States at a particular historical moment, but also it was also influenced greatly by the men’s experiences with recovery programs, the prison system, and healthcare providers, all of which were trying to shape them into particular kinds of subjects, specifically addicts, either active or in recovery. They were taught to narrativize their addiction as moral and medical stories, and their stories tended to end with dreams of a normal future, a future free from pain, frustration, and the gaze of the apparatus. But in their struggle to make that future happen, their emotional options were limited by the anti-meth apparatus: those who failed felt profound shame, those who succeeded expressed great pride in their abilities, and those who hovered in the middle I describe as having “risky subjectivity,” the perpetual constructing and reconstructing, the perpetual struggling to become something else.

Framing Samuel See: The Moral Panic and “Double Epidemic” of Methamphetamines and HIV among Gay Men,” International Journal of Drug Policy, February, 2016.

After being arrested for violating a restraining order against his husband, on November 24, 2013, Yale professor Samuel See died while in lockup at the Union Avenue Detention Center in New Haven, Connecticut. The death received media attention around the world, with readers arguing online about whether See’s death was caused by police misconduct, as his friends and colleagues charged in interviews and during a well-publicised march and protest. When an autopsy revealed that he had died from a methamphetamine-induced heart attack, online commentary changed dramatically, with See’s many supporters rhetorically abandoning him and others describing him as a stereotype of the gay meth addict who deserved his fate. In this article, I argue that this shift in the interpretation and meaning of See’s death can be traced to the discursive structures left by the moral panic about crystal meth in the United States (1996–2008), which comprised within it a secondary moral panic about crystal meth in the gay community and its connection to the spread of HIV and a possible super-strain (2005–2008).

I’m currently revising a fourth piece for a collection of essays on syndemics.

My doctoral research led me to all sorts of places I never though I’d go. One of those places is the American corrections system, a bizarre and awful thing that is in desperate need of reform — and research. And my current work is with recently released HIV-positive MSM and transgender women who were incarcerated at the Los Angeles County Jail. But that’s another post.

Movies. 2014.

This year’s Golden Teddy Awards for Most Excellence in Movies starts with the list of my ten favorite movies of 2014 from LGBT Weekly and then goes into choices for excellences in various Oscar-ish categories as well as things like “prop chomping” and  “dystopian art direction.” It’s not quite as absurdly long and detailed as previous years, but I don’t have that kind of time anymore. And I’ve been sick. So there.

  1. [expand title=”Grand Budapest Hotel”]The-Grand-Budapest-HotelIn Wes Anderson’s greatest film so far, it is 1932 and the Grand Budapest Hotel is in its heyday. A treasure of the fictional Eastern European nation of Zubrowka, it is packed with suited dignitaries and their bejeweled wives, and the regimented staff is legion; over all of it presides the hotel’s slightly foppish and nearly over-competent concierge M. Gustave, played by a miraculous, David Niven-inspired Ralph Fiennes. Gustave is not only devoted to his hotel, but also to the numerous lonely older women who frequent it, and his favorite is Madame Desgoffe-und-Taxis (Tilda Swinton), an 84-year-old countess who adores Gustave. When the countess dies, Gustave and his favorite bellboy Zero (Tony Revolori) go to the reading of the will. The countess’ dastardly son Dmitri (Adrian Brody) is livid that Gustave is given a priceless painting called Boy With Apple and demands that this never happen, but with Zero’s encouragement and help, Gustave steals the painting and returns to the hotel. The caper that ensues is thrilling and hilarious and full of idiosyncratic supporting figures played by the likes of Willem Defoe, Saoirse Ronan and Harvey Keitel. The actors are directed to such mannered behaviors as to be almost abstracted; they archly speak as if they have hopped out of a Roald Dahl or JD Salinger story, and they move like gorgeously drawn cartoon characters, sharply and exaggerated, influenced by slapstick and mime. The result is the opposite of natural or subtle, but Anderson’s direction, of actors and art and photography, communicates the themes and emotions – the sadness of nostalgia and growing up, the power of loyalty and courage – with something that achieves grace. On DVD.[/expand]
  2. [expand title=”Boyhood”]BoyhoodIn 2002, Richard Linklater cast a boy (Ellar Coltrane), his sister (Lorelei Linklater) and their mother (Patricia Arquette) and father (Ethan Hawke), and he filmed them as a growing, living, changing family over 12 years. Linklater deserves a slew of awards simply for overcoming such a film’s logistical difficulties – flighty children, lengthy contracts, the ravages of time and history – but he and his actors also managed to create a film as true to the emotional journey of childhood and modern American family life as any other movie in a generation. Like the life that Linklater is depicting, Boyhood does not have a plot as much as it has a series of vignettes focused around key moments in Mason’s childhood. The film feels like cinéma vérité, but the emotional power of the editing, the acting Linklater elicited from his actors both young and old (particularly Arquette, doing the best work of her career), and in the beauty of his landscapes and light is something we usually only see in finely crafted narrative films. Boyhood is not perfect – it’s long and rough in places and the plotting seems a bit forced at times – but it is nonetheless an extraordinary monument to the power of art, film and family. On DVD.[/expand]
  3. [expand title=”Under the Skin”]Under-the-SkinJonathan Glazer’s hypnotic masterpiece follows a woman (Scarlett Johansson) as she drives around Edinburgh, stalking men, seducing them and then enveloping them in a gooey blackness. After an encounter with a disfigured man, she seems to develop introspection. She wanders into the Scottish countryside, pursued by mysterious men on motorcycles and less mysterious men with dirty minds. We assume she’s not human, but we don’t know what she is. The audience needs to do a lot of work to piece things together, and this is often the hallmark of what we call “art films.” This kind of abstraction can become pretentious, but in Under the Skin, the abstraction is what makes the art. Glazer’s sublime use of the foggy Scottish landscapes, Mica Levi’s truly haunting string-heavy score, Scarlett Johansson’s brave and subtle performance and our own expectations of science fiction combine to create one of the most original and indelible films of the year. Streaming and on DVD.
    [/expand]
  4. [expand title=”Only Lovers Left Alive”]Only-Lovers-Left-AliveA luminous, sublime, and brilliant Tilda Swinton plays Eve, an achingly-sweet, centuries-old aesthete who happens to be a vampire. Her similarly afflicted husband Adam, played by Tom Hiddleston, is a glum musical genius who hides from the world, composing from afar, talking to no one but a clueless hired hand (Anton Yelchin) and his wife, but to her only over Skype. She lives in Tangiers, along with her friend Kit Marlowe (yes, that one, played by John Hurt), and Adam lives in a particularly dilapidated section of Detroit. She decides to come to him after he expresses more suicidally depressive thoughts about the weight of the world. During her visit, as they discuss history and art and their love, Eve’s crass and silly sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) arrives and creates situations that force this short story in the lives of Adam and Eve to climax in hunger and, of course, blood. Funny, haunting, weird and sad, Jarmusch’s movie is the rare one about the undead that is actually about the living. On DVD.
    [/expand]
  5. [expand title=”Nightcrawler”]NightcrawlerLewis Bloom, played by a balls-out brilliant Jake Gyllenhaal, is a nightcrawler, a freelance reporter who spends the nights wandering the city, waiting for a police scanner to announce a car crash or a murder that can be filmed and turned into the bloody local TV news. Lewis is pathologically ambitious, solicitous and aggressive, and he speaks almost entirely in the aphorisms of self-help books and online business classes, always with a broad smile and wide eyes, all the more creepy on his tightly gaunt body. He unnerves Nina Romina (Rene Russo), the news director of a low-rated Los Angeles morning show, but he also brings in great footage, which she craves. How he does it, and how he plays Nina is what makes Nightcrawler thrilling and more than a little bonkers. This is the first film directed by Dan Gilroy, who pulls out Gyllenhaal’s greatest performance and gives us the best thriller of the year. The two are inextricably connected, because it is Gyllenhaal’s unexpected actions and off-kilter affect that kept me on the edge of my seat and muttering “wow” over and over. Gilroy also handles the car chases and random violence on Los Angeles’s iconic streets with skill, evoking the L.A. noir of Drive and Heat. The film is disquieting and, even at its most fantastical, somewhat believable. Lewis may not exist, but the stories that he records for Nina’s broadcasts do. We’ve all seen them. In theaters.
    [/expand]
  6. [expand title=”The Lego Movie”]The-Lego-MovieThe Lego Movie is the greatest advertisement for a toy ever made, but it’s also a great movie in and of itself and easily the best animated film of the year. Emmet (Chris Pratt) is a construction worker in a city that runs with clockwork precision: Everyone is perfectly regimented, efficient, and properly tasked. Everyone loves the same song “Everything is Awesome!” and the same TV show “Where’s My Pants?” and their leader President Business (Will Ferrell). But the president is actually a dictator with a massive army of evil robots and nasty cops (the leader of which is voiced by Liam Neeson) at his command, and he is planning to destroy the Lego universe using a weapon called the Kragle. Is Emmet their prophesized savior? Some rebels (voiced by Elizabeth Banks, Morgan Freeman, and others) think he may be, and hilarity and action ensue. Writers and directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, in addition to mixing witty and sly adult-oriented jokes with kid-pleasing slapstick, work on multiple thematic levels, creating a morally and ethically complex film out of what could have been a cynical advertisement. The film sets up a battle between mindless, automated corporate capitalism on one side and creativity, freedom, and, in a way, mysticism on the other. It culminates in a surprising moving third act that left me in tears. And wanting Legos. Streaming and on DVD.
    [/expand]
  7. [expand title=”Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)”]BirdmanInnovative, hilarious, and moving, Birdman is film about theater, film, and actors, as well as regret, love, family, and, in a way, the meaning of life, and it soars. Michael Keaton is blockbuster star Riggan Thomas, who wants to earn respect by appearing on Broadway, so he writes, directs, and stars in a stage adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story. His recovering addict daughter Sam (Emma Stone) is his assistant, and his costar is lauded, but unhinged, method-actor Mike Shiner (Ed Norton). The film veers from slapstick comedy to melodrama, but the depiction of Riggan’s interior life makes the film wholly original. He has conversations with and sometimes becomes Birdman, the superhero he once played, and whether or not Riggan is crazy or actually super powered is never really made clear. But his depression and frustration and desire for relevance, to the world, to his daughter, and to his ex-wife, are all real. This is by far Keaton’s greatest performance, a true tour de force of versatility, believability, and emotional honesty. Keaton has never had material like Birdman, and he’s never had a director like Alejandro González Iñárritu, who elicited an epic performance from Keaton and an equally brilliant performance from Norton, whose Mike is a caustic, hilarious, nutty Lothario of surprising depth. In theaters.
    [/expand]
  8. [expand title=”Stranger by the Lake”]Stranger-by-the-LakeThe power of lust is at the heart of this quiet, erotic, disturbing and very French film. Lithe and beautiful Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) comes to a lakeside beach every day to swim and cruise men. He is infatuated with Michel (Christophe Paou), a mustachioed man with a particularly skillful freestyle stroke and a clingy boyfriend. One evening, Franck watches Michel drowning his boyfriend before calmly swimming to the shore, dressing and driving away. Franck does nothing, and the next day, Michel starts flirting with Franck. Despite some apprehension, Franck returns the affection and they begin to have trysts every afternoon. Still, Franck clearly worries that Michel will do to him what he did to his previous lover. The strange and almost cynical morality of the characters and the ever increasing tension about Michel’s potential make what at first seems like a bland sex comedy into something much more complex, metaphorical and even epic. It’s hard to know exactly what writer-directed Alain Guiraudie is doing, whether it is an existentialist homage to Camus’s The Outsider or just the story of how far lust and connection can warp a man’s moral compass. The lack of clarity in the Guiraudie’s message makes the film’s sex more disconcerting, but also more powerful. Streaming and on DVD.
    [/expand]
  9. [expand title=”Wild”]WildReese Witherspoon plays Cheryl Strayed, whose memoir Wild is based on. Like the book, the film is partly autobiography and partly the story of her six month trek of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to Oregon. This experience is powerfully cathartic to Cheryl; she has just extracted herself from a failed marriage, an addiction to heroin and some extravagantly self-destructive habits that seem to have been a failed coping mechanism to deal with the grief over losing her mother. While Cheryl walks and hikes and gets blisters and nearly starves and narrowly escapes rape and hypothermia, her earlier life is shown in flashbacks, many of which feature a luminous Laura Dern as Cheryl’s mother. Director Jean-Marc Vallée, whose direction made Dallas Buyer’s Club vastly better than its screenplay, took Nick Hornby’s script and crafted a visual and emotional experience that goes far beyond the words, either Hornby’s or Strayed’s. Vallée dwells on the beauty of the landscapes without sentimentalizing, shows Cheryl’s bad habits without being prurient, and guides Witherspoon and Dern to flawless and naturalistic performances. In theaters.
    [/expand]
  10. [expand title=”Snowpiercer”]SnowpiercerBong Joon-ho’s first English-language film is astonishing, breathtaking in its visuals, bleak in its plot and enraging in its refusal to do what most American audiences expect from their science fiction action films. The film is set in 2031, 17 years after an attempt to fix global warming goes horribly wrong, freezing the planet and killing all life. All life except for those who made it onto a long, high-tech train on a constant circumnavigation of the planet. The train was built by a visionary inventor named Wilford, who predicted the environmental calamity and manages the miraculous engine that keeps the train moving and its inhabitants alive. While the train features greenhouses, a fish farm, livestock, a school, restaurants, clubs, these luxuries are available only to the riders in the front of the train. In the back, the riders live in squalor, surviving on blocks of mysterious, rubbery protein and subject to the violent whims of Wilford’s brutal security forces who steal the riders’ children and freeze the limbs off riders brave enough to fight back. These tail riders are plotting a revolution at the beginning of the film, with Curtis (Chris Evans), Edgar (Jamie Bell), Tanya (Octavia Spencer), and the tail riders’ de facto leader Gilliam (John Hurt) trying to find the best moment to push through to the other cars, past the security forces and their absurd, saccharine chief, Mason (Tilda Swinton). When they do, the film takes you on a shocking, weird and wonderful journey unlike anything offered in American films in years. Streaming and on DVD.
    [/expand]

locke-poster1-404x600Honorable Mentions: Locke, Foxcatcher, Begin Again, The Homesman, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Love is Strange, Interstellar, Gone Girl, The Way He Looks, Guardians of the Galaxy, Pride, The Imitation Game, and Whiplash.

 

 

 

 

Moore in MapsMost Excellence in Being Amazing in a Lead Role: Julianne Moore is heartbreaking as she vanishes into Alzheimer’s in Still Alice and hilariously frail as an aging starlet in Maps to the Stars; Tilda Swinton is an incandescent vampire aesthete in Only Lovers Left Alive; Tom Hardy is heroically ethical in the monologic Locke and heroically criminal in The Drop; and Jake Gyllenhaal is the best sociopath since American Psycho in Nightcrawler.

birdman-keaton-nortonMost Excellence in Being Amazing in a Supporting Role: Ed Norton is hilarious as the maniacal narcissist in Birdman; Emma Stone has insight and charm for days as the Birdman’s daughter in Birdman; Ethan Hawke is a haphazardly responsible dad in Boyhood; Laura Dern glows in Wild; Tilda Swinton is a toothy and hilarious postmodern Eichmann in Snowpiercer.

still-of-steve-carell-in-foxcatcher-(2014)-large-pictureMost Excellence in Prop Chomping and Scenery Munching: Steve Carell’s prosthetic makeup and WASPy speech impediment are intermittently hilarious and pedophile-creepy in Foxcatcher; Meryl Streep is witch-tastic as the Witch in Into the Woods; Bryan Cranston is CRAZY! as the MAD! scientistic who is actually SANE! in Godzilla; the crazy ladies of The Homesman screech their psychopathologies, play with dirty dolls, and stare off into space.

Snowpiercer movie2Most Excellence in Dystopian Art Direction: Since not one of the many scifi dystopias this year depicted a particularly original world, no one wins. Snowpiercer wins an Honorable Mention for the gorgeous, Fauvist, idiosyncratic train, which was brilliant but looked more like a Terry Gilliam film from 1980s than a vision of the future. Tied for Dishonorably Cliched: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Divergent, Interstellar, and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1.

domMost Excellence in Unbelievable Homosexual Hair: Dominic West in Pride. It’s cute movie but only truly interesting because the queer activists helping the striking miners in Thatcher’s early 1980s plot is true. Otherwise, it’s just Harvey Milk joins the cats of the The Full Monty, and not in a good way. West plays Jonathan Blake, one of the Britain’s longest surviving people with HIV, and he’s not remotely convincing as disco queen, partly because of his affect, mostly because of his hair, which is just ew.

rocket-raccoon-guardians-of-the-galaxy-2Most Excellence in Superheroics: Rocket Raccoon. Because he’s a fucking raccoon space pirate. Chris Pratt is awesome in so many ways except for being a raccoon, which he’s not. And Rocket Raccoon is.

Most Excellence in Making Things Difficult for Movie Reviewing: The Los Angeles publicists who make it so very difficult for me to review movies. You don’t know who you are because you don’t even read my emails.

The Normal Heart is no longer dated; it’s timeless.

When Larry Kramer premiered his play The Normal Heart off-Broadway in 1985, his agonizing, angry autobiographical story about the AIDS epidemic in New York City and the few activists desperately trying to help their lovers and friends hit like the city like an emotional meteor. While a very few theater critics were able to see through the anger and desperation and criticize the play for its occasional polemical two-dimensionality, most people who saw it experienced it like Kramer’s alter ego in the play Ned Weeks did AIDS: enraged and distraught. Kramer, who helped found both Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and ACT-UP, is arguably the least subtle of modern American civil rights heroes; he makes Malcolm X seem like a cranky assistant principal. But of those heroes, only Marin Luther King, Jr. was as great a writer. Whatever dramaturgical problems the play had, Kramer wrote speeches for his characters that were powerfully eloquent enough to mobilize audiences to turn on the city that had long sheltered but had ultimately failed gay men. (It’s doubtful that New York’s closeted Mayor Ed Koch could have prevented the AIDS from becoming an epidemic, but it’s inarguable that his selfish, terrified inaction made it worse for New Yorkers infected with HIV.)

You’d think with a figure like Larry Kramer and a play so powerful and celebrated and a topic so immediate and dire, The Normal Heart would have been filmed quickly. But two things intervened: Kramer’s irascibility scared the bejesus out of closeted Hollywood, and Barbra Streisand, who held the rights to the film for more than a decade, thought the cinematic narcissism called The Mirror Has Two Faces was more important for her to make. It wasn’t until a celebrated 2011 Broadway revival of the play that the combined forces of HBO and Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story) finally managed to begin filming.

Their stunningly good production of The Normal Heart is arriving more the 29 years after the play’s premiere. In that time GMHC became an entrenched bureaucracy and ACT-UP rose and fell and protease inhibitors made HIV a manageable illness like diabetes in wealthy countries and those countries have helped make it so for millions in poor countries and gay marriage is legal in 17 states and it is Supreme Court decision away from being the law of the land. Honestly, we don’t need The Normal Heart the same way we did in 1985. While the play was written as contemporary political theatre, it can’t be that now. Now, it is just history. This would seem to ensure than the film would be less than what the play was, but the opposite is what has happened. Kramer’s adaptation of his own play not only makes it work better for the expansive power of film, but it also fixes the particularly dated features of the play, tempering the anachronistic prevention arguments, deepening once flat characters, and expanding the story from its local specifics into a more universality. The Normal Heart is no longer dated; it’s timeless.

Kramer’s alter ego is Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo), a neurotic gay writer unlucky in love and critical of gay men’s shallow promiscuity (and thus disliked by many of them). It is 1981, and his friends start getting sick and then dying, and based on the expertise of a cranky, wheelchair bound doctor (Julia Roberts), he helps organize a group of gay men to do something. In the play, the organization is unnamed, but in the film, as in reality, this organization is GMHC, now one of the country’s largest AIDS service organizations. While attempting to get The New York Times to write more about the disease, he meets Felix Turner (Matt Bomer), a beautiful fashion writer, and they quickly fall in love. Meanwhile, Ned and his GMHC partners worry and grieve about their lovers and fight and fight about tactics and personalities, with Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch) representing the WASPy conservative accommodation-minded opposite of Ned’s confrontational Jew and Tommy Boatwright (Jim Parsons) as their sweet, smart middleman. The stakes are powerfully raised with Felix reveals to Ned that he has a Kaposi sarcoma lesion growing on his foot. Between Felix’s illness, Bruce’s opposition, and the disapproval of Ned’s brother Ben (Alfred Molina), Ned is in a constant state of agony – and righteousness. The end of the story is pre-ordained by history and circumstance, and you will cry.

Kramer’s screenplay reorders scenes, deletes several expository AIDS 101 monologues, gives Roberts one extra minute to earn more sympathy, and greatly expands Tommy’s character. Based on Roger McFarlane, Kramer’s close friend and the first executive director of GMHC who went on to run multiple other AIDS organizations, Tommy was a small but key character in the play. In the film, he comes to represent the pragmatic, responsible, moral good that came from the idealistic and fraught early fighting between Ned and Bruce. Parsons, who has won three Emmys for The Big Bang Theory and is possibly the great comic actor of his generation, shows that he is as versatile and powerful as the film’s star Mark Ruffalo. Ruffalo, to his credit, has never been as great on screen, despite brilliant performances in You Can Count on Me and The Kids Are All Right, and he is funny, heartbreaking, annoying, and very sexy. Performing a character created to be cried over, Bomer is obvious, but good. Roberts’s casting was maligned by some purists, but her cold, angry performance is flawless.

The biggest surprise for viewers not familiar with New York theater is Joe Mantello, best known now for his direction of, among other major Broadway shows, Wicked. As Mickey Marcus, one of Ned’s best friends, Mantello erupts in the third act of the film with the greatest of Kramer’s speeches, a barnburner of rage and agony. Like Parsons and Bomer, Mantello is an out gay man, and they join several other famous out actors – including Stephen Spinella, Denis O’Hare, and BD Wong – in a largely out gay cast. That would have been impossible in a film shot during the 1980s.

While Kramer and the cast are responsible for much of the film’s success, I have to give director Ryan Murphy his due. I think he’s the most overrated producer and writer in television. Whatever Glee’s charms, it’s wildly inconsistent and occasionally unwatchable, and American Horror Story is sadistic misogyny as low-brow art. I was terrified of what he would do to such an important work like The Normal Heart. But the film, despite being a little long and edited occasionally too bluntly, is beautifully directed, with scenes tautly staged and occasionally gorgeously shot. And when everyone in a cast delivers such consistently great performances, it can’t be simply their natural talent. Murphy directed them, and the film, to greatness.

The Normal Heart
Directed by Ryan Murphy
Written by Larry Kramer
Starring Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer, and Jim Parsons
Premiering on HBO on May 25 at 9pm

Sex on the rocky, French beach

Apparently, one of the reasons Stranger by the Lake has been of such interest to film writers and culture bloggers is the sex. Alain Guiraudie’s extremely French sex thriller is being listed along with Blue Is the Warmest Color and Interior. Leather Bar as part of an art film trend of explicit and not always necessary sex. The criticism of this trend is that the sex doesn’t add to the story or characterization or even the mood, and while I think that’s sometimes the case (as in I Want Your Love), it certainly was not in Blue nor with Stranger by the Lake. In fact, while the sex in Stranger is titillating and sexy, it is also occasionally creepy and it always is necessary for the propulsion of the plot and the creation of authenticity. The movie does, after all, take place at a gay cruising spot, a rocky beach on a lake in rural France. The men are mostly naked and most of them go into the woods to have sex with each other – or to watch other men have sex with each other. Not showing the sex these men share would be bluntly censorious and dishonest.

And the power of lust is at the heart of Stranger by the Lake. Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), a lithe and beautiful young man, comes to the beach every day to swim and cruise men and he is infatuated with a mustachioed man named Michel (Christophe Paou) who has a particularly skillful freestyle stroke and a clingy boyfriend. Franck also comes to talk to a heavy older man named Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao), who, unlike Franck, doesn’t see himself as gay, but rather as a man who always has a women and sometimes has sex with men. Franck is confused because Henri has no interest in cruising or swimming, but Franck clearly finds value in Henri’s vague pronouncements about the ways to live correctly.

One evening, after spending the afternoon having sex with a man in the woods, Franck watches Michel and his boyfriend swimming in the lake. Then arguing. And then Michel drowning his boyfriend before calmly swimming to the shore, dressing, and driving away. Franck does nothing, and the next day, both Franck and Michel are back at the beach. Michel starts flirting with Franck, and despite some apprehension, he returns the affection and they begin to have regular trysts every afternoon. Still, Franck clearly worries that Michel will do to him what he did to his previous lover.

The strange and almost cynical morality of the characters and the ever increasing tension about Michel’s potential make what at first seems like a bland sex comedy into something much more complex, metaphorical, and even epic. One critic’s theory is based on the seeming 1980s clothes and cars; the callous way the men on the beach treat each other and their seeming death drive are Guiraudie’s commentary on the early years of AIDS. But it’s hard to know what Guiraudie is doing, whether it is an existentialist homage to Camus’s The Outside or just the story of how far lust and connection can warp a man’s moral compass. The lack of clarity in the Guiraudie’s message makes the film’s sex less hot and more disconcerting, but also, oddly, more powerful.

Guiraudie’s spare, slow-burn script and ambiguous themes are matched by his stunning and simple photography, which manage to make the simplest refractions off of the lake and the shadows thrown by tree branches into art. His cast of mostly unknowns are impeccably directed as well. Deladonchamps is both appalling and endearing, while Paou is actually sexy enough that I could imagine (if not agree with) Franck ignoring Michel’s murderousness. The discomforting nature of their relationship is much more fascinating and surprising than their sex, even though that is pretty fun to watch, too.

Stranger by the Lake
Written and Directed by Alain Guiraudie
Starring Pierre Deladonchamps, Christophe Paou, and Patrick d’Assumçao
Not Rated
Opens March 14 at Landmark Hillcrest