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

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Tom Hardy’s Perfect Storm

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As I was walking out of Locke, a man behind me told his wife, “That’s my worst nightmare.” I was thinking of other clichés, too: for Ivan Locke, the events in the film are a shitshow, a tsunami, his Waterloo, a perfect storm. Most American audiences know Tom Hardy, who plays Locke, for sci-fi action roles: the perfectly suited, smoldering Eames in Inception and the masked nihilist Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. They might expect Locke to be suffering in a spaceship battle or an espionage caper gone wrong. Ivan Locke, however, is not worried about the physical world ending, but rather about the destruction his personal, familial, middle class world. And we watch him worry about it for 90 minutes while he drives to London, the only physical action coming from him answering the phone, blowing his nose, and shuffling papers. Ivan Locke is as opposite from his Hardy’s most famous roles as possible, but it is his most powerful and moving performance.

The film opens with a wide pan of a construction site, a giant hole in the ground that will be the base of seemingly very large building. It’s evening and the workers are leaving for home, and we see one unlock a BMW, change out of dirty boots, and climb into the driver’s seat. He connects his phone to the Bluetooth and dials someone listed as “Bastard,” and he leaves an urgent message for a man named Gareth (Ben Daniels) with one word: “concrete.” Then he dials Donal (Andrew Scott); Ivan tells him that he will not be at work the next morning. Donal freaks out because it is the next morning when Ivan is supposed to supervise pouring the concrete foundation of the building, and it is going to involve the largest pour of concrete for a non-military site in the history of Europe. (You will learn a great deal about concrete while watching Locke.)

Next, Ivan calls home. His wife is at the store but he tells his oldest son that he won’t be home to watch the game. Then Ivan dials Bethen (Olivia Colman) and tells her that he got her message and that he’s on his way to London. Bethen, as it turns out, is a woman Ivan had sex with once, and she is now having his baby, two months early. And when Katrina, Ivan’s wife, calls, he finally tells her that he slept with another woman who is giving birth. It does not go well. Many of Ivan’s phone calls do not go well that night.

As all of the action takes place inside a car, with Hardy the only person visible and the other characters’ only heard, that writer-director Stephen Knight manages to make Locke riveting is near miraculous. The film is paced almost like a thriller, but the stakes in a thriller are usually much higher. Ivan’s predicament is not life and death, but rather his ability to be good man. Before this night, no one had ever doubted him. He was an impeccable person. But he made a terrible mistake in a moment of weakness, and he is trying to live up to his own standards, to do the right thing, right by Katrina, by Gareth and Donal, and by Bethen. His father had not done the right thing by Ivan, and Ivan refuses to be his father. That it is impossible for all of this to be fixed is clear very early in the film, and Ivan knows it. But he still tries.

Though his situation is desperate, Ivan’s nobility is constant. That Hardy can balance these two is remarkable. A lesser actors would use this kind of role to be explosive, to wail at the world, or to chew scenery. Hardy’s Ivan is cold, but this is made clear to be a defense against the emotional chaos of Ivan’s childhood. But it wasn’t a defense enough against the the night his life falls apart, becoming, yes, a nightmare.

Locke
Written and directed by Stephen Knight
Starring Tom Hardy, Olivia Colman, and Ruth Wilson
Rated R

 

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Born to die

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My biggest peeve with many comic book movies is how much they divert from their source materials (the worst is culprit being the X-Men films.) However, Sam Raimi’s three Spider-Man movies, whatever liberties taken with plot points, did not change the essence of Peter Parker and his alter ego: He was a teen-aged orphan who was bitten by a radioactive spider and turned into an angsty, wise-cracking do-gooder superhero who could stick to walls, lift a hell of a lot of weight, and swing on webs shot from his wrists. He was torn by his commitment to the great responsibility that came with his great power and his love for both his Aunt May and the woman he loved, Mary Jane Watson. When Marc Webb rebooted the franchise two years ago, he kept most of these key elements, this time casting the wonderful Andrew Garfield as Peter, but instead of having a new Mary Jane, he cast the even more wonderful Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy, Peter’s girlfriend from the 1960s and 1970s comic book. While this decision definitely makes the reboot more similar to comic book, Webb has yet to achieve either the emotional power or the adrenalin rush of Raimi’s excellent first two films. (Raimi’s third is was awful.)

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 starts shortly after the events in the previous film. Spider-Man is a superhero-about-town, trying to balance his heroics with his relationships with Gwen and Aunt May (Sally Field). Peter promised Gwen’s dying father that he would stay away from Gwen to protect her from his dangerous life, and he breaks up with her for that reason. Of course, that doesn’t last long. Meanwhile, Peter’s childhood friend Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan, doing the exact same creepy whiney thing he does in every movie) inherits his father’s massive biotech company, which employs both Gwen and Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx), an electrical engineer with something like Asperger’s Syndrome. Harry’s dying father Norman tells Harry that the disease killing him will also kill his son. Harry is determined to find a cure and discovers that old experiments conducted by Peter’s deceased father (Campbell Scott) created the spiders that gave Peter his powers and may also save Harry. Around the same time, Max gets shot with a zillion bolts of electricity and falls into a tank of electric eels and is turned into Electro, a mentally unstable human lightning bolt. Somehow all of this swirls together into a typically overstuffed – though mostly coherent, in this case – comic book movie plot.

While Foxx and DeHaan munch on a good amount of CGI scenery being crazy and dastardly, the scenes between Garfield and Stone and Field are lovely. Garfield is a more relaxed and much funnier Peter than Toby Maguire was in Raimi’s films, and his dialogue with Stone is so sweet, wry, and believable that I wished Webb had directed them in a romantic comedy instead of a superhero film. Garfield’s scenes with Field are similarly affecting. Unfortunately, half of the film is focused on clichéd superhero action that may have might as well been animated.

Spoiler alert: Halfway through The Amazing Spider-Man 2, I remembered the whole point of Gwen Stacy: She is there to die. Most Spider-Man fans probably only think of Peter Parker being with Mary Jane Watson, but in for the first decade of his character’s existence, he is with Gwen, a character and a relationship then beloved to fans. In 1973, just as in this latest film, she is killed during a battle between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin. The reverberations of Gwen’s death was expansive in the Marvel Universe, and to comic books in general, as it marked the end of the optimistic innocence of superheroes and a turn to darker stories. It is clear from the last ten minutes of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, her death has profoundly changed Webb’s version of Peter Parker and, assumedly, this change will be central to the plot of the next movie. Whether this will lead Webb to create a more interesting and compelling film is debatable.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Directed by Marc Webb
Written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and Jeff Pinkner
Starring Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, and Dane DeHaan
Rated PG-13
At your local multiplex
Unnecessarily in 3-D

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We assume she’s not human, but we don’t know what she is

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There are a large number of people who will go to see Under the Skin simply because they heard that there was a great deal of nudity in it. Of particular importance, Scarlett Johansson, the famous and curvaceous blonde actress many men (and women) fantasize about, is particularly naked, the first time she was gone full frontal on film. This is of note, I guess, because, especially in the United State, nudity is taboo and actresses who are willing to be nude on film are often looked down upon (while actors who do it are considered brave). Johansson did not go nude for a blockbuster Hollywood film, but, rather, for art, which should get her a pass from our nation of prudes. I have a feeling that the pervs that go to see Under the Skin won’t give it a pass, because they will likely be mystified – unless the pervs enjoy difficult, ponderous art films. I’m not a perv, but I do love that type of film, and director Jonathan Glazer has made an indelible, hypnotic masterpiece of an art film with Under the Skin.

The film begins with a clear signal that the viewer is not going to be coddled as they are with populist Hollywood movies. After spare white credits, the screen in black for a long moment as a low drone sounds. Finally a white dot appears, then a bright star, then swirling colors and abstract images while the soundtrack crackles and beeps and Scarlett Johansson’s voice is heard making various phonetic sounds: e, ah, oh, and so on. This goes on for a while, and it’s as beautiful as it is perplexing. Finally, we see the dark (Scottish, as it turns out) countryside and a speeding motorcycle turning through a curvy road. The cyclist stops, run downs an embankment, and then returns, a dead woman flung over his shoulder. He puts the body in the back of a parked white van and zooms away. Suddenly, we see a vast space of white light; a naked woman (Johansson) pulls the clothes off of the dead woman and dresses herself in them.

Next, we watch her driving the van around Edinburgh, stalking men. After she finds a man who is alone, has no one expecting him and no family, she seduces him. Each time, she drives him to an abandoned building, which she enters first. As he follows her, they are both suddenly in a space as black as the clothes-change space was white. She undresses, beckoning to the man, and he walks towards her, removing his clothes, piece by a piece. When he is completely naked (and often erect), the blackness envelops him until he is gone. She puts her clothes back on and looks for another man.

We assume she’s not human, but we don’t know what she is. We are never told why she is killing these men, how she is doing it, who the helpful motorcyclist is, or why she expresses no emotion as the men (or any others) die. However, something does happen to her after she picks up a disfigured man with plans to send him, like the others, to the black goo. (That man is played by Adam Pearson, who actually has neurofibromatosis, which causes non-cancerous tumors to grow on his face.) She seems to develop introspection, and this leads her deep into the Scottish countryside, the motorcyclist in pursuit.

If all of this sounds rather odd, it is. That the film offers no explanation as to the motivation or origin of Johannson’s character or her motorcyclist pal and barely provides signals of her transformation in the third act. 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.” Sometimes, I think, this abstraction becomes pretentious, but other times, like in Under the Skin, the abstraction is what makes the art. I don’t think too many people would argue that any semi-skilled actress could have done Johansson’s part, but Johansson’s fame was needed to bring in audiences. Once there, they can witness Glazer’s sublime use of the Scottish landscapes, Mica Levi’s truly haunting score, and our own expectations of science fiction to create one of the most original major films in some time.

Under the Skin
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
Written by Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer
Starring Scarlett Johansson, Adam Pearson, and Michael Moreland
Rated R

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Jude Law, naked and sweaty

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The first two minutes of Dom Hemingway is perhaps the most thrilling film scene I’ve seen in several months. As the titular character, Jude Law – beefed up, with mutton chops and his natural receding hairline – stands naked and sweaty, only his head and torso visible for those two minutes while he gives a fierce, bombastic, shockingly poetic monologue about the wondrous nature of his cock. Two minutes is not a very long time in our real world, but on film, it can seem like an eternity, but not here. Law becomes more ecstatic as he comes closer to orgasm; this ode to his cock explodes as a fellow prison inmate is giving him a blowjob. It’s fabulous (if filthy) writing and a fabulous performance, and when Law is peeling the paint off the walls with his intense recital of writer-director Richard Shepard’s monologues, the film is mesmerizing. But the plot does not live up to the promise of the many great individual scenes.

Dom is a British career criminal who is released from prison shortly after his cock talk. He had refused to testify against his boss, so instead of a plea-bargained three years, he served 12. During that time, his wife left him for another man and then died of cancer. His daughter grew up and has erased him from her life. Despite the joy of his released, he is very, very angry, and he hopes this disaster will be tempered by finally receiving not just payment for the safe cracking that got him sent to jail but also a deserved gift for his time and troubles. So, after beating his ex-wife’s new husband to a pulp and then drinking and whoring for three days, he and his best friend — the effete, constantly eyebrow-raised Dickie (Richard E. Grant, most recently of Girls) – take the train to the south of France to meet Dom’s former boss, Mr. Fontaine (Demian Bichir, Oscar nominated for A Better Life).

The visit both goes much worse and much better and then much worse than anyone could have expected. Afterwards, Dom needs the help of his daughter Evelyn (Emilia Clarke, the Khalisi in Game of Thrones), who has married and had a child with Senegalese man named Hugh (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, from the British sci-fi show Misfits). She is not impressed with her father, who appears drunk and bloody on her doorstep. Dom is often drunk and bloody, and parenting is not one of Dom’s natural gifts, unlike safe-cracking. He’s a bit rusty with that, too, and the gangster son (Jumayn Hunter) of one of his old enemies decides to use that rust to screw Dom over.

As you can see, the plot is very complex, and that usually that can work in a novel, but rarely on screen. (I was actually surprised that Shepard didn’t adapt Dom Hemingway from a book.) In a film, the constant turns and misdirections make for a convoluted story. It’s is also a bit tonally confusing. The bloody, somewhat slapstick crime story feels like it came from a Guy Ritchie film like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, while the family drama about regret and redemption seem to have been culled from something like Love Actually. Merged together, the film doesn’t jell. That said, Shepard writes coke and alcohol-fueled monologues as well as he directs tense and hilarious testosterone-soaked scenes. Even if he doesn’t pull it all together as well as, say, Quentin Tarentino and Danny Boyle can with similar material, Dom Hemingway is a lot fun.

Most of this, of course, is because Jude Law gives his best performance in more than ten years and the funniest of his career. He put on thirty pounds (drinking ten cokes a day), and it looks very, very good on his familiar lither frame. Luckily for us, he’s naked for a couple rather long scenes. But it’s his spitting, throbbing, screaming explosion of a performance that really matters and makes Dom Hemingway well worth watching.

Dom Hemingway
Written and directed by Richard Shepard
Starring Jude Law, Richard E. Grant, and Emilia Clarke
Rated R

 

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