Genre: Drama , Television
Directed By: Ryan Murphy
Written By: Larry Kramer
On DVD: Aug 26, 2014
Runtime: 2 hr. 13 min.
Bình Luận:
THE NORMAL HEART: NƯỚC MẮT, NỖI ĐAU và TIẾNG THÉT GÀO - JEFFREY THAI
MOVIE INFO
This drama tells the story of the onset of the HIV-AIDS crisis in New York City in the early 1980s, taking an unflinching look at the nation's sexual politics as gay activists and their allies in the medical community fight to expose the truth about the burgeoning epidemic to a city and nation in denial. -- (C) HBO
Bộ phim truyện này kể câu chuyện về thời kỳ đầu của đại dịch HIV-AIDS ở thành phố New York vào đầu thập niên 80 của thế kỷ trước. Nó soi rọi một cái nhìn không khoan nhượng vào các quan điểm chính trị về tính dục của nước Mỹ, khi mà các nhà hoạt động cho quyền của người đồng tính và các đồng minh của họ trong cộng đồng y khoa tranh đấu để phơi bày sự thật về cơn đại dịch bị làm ngơ đang bùng nổ trong thành phố và cả đất nước.
‘The Normal Heart’ Dạy Cho Thế Hệ Trẻ Về Thời Kỳ Đầu Của AIDS
Tại sao Ryan Murphy, một trong những nhà sản xuất series phim truyền hình nổi tiếng nhất hiện nay lại muốn làm một bộ phim chuyển thể từ một vở nhạc kịch đã 30 năm tuổi về sự hình thành của một tổ chức hỗ trợ bệnh nhân AIDS cho HBO? Bởi vì, ông nghĩ câu chuyện về sự lây lan của AIDS đang bị lãng quên.
Murphy chính là sự sáng tạo đằng sau các series như Glee và American Horror Story, và giờ đây ông mang lại dáng vẻ mới cho ‘The Normal Heart’ – vở nhạc kịch năm 1985 của Larry Kramer nói về cách phản ứng trốn tránh của cộng đồng gay với căn bệnh thế kỷ và cách phớt lờ của chính phủ thời ấy.
“Rất nhiều người trẻ đã không biết về phần này của lịch sử,” Murphy nói. “Họ không nhớ sự sợ hãi đó.”
Murphy, (bản thân ông cũng là gay) nhớ về lần đầu tiên khi ông có các mối quan hệ vào đầu thập niên 80. Khi đó ông 16 tuổi, làm việc tại một cửa hàng giày trong một khu mua sắm ở Indianapolis.
“Tôi đã gặp một thanh niên 21 tuổi,” ông kể “Và tôi đã theo về căn hộ của anh ta.” Tại đó, Murphy đã nhìn thấy tờ báo The New York Native với tiêu đề lớn về AIDS. “Và thế là tôi đứng dậy và rời khỏi căn hộ.”
Trong thập niên tiếp theo, Murphy đã mất 10 người bạn vì AIDS. Ông đã làm việc tại một đường dây nóng hộ trợ về AIDS ở Washington, D.C. Tại đó, ông đã đọc – và yêu – ‘The Normal Heart’.
Bản chuyển thể của ‘The Normal Heart’ sẽ được chiếu vào tối Chủ nhật trên HBO. Đây là một trong hai bộ phim lớn gần đây nói về đại dịch AIDS những năm 1980. Bộ phim ‘Dallas Buyers Club’ đã nhận được 6 đề cử giải Oscars năm nay.
Murphy đã nhìn thấy một sự tương đồng với bộ phim Platoon, ra đời 15 năm sau chiến tranh Việt Nam. Giống như với chiến tranh Việt Nam, với AIDS, “Có sự thay đổi trong cách mọi người muốn nói về vấn đề đó,” ông nói. “Trong suốt một thời gian dài, tôi không nghĩ người ta muốn nói về nó.”
Việc nhớ về những ngày đầu của đại dịch này là cực kỳ quan trọng, Phill Wilson, nhà sáng lập Black Aids Institute, phát biểu. Ông cũng chỉ ra rằng HIV vẫn đang tồn tại vẫn sống tốt và vẫn đang lan truyền. Và cách thức tồn tại của nó ngày nay hoàn toàn khác với những năm 1985.
“HIV tại Mỹ là một đại dịch đen,” ông nói. “Gần 50% nạn nhân đang sống chung với HIV tại Mỹ là người da đen. 50% nạn nhân nhiễm mới tại đất nước này là người da đen. Hơn 70% phụ nữ dương tính HIV ở đất nước này là người da đen.”
Những con số phần trăm này đã được phản ánh, trong một chừng mực nào đó, trong các sản phẩm văn hóa hiện đại. Wilson nhắc đến các bộ phim như ‘Noal’s Arc’ và ‘Brothers & Sisters’, cả hai bộ phim đều có các nhân vật dương tính với HIV. Một số ít bộ phim của các đạo diễn Mỹ gốc Phi đã khắc họa điều kiện sống với HIV trong thời hiện đại. (Wilson đã chỉ ra ví dụ điển hình là ‘Precious’, một bộ phìm giàu cảm xúc, mô tả chân thực chân dung một cô gái thiếu niên khi phát hiện ra mình dương tính sau khi trốn thoát khỏi nhà do bị bạo hành gia đình.)
Vậy điều mà ‘The Normal Heart’ nói về HIV ở hiện tại là gì? “Rất nhiều”, Wilson nói, ông đã coi đi coi lại vở nhạc kịch nhiều lần: “Đó là một câu chuyện về con người, bất kể khác biệt, khi không còn một ai quan tâm tới họ, đã tìm đến nhau, để cứu lấy mạng sống của họ.”
Thông điệp của ‘The Normal Heart’ rất gần gũi với một nhóm những thanh niên trẻ đang làm việc tại nhóm Metro Teen AIDS, một tổ chức giáo dục thanh niên và phòng chống HIV. Nhưng ngay cả khi có những tổ chức như vậy thì Murphy vẫn đúng. Ngay cả những người trẻ đang tham gia cuộc chiến chống lại HIV, không phải tất cả bọn họ đều hiểu rõ về lịch sự khó khăn chống lại đại dịch này.
“Tôi đã không biết là ban đầu chỉ có gay,” một thanh niên 25 tuổi nói. “Tôi đã nghĩ là cả straight và gay.”
Và một thiếu niên 15 tuối đã shock khi biết cộng đồng gay đã cố tự cô lập mình “Nếu tôi ở trong tình huống đó, tôi sẽ không sợ hãi việc mình là ai,” cô nói.
Nhưng một người bạn của cô đã chỉ ra rằng thông điệp của bộ phim là việc vượt qua nỗi sợ ấy. Và điều đó đã làm thay đổi cách nhìn nhận về cộng đồng gay ở đất nước này. “Tôi nghĩ, bạn cần phải đấu tranh cho điều mà bạn muốn,” cô nói.
Đâu đó, Larry Kramer đang mỉm cười.
Trong bộ phim ‘The Normal Heart’ của HBO, chuyển thể từ vở nhạc kịch năm 1985 của Larry Kramer, Mark Ruffalo (phải) trong vai Ned Weeks, bắt đầu cuộc hành trình tìm kiếm lời giải cho căn bệnh bí ẩn xuất hiện trong cộng đồng gay của anh. Joe Mantello đóng vai một thành viên tổ chức hỗ trợ bệnh nhân AIDS, Gay Men’s Health Crisis.
(Theo Neda Ulaby, National Public Radio)
CRITIC REVIEWS FOR THE NORMAL HEART
The Media Forgets That AIDS Is Still an Epidemic, But Hollywood Doesn't'The Normal Heart' is a damning indictment of our government's negligence
By Eric Sasson
At the end of his brutal, graphic movie adaptation of Larry Kramer's seminal play, The Normal Heart, premiering Sunday on HBO, director Ryan Murphy puts up some sobering statistics on the screen: 36,000,000 people dead since the start of the AIDS epidemic, and 6,000 new HIV infections every day around the world. The numbers are meant to discomfort us in 2014, almost 30 years after Kramer's play debuted at New York City's Public Theater: AIDS has not disappeared. AIDS still kills.
Given the paucity of coverage in the media lately, audiences can be forgiven for not thinking much about the disease. After all, AIDS is hardly the scourge it once was, and the proliferation of advanced antiretroviral medication means most people with HIV who get treatment will live long with few complications. The disease is so undercovered that even last week's historic announcement that the CDC had recommended doctors prescribe Truvada, a pre-exposure prophylaxis drug, to all gay men engaging in high-risk sex was pretty much ignored by most major outlets.
It doesn't help that what was once the organizing issue for most LGBT rights organizations for decades barely gets any mention in their annual reports. Nor are these organizations doing the kind of strategic work they once did on the disease. The LGBT community, it seems, has other things on its mind—notably same-sex marriage. As the community cheers the falling dominoes of gay-marriage bans, other issues have moved to the forefront: workplace discrimination, transgender equality, bullying. In a recent Buzzfeed article, “7 LGBT Issues That Matter More Than Marriage,” AIDS or HIV aren't even mentioned once.
Not that these issues aren't important, or that the gay community shouldn't celebrate its hard-earned victories. It's certainly valid to focus on other issues, considering the gigantic strides we've made against AIDS. Once HAART medications rendered HIV a manageable condition, the number of deaths in the gay community plummeted worldwide. In 2012, for the first time in thirty years, AIDS was no longer even in the top 10 causes of death in New York anymore. With the virus seemingly under control, the LGBT community has focused its energies on other issues with broader, more uplifting appeal—ones that, unlike AIDS, aren't rife with depressing images of sickness and death, but instead feature heart-warming portraits of just-like-you-and-me couples expressing their love and raising their kids, soldiers serving honorably after the end of "Don't Ask Don't Tell," and out celebrities hosting talk shows and awards ceremonies. What better way to show that the LGBT community has survived, even thrived, since the AIDS crisis, than through these testaments to resilience and pride?
But before we celebrate the end of AIDS, consider the following: New infections of HIV are on the rise among younger gay men, and remain stubbornly high overall in the U.S. at around 50,000 a year. 15,000 people a year still die here, despite the fact that effective medications are readily available and covered by insurance. As a recent New Republic article pointed out, the U.S. significantly lags all other developed countries in reducing mortality rates, as well as access to life-saving health care.
Perhaps AIDS gets less coverage today because the face of the disease has changed. Today, Hispanic and African American populations are disproportionately affected, and new HIV infections appear to be rising in areas like the Deep South, where there's less access to adequate healthcare and the stigma of HIV remains high. These are not the faces of the gay community we see on TV, which skew overwhelmingly white, urban, affluent, and more often than not male. As AIDS now hits these less visible communities the hardest, are we all that surprised to see it follow a trend familiar to these communities: less funding, less outrage, and less coverage in the mainstream media? Activists have long complained about the dearth of coverage in the MSM around issues of poverty and disadvantaged communities, and statistics back it up: there is less reporting on poverty in America than on any other major societal issue. So it is with AIDS.
That alone makes The Normal Heart an important film. Along with Dallas Buyers Club, it's ushering in a new kind of AIDS film, one that is finally willing to mount a damning indictment of our national and local governments' silence and negligence in the face of the growing epidemic, a silence which led to fear-mongering and homophobia so profound that a famous musician wore an “AIDS kills fags dead” t-shirt, people were afraid to use public toilet seats, and some didn't even want to be in the vicinity of the infected—in the movie, a repairman refuses to enter a room of an AIDS patient to fix the TV, saying he'd rather quit his job than come in contact with the disease.
As unflinching as these movies are, some might worry that they reinforce the myth that AIDS was only a problem in the past—that by focusing exclusively on the 1980s and '90s, they allow today's audiences to shake theirs heads at the poor policies of yesteryear while applauding how far we've come since then. But Murphy, the director, seems aware of this: The Normal Heart focuses acutely on the ways in which our public institutions failed us. We even see protagonist Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo) accuse the government of intentionally ignoring AIDS as part of a conspiracy to see gays die off. The movie comes across as a cautionary tale: We've come very far, but don't think this can't happen again.
Who knows what would happen if a new, different epidemic were to hit us today? We'd like to think we're enlightened enough not to repeat the mistakes of history, but I wonder. Less than thirty years ago, the U.S. government remained silent as thousands of gay men died. Reagan didn't even mention the word AIDS until 1985, the New York Times refused to use the word “gay” in its initial review of Kramer's play, and New York Mayor Ed Koch was notoriously slow in doling out any funding. A community suffered and watched as fear and hate spread, as hundreds of thousands got sick or died, and countless others were shamed into remaining in the closet. And what community was less visible than the gay community back then? It took men like Larry Kramer to insist not only that he be heard, but that he be treated as an equal.
What The Normal Heart may hopefully do, then, is rekindle our fear of complacency. We don't have to wonder about new epidemics—AIDS is still here. It is still killing people, particularly people without a voice or the means to get proper care. Movies like The Normal Heart remind us that we owe it to those who lost their lives to speak up for those who are suffering today. Tomorrow, there will be 6,000 more of them in the world.
Ryan Murphy's adaptation of The Normal Heart is set in the past, but not safely in the past. This in itself is remarkable. The film's source material, Larry Kramer's play about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, premiered in 1985 and was revived on Broadway in 2011. This HBO version — which stars Mark Ruffalo as a Ned Weeks, a Larry Kramer–like character raging against state-sponsored neglect and passive-aggressive bigotry — arrives after nearly three decades of failed attempts to adapt it to film.
Despite the elapsed years, nothing about the movie feels dated, neutered, or "official." Kramer's play was theater, but it was also journalism and agitprop. Kramer co-founded the activist organization Gay Men's Health Crisis during a meeting at his apartment, to raise awareness and money to battle the epidemic at a time when nearly everyone preferred not to publicly discuss it. For all its poetry and vitality, the play was an extension of that rabble-rousing mission. The film has poetry and vitality, too, and its greatest virtue is that it seems not to give a damn if you approve of any of its creative choices as long as you connect with it emotionally and intellectually. It rips Kramer's work out of the cocoon of received wisdom that might have otherwise entombed it by making it seem safe or "official." It's an account of life during an epidemic that might have been less brutal, or at least more dignified, had public officials behaved with more bravery, honesty, and compassion. It aims to rattle viewer complacency and re-create the sorrow, horror, and outrage of the early '80s, when gay men were dying in droves after acquiring HIV and the dominant culture wrung its hands or folded its arms, with the ugliest among them (some of whom were employed by President Ronald Reagan's administration) writing off mass death as the byproduct of poor lifestyle choices.
The Normal Heart was righteously pissed about this all when it first hit New York floorboards, just four years after the first cases were initially labeled as "gay cancer" and "Gay Related Immunodeficiency Disease." The HBO film is pissed, too, but for different reasons. It seems angered by the possibility that this period might recede in the national consciousness or (just as bad) be distorted or whitewashed, by conservatives who want to deify Reagan and his people and excuse their inaction in the face of AIDS, or by straight liberals or closeted gay men who stuck their heads in the sand back then instead of saying or doing something that might've made a difference. At its best, the movie has the propulsive wildness of a late-'80s or early-'90s feature by Oliver Stone or Spike Lee. It comes out swinging with both fists, wildly. It's the anti-Philadelphia. At times the movie seems to be even angrier at closeted '80s gay men with political or financial power than at similarly privileged but inactive straight liberals, or at Reagan and his evangelical Christian-pandering minions. The late Ed Koch, New York City's mayor during the Normal Heartyears, is blasted as a hypocritical closet case who could have worked miracles if he'd had the courage to publicly self-identify as gay and treat medical research funding and public health initiatives as personal missions. "Why are they letting us die?" Weeks demands, a question to which every other character knows the answer.
The movie's political agenda is clear: to carve out a "Never Forget" space in the national psyche. It wants the official governmental non-response to AIDS in the early '80s to be placed on a list of the most contemptible acts of calculated neglect in the nation's history. It knows the only way it can do that is to disregard everyone else's sense of what's appropriate or tasteful and work from the gut. To that end, Murphy's movie is loud, lusty, sentimental, strident, despairing, viscerally nasty, unabashedly polemical, frequently infuriating, and often powerful. It's a film about love, sex, illness, death, bigotry, and anger. It is imprecise in its effects and sometimes clumsy and overbearing, and there are times when you might wish it would just shut the hell up (particularly when a character launches into yet another statistics-laced speech that sounds far too obviously "written"). And yet all of these qualities make The Normal Heart an equivalent of the literary voice and offscreen personality of Kramer, who wrote the adapted script. I suspect that's why critics by and large have been so kind to this production: because they see themselves in the not-Kramer characters, the ones who're obsessed with saying things in the "right" way rather than hollering and cursing and pounding tabletops and shaming people until they act, or at least react.
At one point, Weeks, who's been drummed out of his own organization for being a strident, self-aggrandizing, and often belligerent wild card, aligns himself with Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, and Alan Turing, who cracked the Germans' Enigma Code. "These are not invisible men," he says. He's not wrong. His desire for the plague's main victims to stop being invisible elevates the monologue beyond mere self-aggrandizement. Not that it matters what anyone thinks of Kramer/Weeks anyway. The historical distance between those lines' first performance and their re-creation in a movie clarifies a point that Kramer was making from the very beginning: It doesn't matter what you think of the messenger as long as you respond to the message, and that under such dire circumstances, merely to be a messenger is to be a hero. Weeks is personally invested in the course of the epidemic because he's lost friends already and fears he'll lose his lover Felix Turner (Matt Bomer), who's infected and in physical decline. "I’m frightened nobody important is going to give a damn because it seems to be happening mostly to gay men," he says. "Who cares if a faggot dies?" But he's also coming to terms with his own identity, sounding a barbaric yawp across the rooftops of the world and exhorting others to do likewise.
Weeks is a consistently annoying and occasionally repulsive character, bulldozing those who disagree with his tactics, making inflammatory statements without consulting his colleagues, and impugning the motives and beliefs of people who disagree with him. (His showboating evokes a self-pitying rhetorical question posed by the arrogant cop hero of Year of the Dragon: "How can anybody care too much?") But when you consider the magnitude of suffering around Weeks, the other characters' tendency to tone-police him seems surreally misguided. He insists that a more genteel approach won't produce results, and history has proved him right. Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts), a polio-paralyzed researcher who's been studying the disease from year one, agrees with Weeks. Her despairing rant against National Institute of Health officials who won't fund her research aligns her with the crusading pariahs of the world. ("Polio was a virus," she tells Weeks. "Nobody gets polio anymore.") As 1981 gives way to 1982 and 1983 and 1984, the verbal brawls over how to frame the message become more intense, sometimes turning physical. But over time we can see everyone's resistance to extreme tactics collectively start to fade. Asking nicely is getting them nowhere. The only holdout is Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch), a banker who becomes an activist but never leaves the closet, even though his model boyfriend contracted HIV early on, then slathered foundation on his sores so that he wouldn't get fired from runway gigs.
The film has sympathy for Niles and concedes that his "good cop" approach is valid, in its way — MLK versus Malcolm X, basically; but his inability to evince the sort of confident, outer-directed anger that Weeks displays ultimately marks him as an obstacle or foil, a guy who has good intentions but the wrong priorities.
Ryan Murphy is the perfect choice to direct this story. Although the social commentary in his TV shows (including Nip/Tuck, Glee, and American Horror Story) has often been confused or self-defeating, Murphy has never seemed more articulate and focused than when he's identifying with beleaguered and marginalized outsiders. That's why the second season of American Horror Story, subtitled Asylum, was the series' best to date: Like Samuel Fuller's 1965 film Shock Corridor — an admitted inspiration on Asylum that was also set in a mental hospital full of speechifying inmates — the story politicized the most painful experiences of its characters. The Asylum inmates were locked away and sometimes tortured and killed because of who they were and how they lived. They didn't fit into the dominant culture, and they paid the price. That's what's happening in The Normal Heart. The film's individual stories are earthbound, rooted in personal and historical fact, but Murphy and his cinematographer Daniel Moder (Enemy of the State) invest the scenes of infection, death, burial, and mourning with the foggy intensity of a 1970s fright film. The opening section, set at Fire Island in 1981, feels like the start of a supernatural horror picture about an ancient curse that has suddenly awakened. The delicate mood of bacchanalian bliss is destroyed when a handsome young man with a troubling cough collapses in the surf. As the story unfolds we see this again and again: handsome young men falling down, then slowly dying. The slick skin and lesions are lit and shot so that they seem at once real and metaphorical: The disease is destroying individual bodies, but also a post-Stonewall ideal that being able to love who you want will let you be who you want. Even some of Weeks's compatriots in the GMHC worry that the disease is a judgment levied against them, if not by God, then by mainstream America. At first they're disgusted by Weeks's hyperbolic assertion that Reagan hasn't said anything because he wants gay men to be extinct, but as the death toll mounts, they start to wonder if there's maybe something to it. The film doesn't wonder. It says, "Yes, that's pretty much what happened. And if you say otherwise, you're naïve or lying."
If anger and suffering were all there were to The Normal Heart, watching it would be torture. Luckily, it has heart to match its guts. There's always been a crackpot humanist sensibility in Murphy's TV work, even when it was going for sadomasochistic violence or surreal kitsch. The love that, say, Glee lavishes on Kurt and his father always felt sincere, not faked, and when American Horror Story fixes its warped funhouse-mirror gaze on the suffering of anyone pegged as different and therefore worthless, you can feel the outrage flowing beneath the camp. Whatever emotions it's conjuring up, you know the show's not kidding. The Normal Heart isn't kidding, either. It's as bold as Kramer when it comes to the grand gesture. The film's most emblematic image occurs during a fund-raising ball: a low-angled closeup of a glitter ball, each triangular plane reflecting a different pair of slow-dancing men. Every death in the picture seems to diminish its survivors, which makes the often-quoted memorial monologue by its sweetest character, Tommy Boatwright (Jim Parsons, brilliant), all the more wrenching. He refers to the Rolodex cards he saves after friends die as "a collection of cardboard tombstones, bound together with a rubber band."
MATT BOMER: THE NORMAL HEART CHANGED HIS LIFE
(Apr 21, 2014) BY SHANA NAOMI KROCHMAL
'It blew my mind in terms of the level of unconditional love between Ned and Felix—my goodness, if these people could incorporate this into their lives, under their circumstances, why can’t I?'
Photography by Kai Z Feng
Matt Bomer is the cover star of Out's June/July issue (available on newsstands May 15), and he spoke with writer Shana Naomi Krochmal about the experience of acting in the long-awaited adaptation of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart directed by Ryan Murphy for HBO. In the film, Matt Bomer plays Felix Turner, who falls victim to the disease as Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo) and Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts) raise hell from opposite ends to figure out what's happening. Here we have an exclusive image from Out's photo photo shoot with Kai Z Feng and a sneak peek at the interview.
Bomer, whom Murphy had cast in guest roles on Glee (he played Darren Criss’s older brother) and The New Normal (as Andrew Rannells’s ostentatious ex-boyfriend), campaigned aggressively to play Felix. “Matt, out of everybody, fought the hardest for it,” Murphy tells Out. “It was that same passion that I had used to persuade Larry Kramer to give me the rights to the play.”
Murphy told Kramer they’d found their Felix. “I said, ‘I really believe in Matt Bomer.’ And Larry said, ‘But he’s so beautiful! Is he too beautiful?’ ”
Murphy arranged a meeting between the two men. “I was pretty starstruck,” Bomer says. “It was like meeting one of the Beatles. He was so central to my understanding and development. We talked for a really long time." Kramer emailed Murphy immediately after: “He’s the one.”
Because Bomer knew the part would require a production break during which he would have to lose a substantial amount of weight—40 pounds—part of his original lobbying effort for the role was extensive, specific research into how, in 1984, a man dying of AIDS would see his body change. His transformation— especially in contrast to Ned and Felix’s vigorous sex scenes earlier in the movie—is a painfully, hauntingly accurate time capsule.
“I think Matt felt the ghosts,” Murphy says. “I think he felt all the shame and humiliation and degradation of all those brothers who have died of AIDS. It was a very beautiful, spiritual thing to witness.”
Filming such demanding material over the course of five months employed Bomer’s years of classical training, and it took him back to that wide-eyed 14-year-old who first read The Normal Heart. “You’re really lucky as an artist if you get a role that changes you as a person,” Bomer, now 36, says earnestly, on the brink of tears. “It taught me how to access myself on a completely different level as an artist. And it blew my mind in terms of the level of unconditional love between Ned and Felix—my goodness, if these people could incorporate this into their lives, under their circumstances, why can’t I?”
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