HBO’s LGBT History: The Normal Heart (2014)
Last week we swooned over Dane DeHaan’s pitch perfect portrayal of a self-serious gay NYC teen in In Treatment and this week we’re returning to what continues to be HBO’s most cherished LGBT theme: the AIDS crisis. We’ve talked about it here, there, and here, here, and yep, here again… Much of this project has been about discovery, but The Normal Heart is still relatively recent and so below find some words I’d dispatched when I first saw it close to two years ago.
“And every gay man who refuses to come forward now and fight to save his own life is truly helping to kill the rest of us.” — Ned Weeks
Anger fuels much of The Normal Heart and the play/film’s ability to showcase such raw and seemingly useless feeling is one of the more extraordinary things to come out of Kramer’s life and work. Curmudgeoney as Kramer and Ned Weeks may come off, their anger is not only justified but necessary. It makes for a tacit and probably unintentional meta-nod to have the Hulk himself play him. [More...]