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The Normal Heart

26 Sep

The Normal Heart — directed by Ryan Murphy. Biopic. 2 hours 20 minutes Color 2014

The Story: A writer with a big mouth screams and yells about a strange new plague: AIDS.
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The normal heart is the heart in any human who is susceptible to Corona, AIDS, Polio, or plague.

Everyone.

This fact is the foundation on which Larry Kramer stood to become one of the most obnoxious human beings alive.

Why did he do this? Such screams, imprecations, threats, insults, denunciations. Such crudeness, such rudeness. What language, what violence of tone, what combativeness! Why did he adopt such measures?

And what did such measure accomplish?

Yelling at people to wake up and do something to recognize and fight AIDS? Would not everyone turn away? Wouldn’t everyone close their ears to such shrieks? Wouldn’t everyone declare his method counterproductive? And shrink?

Mr. Kramer may have had a natural talent for obnoxiousness, true, but what it created was a huge aegis under which everyone else’s fear of being obnoxious could gather, as Kramer’s obnoxiousness magnetized all revulsion of obnoxiousness to himself and thus freed the partial favoring and the partially opposing — much the same thing. Kramer became the target of everything his partisans feared would happen to themselves. They feared calumny. Kramer drew its fire upon himself. And this allowed partisans to wake the world to AIDS. Under the aegis of his deafening outrage every other voice, therefore, could do their thing. That portion of each opponent, having resisted him to his face and in every other way, could then offer the voice of their own campaign against AIDS, with its own style, commitment, rationale, and esteem, to be expressed, heard, and collect bit by bit in small portions to form a majority to eventually awake to, to learn, educate, face, and help cure AIDS. Kramer spoke the unspeakable about the unspeakable, and his noise allowed others to speak. Until between Larry Kramer, the ugliest man in the world, to Elizabeth Taylor, the most beautiful woman the world, there was exposed the linkage which always existed, of the normal heart of us all, Those who created the gleam of that chain forged it beneath the blitz of Larry Kramer’s loud mouth.

So the material of the screenplay, which is based on Kramer’s own history of protest and insistence, collects under Kramer’s beating wing all the opposition he met in everyone he knew, loved, worked with, and was related to. For everyone was opposed to him in some form or other, and the film shows them all. From the start, he faced universal denunciation for his methods and personality. But the opponents most shown in the film are those in his own camp. The female doctor who first treated AIDS patients had trouble with Kramer, as did his own brother, his own staff, the government worthies whom he met with, and his own mate whose own AIDS Kramer had to contend with. Everyone in one way or another was his opponent.

But his real enemy was not them. His real enemy was worse. His enemy was not his own loudness. His enemy was a loudness louder than loudness. His enemy was Silence.

Which took the form of denial, resistance, obfuscation, cowardice, indifference, avoidance, prejudice.

But Kramer was loud and never stopped being loud. He was our loud angel — and the film is wonderful in its huge jeremiads not just by Mark Ruffalo who plays Kramer, but by Julia Roberts, Joe Mantell, Jim Parsons, Alex Molina.

The film is well directed and perfectly cast: and everyone is at their best.

Still.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Alfred Molina, Julia Roberts

 
 
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