TV Review: Heart failure

HBO’s adaptation of “The Normal Heart” falters under Ryan Murphy’s direction

It’s easy to imagine how good HBO’s “The Normal Heart” looked on paper: adapted from Larry Kramer’s groundbreaking 1985 play, directed by Ryan Murphy, one of the biggest names in television, with a respected cast for a fearless cable network with a long track record of catapulting gay-themed, socially conscious (and often controversial) films into the mainstream (from 2003’s “Angels in America” to last year’s “Behind the Candelabra”). 

Unfortunately, there’s something innately and irrevocably wrong with the made-for-TV movie. There is something off from the first frame that carries through the entire 2 hour and 15 minute runtime, a hard-to-pinpoint flaw that seems endemic to the presence of Ryan Murphy, a hacky, overrated TV producer (“Glee,” “Nip/Tuck”) who has lately made a film career of adapting maudlin, half-baked memoirs into glossy, borderline-unwatchable movies (“Running with Scissors,” “Eat, Pray, Love”). “The Normal Heart” is easily his best film, due mostly to the unimpeachable source material, but it’s still a failure.

The play is a microcosmic look at the early days of the AIDS crisis in New York City. It was written by Kramer as both a frantic warning to New York’s gay community and the world at large and as an apologia for the author, a controversial figure largely shunned by his peers for his aggressive, in-your-face style of activism. He was an audacious challenger of the promiscuity-as-protest philosophy that permeated his East Village community in the years leading up to the HIV epidemic. 

The film opens in 1981 with Ned Weeks (a fictional stand-in for Kramer, played by Mark Ruffalo) vacationing at a gay resort to celebrate the birthday of Craig (“Glee” star Jonathan Groff). Weeks, a Jewish writer whose incendiary novel criticizing the gay lifestyle has made him something of an outsider to his community, observes the hedonism around him with unease. Soon, Craig collapses on the beach. When Weeks returns to Manhattan, he visits Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts) to learn more about a mysterious new cancer spreading throughout the city which appears to afflict only gay men.

As his friends begin to die and the disease spreads at an alarming rate, Weeks forms the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a ragtag activist group meant to raise awareness within the community and draw attention from the U.S. government. As the months and years pass and the death toll reaches the thousands, the volatile, frustrated Weeks becomes ever more confrontational, screaming at everyone who refuses to listen—the media, the mayor, the White House. Like Kramer, Weeks takes an abrasive, take-no-prisoners approach to communicating his message, which ultimately alienates him from his fellow GMHC activists. 

Time has vindicated Kramer’s fire-and-brimstone approach to activism. When the play was revived for Broadway in 2011, it was welcomed with critical accolades, a handful of awards, and its largest audience yet.  

As a film adaptation, “The Normal Heart” succeeds where many others have failed. Kramer, responsible for the film’s screenplay, opens the story up in ways few stage-to-film projects have managed to do. The characters’ impassioned speeches (of which there are many) somehow transcend the stodgy theatricality that has haunted so many other adaptations (such as, most recently, the disastrous “August: Osage County”), and Murphy should get his due credit in orchestrating such a tricky transition and managing to create hair-raising moments of urgency despite the dated material. 

But the movie’s failings must also fall directly on Murphy’s shoulders. As he did with his 2006 film of Augusten Burroughs’ dubious memoir “Running with Scissors,” Murphy flounders with emotional nuance; never one for subtlety, the creator of “American Horror Story” doesn’t know what to do with a quiet moment. He’s not tone deaf, but he’s one note: loud, transgressive, self-satisfied, never gentle. His attempts at tenderness are painted with broad, sentimental brushstrokes. His major strength is found in the performances he elicits from his cast—apart from the always-reliable Ruffalo and Roberts, the film showcases strong work by Taylor Kitsch, Matt Bomer and Jim Parsons—but he undermines those performances with clunky stylistic flourishes and a leering camera pre-occupied with the physical grotesqueries of the disease. In its worst moments, the terrifying reality of “The Normal Heart” is undermined by Murphy’s sensationalized shooting style—true horror becomes horror movie exploitation. 

Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of “The Normal Heart” premiered on HBO Sunday, May 25, and is now available On Demand and on HBOGo.

For a far more poignant, heartbreaking snapshot of a community in crisis, allow me to recommend an alternative to “The Normal Heart”: the astounding “How to Survive a Plague,” available on Netflix, is easily the best documentary of 2012. It traces the history of ACT UP, the organization Kramer helped found after he departed GMHC. Through extensive archival footage and talking-head interviews, director David France chronicles the painful, difficult challenge of bringing AIDS-fighting drugs to the market.