I recorded and watched the film version of Larry Kramer’s powerful play The Normal Heart last night on HBO.  Often times a play doesn’t translate all that well to film — long speeches that become agonizing when it’s not live, static staging, but this worked very well.  Even some of the long speeches worked because it’s people pouring out their fear and frustration.  There was even voice over which I didn’t hate.  I usually fine it intrusive as hell, but since the main character, Ned, is a writer it felt like him composing to himself, and god knows I talk out loud when I’m working on a scene.  The direction was a bit hysterical at points, but the cast was so good and the dialogue so powerful that it didn’t bother me all that much.

The cast was phenomenal.  I fell in love with Mark Ruffalo in The Avengers.  I know this sounds weird, but he humanized The Hulk in a way that was very touching, and he was amazing in this film.  He played a gay man with a delicate touch, not the least bit cliched.  Matt Bomer as his love interest was also pitch perfect.  We watched a couple fall in love in a romance that was the equal of any hetero couple ever presented on film.  Jim Parsons was an anchor to this piece.  The man keeping track of the dead on, as he says, cardboard tombstones.  Alfred Molina turned in another elegant and nuanced performance as Ned’s straight brother trying to love and understand his sibling.

As I watched last night it reminded me of a book I read about the great conductors.  The author made the point that a generation of great musicians “went up in ashes” in the German camps in the nineteen-forties.  AIDS did the same thing forty years later.  A generation of writers, composers, dancers, artists were lost to this disease.  What plays, books and songs didn’t we get because of this scourge?  The tag at the end pointed out that since the appearance of the virus 36 million people worldwide have died.  One has to ask who might have been saved if almost six years hadn’t passed before anyone began to take this disease seriously.