7.7 | / 10 |
Users | 5.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
The battles of a gay activist to raise awareness of, and gain government support in the fight against, HIV/AIDS during the early 1980s. Adapted from the play.
Starring: Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts, Taylor Kitsch, Matt Bomer, Jim ParsonsDrama | 100% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: DTS 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
Spanish: DTS 2.0
English SDH, French, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
UV digital copy
DVD copy
Region free
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 5.0 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 1.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
Larry Kramer's autobiographical play, The Normal Heart, has grown in stature since it was first produced at New York's Public Theater in 1985, where it ran for 294 performances (an unusually long engagement for The Public). The events of the play were still fresh at the time, and similar tragedies were continuing all over the city even as the actors recited the grim statistics of the dead and dying on a nightly basis. The HIV virus would not be officially identified until the following year, and the antiviral "cocktails" that would make infection a manageable condition rather than a death sentence were still years away. In its original form, Kramer's work played like a political screed by an agitator whose confrontational style had just gotten him thrown out of the very organization he had been instrumental in founding, Gay Men's Health Crisis (or "GMHC"). By the time The Normal Heart was revived at The Public Theater in 2004, however, and even more so in its first Broadway production in 2011, the play's depth and enduring merit had emerged. Beneath the fury and frustration of the terrible losses inflicted by a disease against which medical science had no defense at the time (and the medical establishment seemed in no hurry to find one), Kramer had captured a fiercely passionate story of the human capacity for love and endurance, even under the worst of circumstances. No one was better suited to write this story than Kramer, who, long before the AIDS crisis, had been asking challenging questions from within the gay rights movement. An early scene in Ryan Murphy's HBO film adaptation of The Normal Heart shows residents of Fire Island's gay community chiding Kramer's alter ego for his portrayal of their lives in his novel Faggots, where the protagonist questions whether a life of sexual indulgence is emotionally fulfilling (the same question that has been asked for years by many heterosexuals). The rapid emergence of AIDS put an end to the party of sensual gratification that had been seen as an expression of liberation by a community that had spent years in shame and hiding, but as Kramer's play captures in searing detail, the crisis also forced many of these individuals to discover their finer natures. Like war, AIDS made men out of boys, often at the cost of their lives.
The Normal Heart was shot on film by Danny Moder, an experienced camera operator now moving into cinematography. Moder's work was one of the film's eleven Emmy nominations. With post-production on a digital intermediate, HBO's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was presumably sourced from the same digital master used for its HD broadcast. As one would expect from a recently shot production finished digitally, the image is sharp, clean and detailed, without noise or interference. However, because of the origination on film, the video transfer retains an "organic" quality that suits the period in which the drama is set. The color palette has been carefully controlled to match the increasingly bleak direction of the story, shifting from the golden hues of the Fire Island opening, to the colder, more clinical palette of Dr. Brookner's consulting rooms and the various offices where Ned Weeks tries, usually without success, to get people's attention. The blacks in night scenes and in specific settings involving black backgrounds (e.g., a TV broadcast) are solid and dark, and shadow detail is excellent in the various crowd scenes and large office spaces. Filtering and artificial sharpening are not an issue. Although various manipulations were no doubt performed by the DI colorist, a fine grain pattern from the original film negative remains visible and natural-looking. The disc has been authored with a generous average bitrate of 29.99 Mbps, which allows plenty of bandwidth for the many large crowd scenes, including Craig's birthday party, the boisterous meeting in Ned Weeks's apartment that leads to the formation of GMHC and a fundraising ball that represents one of the organization's most successful events.
The Normal Heart's 5.1 sound mix, encoded on Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA, effectively recreates the varied environments of Eighties New York, from the unique beachfront community of the Pines on Fire Island to the angry anti-gay demonstration that Tommy Boatwright has to traverse to enter GMHC (it's the rare occasion when the Southern gentleman loses his cool for a split second). The rattling of the subway, which was suffering from years of neglect and disrepair, will bring back memories to any straphanger who remembers the era. Carefully selected period tunes grace the soundtrack (e.g., Culture Club's "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me"; Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love"; and The Rolling Stones' "Waiting on a Friend"), and the underscoring by Cliff Martinez (Traffic) complements the emotions of the story without forcing them.
The sole extra is a brief but informative featurette entitled "How to Start a War" (1080p; 1.78:1; 9:40), which includes interviews with Kramer, Ruffalo, Parsons, Roberts and others. The only major omission is director Ryan Murphy.
As Julia Roberts notes in "How to Start a War", the events of The Normal Heart will seem exaggerated to someone in their twenties, but they are not. A mere thirty years ago, gay people were still considered aberrant by mainstream America, and a significant portion of the population still holds that attitude. (Just look around the internet, and you can find it easily enough.) As long as AIDS was regarded as "the gay plague", it wasn't treated as the public health issue it is now understood to be, but as a rare affliction affecting "them" and just another reason why "they" should be avoided. It took far too long for the responsible authorities to grasp, in the words of Shakespeare's Shylock, that we are all "subject to the same diseases". The Normal Heart provides an essential history of how prejudice prevented an adequate response to a public health crisis, but in Ryan Murphy's fine film adaptation, it also shows how an impossible situation elicited heroism from unlikely sources and prompted many to discover a capacity for love and sacrifice they never knew they had. Highly recommended.
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