Ryan Murphy | The Normal Heart / 2014 [TV Movie]

a prophet shouting in paradise for change

by Douglas Messerli

 

Larry Kramer and Ryan Murphy (screenplay, based on the play by Larry Kramer), Ryan Murphy (director) The Normal Heart / 2014 [TV Movie]

 

From the first scenes of Ryan Murphy’s hyperactive The Normal Heart to its very end, Murphy takes us into a journey of self-awareness and activism which is, on one hand, awakening and heartening given the slowness of any action in the early days of AIDS even among gay men, but utterly exhausting and emotionally distressing so that by the end of the important and powerful film one feels, if you have any sense of empathy, totally wrecked, in tears and with no answers. I feel this is an important film, but its one failure is that Murphy has no sense of rhythm, seldom allowing his central character, based on the charismatic and often totally irritating Larry Kramer, any let up or moments of joy, even though we know that with his lover John Duka (in this film named Felix Turner), he must have had quiet moments of intense love and joy. Like a railroad engine constantly moving forward, Murphy’s work, however, offers no stop.

     Fortunately, Kramer’s character, named Alexander “Ned” Weeks in the work is played by the wonderful actor Mark Ruffalo, whose shouts and pleas are expressed much more quietly and calmly, for the most part, than Kramer’s own “mow-em-down” style. Ruffalo brings a depth of character to this film that it desperately needs to simply keep us alert to what he is, little by little, coming to perceive about the new “gay cancer.”

     Already before the film’s first scenes, Weeks has written a major fiction, Faggots, which had criticized the gay community for its shallow and promiscuous behavior; so re-entering the world of Fire Island in 1981, the one place on the planet where gay men gathered precisely to set all their sexual inhabitations aside, permitting themselves the full enjoyment of the sexual identity which they had fought so long and hard to maintain, was perhaps not an easy choice. But he is there to celebrate the birthday of his dear friend Craig Donner (the handsome Jonathan Groff). Donner is currently dating another beautiful energetic young man, Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch), who will soon play an even larger role in Weeks’ life, and is surrounded by other tanned, beautiful men such as Mickey Marcus (Joe Mantello), all of whom, when not taking in the sun, help shave each other’s bodies and engage in an almost endless sybaritic life.

    But something happens here that changes everything. While on the beach, Craig suddenly feels dizzy and collapses. And later, when blowing out the candles of his birthday cake, he cannot catch his breath and begins to cough.     

     While returning to New York City on the ferry, Weeks reads in the The New York Times about a new rare disease possibly discovered “Rare Cancer Diagnosed in 41 Homosexuals.” Never one to let a problem go unresolved, Weeks visits the offices of Dr. Emma Brookner (brilliantly played by a dour, unsmiling Julia Roberts) who has been one of the few doctors who has been willing to treat these cases, which is seem by others as possibly contagious. Sitting in a wheelchair, herself brought down by a childhood virus now irradicated, polio, she speaks of a rare diseases that might normally be harmless to such robust young men unless their immune systems had been compromised. In short, she believes this new disease might itself be an undetected virus spread through sexual contact. But she has, as yet, no evidence, and other people in the medical profession refuse to accept her findings.

     At the hospital Weeks meets just such a patient, Sanford (Stephen Spinella), whose face and hands are scared with lesions from Kaposi’s sarcoma. Dr. Brookner pleads for Weeks’ help in making the gay community aware of the disease and its possible causes.

     Almost at the same moment, Weeks’ friend Craig, suffering convulsions, is rushed by Mickey, Bruce, and Ned to the hospital where he almost immediately is pronounced dead.

   Weeks organizes a meeting for local gay men to hear what Brookner has learned about the disease. She still lacks concrete evidence, but she argues that she believes it is sexually transmissible and encourages these men to perhaps avoid sexual contact for the time being. Strangely, condoms or other protective devices are never brought into the equation, perhaps because it was still unrecognized to be the result of the actual emission of semen. Perhaps any contact might help the contagion spread. She attempts to explain that although she has written about her conclusions, no medical journal is interested in a disease affecting primarily homosexual men, still the pariahs of the general society.

     Obviously, her suggestion of no sexual contact does not go over well with the group of young gay men to whom she is attempting to convince.

     Weeks declares that it is time to start up a service to spread information about the disease and to provide those who have been infected to find medical help, the beginnings of the important Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC). The remarkable organization would be the first of many great frustrations in Weeks’/Kramer’s life.

     Brookner invites Weeks to once more visit a local hospital where many of her sickest patients lay dying in critical condition because of what was then called the gay-related immune deficiency (GRID). Unlike all the others, again, she did not mask up or attempt to separate herself in any manner as a human from her patients, and Weeks follows her example as he enters his first true version of hell, observing how these men are dying before his eyes. It would move anyone, and it certainly did Weeks, who wanted his new organization not only to establish a telephone hotline, counseling services, and a place of the general messaging of information, but sought it to be an activist group, first contacting his lawyer brother, Ben Weeks (Alfred Molina), to provide free legal advice to the GMHC. Although the brothers are close, the elder having long protected and made his younger sibling financially secure, they come to a standstill when Weeks attempts to convince his elder brother that he is the same kind of being he is, simply with a different sexuality. The lawyer simply cannot accept that, still perceiving even his beloved brother as somehow sick and mentally ill. Eventually, the two keep their distance, despite their deep bonds and love.

     With Tommy Boatwright (Jim Parsons) an eager, younger gay man, Bruce, Mickey, and others, including a lesbian volunteer (so important to such movements, but often forgotten) he begins his organization with very little funding. In hopes that at least the city government might help him out, he attempts to get entry to then mayor, Ed Koch, calling him out on the media finally as gay and demanding his support. He also demonstrates his anger on the air against the Regan administration who was doing nothing at all about the AIDS crisis and actually cutting the budgets for medical research.

      The group of eager caregivers which constituted his board were not at all yet up to such activist positions, particularly when it came to Weeks’ insistence that gay men realize that it was sexual promiscuity that was making them ill. And, over his objections, they elect pretty-boy Bruce as their president, basically removing the organization’s founder to the sidelines.

     Finally, Weeks approaches a connection he has vaguely made with a reputedly gay man in The New York Times, Felix Turner (Matt Bomer) who tries to make it clear that the newspaper has utterly no interest in actually exploring the true nature of the disease. They are disinterested in articles about homosexuals.

     At the same time, however, he reminds Weeks that they had previously met up in a bathhouse a few years earlier, and been highly attracted to each other. Quite quickly, Weeks is charmed by Turner’s beauty, personality, and general grace, and the two begin a relationship. Given Weeks’ generally abrasive personality in his unceasing advocacy for gay men who wouldn’t fight for themselves, however, it is not an easy go. But given the skills of both Bomer and Ruffalo the two calm one another and find an easy dependency that is one of the few truly relaxing and charming aspects of this generally overwrought drama.

     Yet even that turns quickly into a major dramatic dilemma when a Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion appears on Turner’s body. Weeks quickly shuffles him off to Dr. Brookner. But after several chemo therapies, operations, and Weeks constantly emphatic statements that he will get better, we see his entire back now pocked with the same lesions, and we all know—accept for Weeks—that his death is imminent. The fight is now as fruitless as Weeks’ attempts to lead his own group into activism. The GMHC officials finally decide to disavow all relations with Weeks, sending him back to the streets alone to fight for the causes about which, in hindsight, we now know he was all to right about.

     You can’t convince an entire community that has battled its way to define their sexual freedoms that they are now wrong for having enjoyed them. Frankly, I knew the dangers, but still also embraced those sexual, and most enjoyable, freedoms. In some ways, I do so still today even though we now all know after thousands and thousands of deaths of both men and women that Weeks / Kramer was right.

     Throughout all these events, the young man Boatright has pulled rolodex cards from its holding device each time someone dies, and gathered them in rubber bands as something like “cardboard tombstones” of all the dead men he has known who have been victims of AIDS, finally having to add Turner’s card to his collection.

      Bruce, meanwhile, attempts to travel with his new boyfriend Albert (Finn Wittrock), who is dying, back to Phoenix to see his mother. At first, the airline pilot refuses to fly the plane with an AIDS patient aboard. But once Bruce assures him he has gone through the proper authorities, it gets worse, as Albert develops aggressive dementia. And when they get to Phoenix, he dies, a doctor refusing even to examine him and present a death certificate. A janitor puts the body in a plastic bag and takes it out to the trash, demanding money of Bruce to buy back the body, the mother in desperate tears.

      Weeks, now rudderless, decides to attend the Gay Week being hosted by his alma mater, Yale University. Here finally he witnesses how, for the first time in his knowledge, young gay men and women are able to openly dance together without the fears which haunted many of an earlier generation. Perhaps even he now realizes why it is so very difficult to give up these new freedoms.

       Back in New York City, the tireless phone operator Tommy Boatright adds yet another name to his “cardboard tombstones,” that of Bruce Niles.  

       Unfortunately, a subject this movie does not approach: Weeks/Kramer did not give up his advocacy for his causes. He went on to help found in 1987 one of the most important of international organizations, ACT UP which truly did, with hundreds of young gay men and women working together, make major changes throughout the world by calling attention to the pandemic.

       Even as I write this essay, I am still in tears. Frankly, I hope they will never stop, my rage never leave me for a single moment.

       As Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat wrote in their review of this movie, “The Normal Heart offers us a precious opportunity to take a hard look at anger: the hurt, disappointment, and pain behind this emotion as well as the genuine value of righteous indignation as an effective tool in the repertoire of prophets and other agents of change.”

 

Los Angeles, October 14, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2026).