A Movie With Heart

One of my favorite movies of 2014 won't be in contention for any Oscars. It isn't eligible. The Normal Heart was an HBO original movie that aired several months back, though I was only recently able to watch it. Based on a mostly autobiographical play by Larry Kramer, the movie focuses on the earliest days of the AIDS crisis as it rips through the New York gay community in the early 1980s.

These days, TV producer Ryan Murphy is known for lighter fare like Glee and The New Normal. Even his darker series, American Horror Story, is more about having fun than being truly dramatic. It was thus a bit of a departure for Murphy to take on The Normal Heart, and an even greater departure for him to direct it himself. He nevertheless proved to be the man for the job; he assembled an exceptional cast, and guided them in giving exceptional performances.

Mark Ruffalo stars as Ned Weeks, a strident firebrand who feels that even his fellow activists aren't taking the situation seriously enough. It's a difficult role, in that the character spends most of his time angry -- a set-up for a decidedly one-note performance in the hands of a lesser actor. Ruffalo brings many tones of rage, from ice cold to white hot, and is equally compelling in the tender scenes Weeks has with his lover, Felix Turner.

That role is played by Matt Bomer, who won widespread critical praise (and recently, a Golden Globe) for the performance. With AIDS the main subject of the story, it's likely no spoiler to say that Felix becomes one of its victims. Bomer's intense performance not only shows the emotional toll of the disease, he also undergoes radical weight loss to show its physical ravages as well. Working together, Bomer and Ruffalo make AIDS, which to some might be an abstract disease, feel very real and personal.

The supporting cast is filled with still more talented actors. Jim Parsons, best known for comedy on The Big Bang Theory, delivers a powerful eulogy in a funeral scene that quantifies the losses in the AIDS epidemic. Taylor Kitsch, who Hollywood has been trying to shove in the action hero box for years, returns to his more dramatic Friday Night Lights roots, plays an intriguing character neither fully in nor out of the closet. Alfred Molina plays the brother of the main character, struggling to accept homosexuality as "normal," and plays some of the best scenes in the movie with Ruffalo and Bomer. Julia Roberts is stronger than she's been in years, playing a prickly doctor afflicted by polio, the only one trying to help AIDS patients at the time. And Joe Mantello, who starred in a Broadway staging of The Normal Heart, is "demoted" here to a secondary role among these film and TV stars, though he still delivers one killer monologue late in the movie.

But all these excellent performances wouldn't work as well as they do if the script wasn't just as excellent. The movie is "activist" without feeling preachy, fiery without seeming like a screed. It builds up a group of characters, makes you really feel for them, and then you're ready to understand what they're going through.

I give The Normal Heart an A-. The fact that it was made for TV may keep the Oscars from acknowledging it, but there's no such division on my movie list. I'm updating my top 10 of 2014 to include it.