USA, 1993 Director: Roger Spottiswoode
Stars: Matthew Modine, Ian McKellen, Lily Tomlin, Alan Alda, Richard Gere
The problem with AIDS films is they tend to leave out their antagonist. Their fascinating central character, their villain (AIDS) is always absent from the action. AIDS movies are a bit like The Silence of the Lambs, with all of Hannibal Lecter’s scenes cut out, or Star Wars without Darth Vader. A bunch of characters run around manically, pressed into some kind of frantic action by the epidemic we sense but never really get to see. People keep talking about things and doing things, someone dies, others cry, but the motivation behind all this is apparently a mystery. As the tag line of And The Band Played On unwittingly notes, AIDS is/was “a threat no one dared face. A word no one wanted to speak.” This includes film makers, commercial and independent, gay and straight alike.
As with Philadelphia, The Living End et al, you don’t see much of AIDS in this film about AIDS. It’s the well sailed tributaries of AIDS – power, politics, “homophobia”, pharmaceutical companies, careerism, etc. – that are explored, not the visceral and complex main line of the subject. Maybe Jaws is an ideal template for AIDS movies – an stealthy menace creating an agonizing build up to a blood curdling reveal and sensational climax.
So And The Band Played On is yet another emasculated film about nothing in particular. This is terrible, as Randy Shilts’ thrilling and powerful book remains, for me, the definitive resource on AIDS. A gripping “page turner” made deliberately melodramatic by its diligently journalistic author, the book catches the rise of the AIDS epidemic in all its grandeur, horror and awe. The movie bypasses most of this, save for a chilling scene set in a early-eighties Halloween parade scene where gay guys – several of which probably unknowingly infected – march by in slow-motion, dressed as death with plastic skulls covering their faces. Tellingly, the most powerful scene in the film is the documentary coda, where footage of dozens real-life AIDS victims (from Ryan White to Peter Allen and Nureyev) plays beneath Elton John’s beautiful “The Last Song”. The rest of the film is garden variety disease of the week.
A who’s-who of Hollywood, a veritable night of 100 stars, rotates before us like some star-studded carousel, popping up over and again and all a little too distinctive (eg Phil Collins as a bath house manager). But the repetition doesn’t work as none stay on screen long enough to make any emotional or narrative impact – the film is always too busy hurtling into its next self-important scene. (see also: The Laramie Project)
As earnest Don Francis, a retrovirologist with the Centre for Disease Control, Matthew Modine tries to anchor the proceedings, but he’s yanked along the bottom, unable to catch a rock. Alan Alda does a good villain (Robert Gallo, the retrovirologist more concerned with his own Nobel Prize than saving lives or expediting funding and research) but he’s one sided – nasty anti-gay Gallo, who, having devoted his career to retroviruses, wanted recognition as the world leader in HIV (which he called HTLV) knowledge, despite French advances beyond his own, and a growing “butcher’s bill” of victims. In Gallo and Francis, the film has a dramatic core along the lines of Amadeus, but alas, it ignores this core.
Instead, we get Lily Tomlin as Selma Dritz (San Francisco Department of Public Health), Ian McKellen as gay activist Bill Kraus, Richard Gere as “The (HIV-positive) Choreographer” and a host of others, including Donal Logue as Bobbi Cambell, self-appointed “KS Poster Boy”. The actors give their all, but the film divvies up screen time and attention equally amongst them. In the above list alone, you have sufficient main characters for four potentially compelling feature films. Trying to tell all of them at once, along with the Francis/Gallo rivalry, in 141 minutes is a hopeless endeavour. The film’s prologue, set in a squalid AIDS-stricken village in Zaire in the late seventies, does nothing to set the scene for later, apart from establishing the film’s intellectual range by showing people withering and dying from an unknown illness and placing caring yet clueless American doctors (Modine plays one) among them.
Made for American television, the film is instructive and doesn’t seem to be concerned with capturing anything other than middle-American attention for a couple of hours, and making them think twice about hating gays and people with AIDS. Shilts seemed to have a far more compelling agenda. A David Lynch or maybe even an Oliver Stone could do his wonderful book some kind of creative justice.
Related Reading: Philadelphia
Review by Mark Adnum
