Premiering Sept. 11, the 2 1/2 hour film starts off as a detective story. Its hero is Dr. Don Francis (Matthew Modine), a researcher for the Centers for Disease Control who finds himself assigned to a baffling mystery: something is killing small numbers of gay men in 1980 urban America. Suspecting a common fink, Francis, along with a few CDC colleagues, tirelessly digs out the histories of the victims–a kind of medical Columbo doing “basic shoe-leather epidemiology.” All the while, a bottom-screen streamer periodically updates the body count (from “80 U.S. cases, 26 deaths” all the way to “315,390 U.S. cases, 194,344 deaths”).
But the horror doesn’t really kick in until the docu-drama gets to the heart of Shilts’s j’accuse. Frantically sounding the alarm, the CDC band–now allied with a pair of San Francisco activists (Lily Tomlin and Sir Ian McKellen)–collides with a wall of ignorance, indifference, hostility and prejudice. The mainstream press largely ignores the story. The public-health bureaucracy responds with foot-dragging and turf-warring. Religious fundamentalists fulminate about “God’s scourge.” Blood bankers resist the imposition of HIV testing until tens of thousands have received AIDS-tainted transfusions. But “Band” saves its most damning indictment for the Reagan administration, whose politics-as-usual myopia (and alleged homophobia) kept AIDS researchers starved for federal funding. Some of this is cheap shooting: whenever the going gets grimmest, we see newsreel clips of an obliviously beaming Gipper. But there’s one fine that rings all-too-truly. “You know damn well if this epidemic were killing grandmothers, virgins and four-star generals,” grouses an overworked doctor, “you’d have an army of investigators out there.”
Nor does the film spare the gay community, a vociferous segment of which seemed more concerned with its own civil rights than public health. San Francisco Chronicle and the first to work the AIDS beat full time, gave us a rare inside view of gay politics. So does this movie, especially at a rancorous San Francisco hearing at which gays shout down a proposal to close their bathhouses, where the number of young men engaged in unprotected sex was a clear health risk. When the McKellen character expresses bafflement, Tomlin replies: “They’re human. And they’re seared.”
As drama rather than history, HBO’s adaptation–directed by Britain’s Roger (“Under Fire”) Spottiswoode–suffers from a defect of its virtues. Even after squeezing Shilts’s 620-page opus into 150 minutes of film, Arnold Schulman’s screenplay teems with so many intriguing people that it diffuses our emotional investment in each of them. Compassion requires intimacy, and, tragically, we don’t get enough of that until some of the victims play their deathbed scenes. McKellen plays his best, but the actor to whom this film owes its life is Richard Gere, who bravely signed on. (to portray a gay choreographer) when the project’s absence of star power threatened its survival.
Once Gere was aboard, hopping on the “Band” wagon became a Hollywood cause celeb. Anjelica Huston, Swoosie Kurtz, Steve Martin, B. D. Wong and singer Phil Collins turn in effective cameos. No one, though, outperforms the actor who portrays the film’s most hissable heavy–none other than Alan Alda. As Dr. Robert Gallo, the National Cancer Institute superstar who, by some accounts, tried to steal the credit from French researchers for identifying the AIDS virus, Alda plays against his image brilliantly. His Gallo is a silkily sinister medical lizard. One can only imagine (as HBO’s lawyers doubtlessly have) the real doctor’s reaction.
You don’t have to be an AIDS expert to sense some validity in the film’s conclusion. “This didn’t have to happen,” a despairing Francis tells a dying friend. “We could have stopped it.” Nor can one disagree with Randy Shilts (who recently disclosed that he, too, has AIDS) when he assesses what’s riding on this docu-drama: “If ‘Band’ gets good ratings, you will see an avalanche of AIDS television projects. They will follow the money.” We’ll settle for just a trickle as long as they’re equally fine.
