How Hollywood portrays AIDS

First Oscar winner
The first AIDS film to take home an Oscar, “Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt,” was made up of profiles of people represented in the AIDS Memorial Quilt. It won for best documentary of 1989. The co-director, Robert Epstein, had earlier won an Academy Award for “The Times of Harvey Milk” (1984). He would go on to co-direct “The Celluloid Closet,” which deals in part with the marketing of “Philadelphia.”

Bruce Davison earned an Oscar nomination for “Longtime Companion” (1990), for playing a gay man who watches his lover (Mark Lamos) waste away mentally and physically. Campbell Scott and Stephen Caffrey, cast as a couple who become activists as they witness government indifference, brought a necessary emotional continuity to the story.

Heartfelt and exceptionally well-written by playwright Craig Lucas, “Longtime Companion” was directed by Norman Rene, who died of AIDS in 1996. The finale, a fantasy in which the surviving characters meet on a beach with their friends who have died, could have been maudlin. It wasn’t.

One of the most moving documentaries about AIDS, Peter Adair’s “Absolutely Positive” (1991) was made up of interviews with HIV-positive people. Several years earlier, he and Epstein co-directed “The AIDS Show,” based on a play about San Francisco artists with AIDS. Adair died in 1996.

Also from 1991, the TV movie “Our Sons” starred Julie Andrews as the mother of a gay man (Hugh Grant) whose lover (Zeljko Ivanek) has AIDS. Ann-Margret played the other mother. Unfortunately, it succumbed to disease-of-the-week disease.

Cable does it best
Much, much better were two made-for-HBO productions that took an epic approach: “And the Band Played On” (1993), based on Randy Shilts’ book about doctors trying to isolate the AIDS virus, and “Angels in America” (2003), Mike Nichols’ superb adaptation of the Tony Kushner play. Both movies dealt with Reagan-era indifference and the desperation of early AIDS victims, including celebrities who found themselves outed by the disease. Shilts died of AIDS in 1994.

Few movies have dealt with AIDS in countries where the disease is now out of control. Last year’s Oscar-nominated South African film, “Yesterday,” has been the most visible to date. Darrell James Roodt’s drama told an alarmingly familiar story: a monogamous wife discovers she’s HIV-positive, and her promiscuous husband beats her before realizing he has full-blown AIDS.

Like so many of the best AIDS films, “Yesterday” communicated an urgency that suggests a deep frustration on the part of its creators. Over the course of a couple of decades, that frustration has become the basis for a vital genre.

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