Movie review: How to Survive a Plague | canada.com

Starring:?Peter Staley, Larry Kramer, Iris Long

Rating:?3.5 out of 5

When the AIDS epidemic started in 1981, 41 people died of the disease. By 1996, when a successful drug treatment was finally introduced, more than eight million a year were dying.
The documentary film?How to Survive a Plague?is a record of what happened in between: the protests, the fear, the drug trials, the bureaucracy, the ignorance. ?There?s nothing gay about these people,? said Jesse Helms, the late senator from North Carolina, who becomes one of the many villains of the film and of the times. (AIDS activists struck back by unfurling a giant canvas condom on the roof of his house as a protection against ?unsafe politics.?)
The film falls somewhere between a how-to manual for a political protest and an extended newsreel of tenacity. Facing great odds, two groups ? ACT UP, an acronym for AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, and TAG (Treatment Action Group), a spinoff faction ? pressured politicians and scientists first to care and then to work quickly. Director David France employs the movie?s greatest gift, a lot of on-the-spot footage, to give?How to Survive a Plague?both a galloping immediacy and a redolent sense of history: some of the artifacts ? like a giant portable telephone, or a scene of Bill Clinton saying, ?I feel your pain? ? bring back that more innocent, more fraught era with a shock.
More important, the movie revives the panic and despair: nothing was working, and the one promising drug, AZT, cost patients $10,000 a year. ACT UP was started by a small New York group that included Peter Staley, a bond trader-turned-AIDS activist, and writer Larry Kramer, whose finest hour in the film comes when ACT UP begins to come apart at the seams as members blame each other for the continuing epidemic, and he chastises their behaviour. A surprise heroine is a woman named Iris Long, a former chemist who was a housewife in Queens, N.Y., before she joined the mostly gay group out of a sense of compassion.
The film documents the marches and publicity events organized by ACT UP as its members occupy hospitals, surround the Federal Drug Administration buildings ? they felt drug trials were going too slowly even as thousands were dying ? and march at the White House, where several people bring the ashes and bones of dead friends and throw them on the lawn. At the same time, they become educated in the chemistry of AIDS, and by the end, scientists are expressing admiration about how much they knew about the medicine. They also managed to get co-operation in unexpected quarters: the Merck drug company worked with ACT UP to develop and test drugs.
We slowly get to know all the key characters, and watch them grow from angry protesters who just want something done to educated opponents who know what that thing is: ACT UP released its own agendas that were so scientifically acute they were often adopted by researchers.
There is also a more flamboyant side to the protests, including the day when, after John O?Connor, the archbishop of New York, declared that prophylactics were immoral, a group of marchers renamed him Cardinal O?Condom and occupied St. Patrick?s Cathedral. It was all part of a long fight that, the film reminds us, continues today. Two million people a year die because they can?t afford the new AIDS drugs.

Source: http://o.canada.com/2012/11/02/movie-review-how-to-survive-a-plague/

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