Les soldats de l'espérance

This is a HBO movie about the first few years of the AIDS epidemic in America. Dr. Don Francis (Matthew Modine) is an immunologist with experience with WHO in Africa. He joins the CDC to investigate the new disease. The gay community in San Francisco led by Bill Kraus (Ian McKellen) is divided about the mysterious deaths and the fear of the new Reagan administration. Dr. Robert Gallo (Alan Alda) is the arrogant American virologist who discovers the first human retrovirus in competition with his French counterpart to lay claim and credit for the discovery.

This is a big vast complicated story. The beauty of this movie is its ability to maintain the narrative. It is a compelling watch despite the wide ranging story and the variety of characters. It is really a horror thriller at its core with AIDS as the bogeyman. The cast is deep and talented. When Gallo enters the picture, this movie transforms into a personality clash. There are many outstanding performances including Alan Alda, Saul Rubinek and the easily dismissed Matthew Modine. It would be a mistake to forget about Modine who must embody the frustration of the audience. This is a well made understandable movie of a complicated issue.

A real-life story about the discovery and destructive nature of AIDS, And the Band Played On is a gripping drama that not only takes you to the front line and behind the scenes of the HIV virus. To the bath houses in San Francisco to the research labs at the Center for Disease Control, there is no area that is not shown in this film. An all-star cast also creates the ambiance to this film. Powerful actors giving the performances of a lifetime. Richard Gere, Angelica Houston, Ian McKellan, Steve Martin, Alan Alda, Phil Collins, and even Matthew Modine are just a few of the actors who deserved Academy Awards for their work. While most of their parts were small, they were not unforgettable segments. Each cameo actor had a crucial role in leading us to the next segment and life of the HIV virus.

We are first introduced to Modine when he is trying to help a tribe with the destructible Ebola virus. Then, just as quickly, we are in mainstream San Francisco. The booming gay community and the political figureheads that were pushing for rights. It is the beginning of 1980, the Democrats are pushing for a more liberal stance, while Regan is being sworn into the White House for his first term. The world is happy, yet timid. The gay community is growing, and discovering that a dark fear is lurking behind them. While the United States is beating a dead horse about closing bath houses and stopping the gay community, the French are looking at it outside of a sexual disease. Possibly a blood disease. While they research their ideas, America begins to see the full effect of AIDS. These scientists are predicting that in the next several years the fatality rate will be 100% if you contract AIDS. Ronald Regan has just had his second term and has still not mentioned AIDS in public. While the French work day and night to stop their public from dying, we begin shunning the gay community. Creating a phobia due to lack of education. We even see a well respected doctor steal the discovery from the French just so that he can credit the monetary value of this disease. While the ending to this film is very sappy, it still was powerful enough to not only be enjoyable, but also educational. A film that if you have not seen yet, you should...and if you have seen it, see it again.

This powerful two and a half hour epic was the most entertaining informative film I have seen in ages. I rented it not knowing anything about it. I first picked it up for the actors to see what they could do in such small roles. Little did I know I was about to see everyone in the performances of their lifetime. Richard Gere proved once and again why he is an actor. It befuddles me why Modine has stopped working, because after seeing him in this film I would have liked to see him move further in the Hollywood community.

It is not everyday that you find a gem as this film. If I was a superintendent of schools and I just saw this film, I would push with every ounce of strength to get this film into my schools. I learned more about AIDS than I ever had in my education career. It not only brought out a text book style of education, but it also brought a very humanistic approach to the disease. It also brought out a very dark political side that perhaps the general public is not as familiar with. Not only that, but it also brought out the dark side of human nature. In times of plagues, we rely to heavily on science to be our savior. While it will be the backbone to our cause, we do need to have a feeling for those that already have the disease. We, as a nation, need to look past social standings, sexual preference, and color of our skin to realize that we are all humans. If this is a "human" disease, then we need to research every venue, not just the most obvious ones. If this film doesn't scare you, I don't think any horror film will.

Like all great films, it did have some horrible sides to it. McKellan's story was too cliché. The story of the homosexual politician who looses his lover because he is more involved with politics than his social life, who eventually reunite when it is discovered that McKellan has AIDS. Modine's flashbacks were unnecessary. I felt that we did not need to be reminded why he believed in human nature, and I don't think that we needed to be reminded by seeing a scene where he throws bodies into a fire. Something more substantial would have been nice. Finally, the ending was too much for me. I don't think it needed to have an Elton John (prominent homosexual figure in entertainment) singing one of his songs with flashing pictures of famous people, straight and gay, that we have lost to AIDS. Perhaps a more poignant picture would have been less famous people (every day Joes) who have died from the disease.

Overall, the good well out weigh the bad points that I just mentioned. I guarantee that you will be surprised, educated, and emotionally enthralled by this film.

Grade: **** out of *****

And The Band Played On is an extremely powerful movie. This movie should be required viewing in any high school. The fact that it took so incredibly long for the then higher powers to admit to the existence of AIDS is stunning and sad. The performances throughout the movie were moving and effective. I thought that Sir Ian McKellan and Richard Gere represented respectfully the signs of strength and fear.

I was also disheartened to learn that throughout this tragedy, there were individuals who might have been more concerned with helping and protecting their own reputation and agenda as well as accepting the credit for their work in breaking down point by point the disease known as AIDS. Alan Alda as Dr. Gallo was fascinating. In fact all of the performances from Matthew Modine and Richard Gere to Steve Martin and BD Wong were great. The most important thing here though is the history of this disease and the hope that we can learn from it.

"This didn't have to happen. We could've stopped it."

"And the Band Played On" is a decent history of the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic in the United States (and a bit of it in France) from a medical research perspective and the related political, professional and scientific obstacles to addressing, let alone containing, the disease in the 1980s. I didn't quite expect, however, although it's the reason I viewed this now, for how much this history of the pandemic reflects the current events of the novel one the world is facing in 2020. As the movie depicts, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is underfunded and, thus, largely ineffective and sidelined as the outbreak expands out of control. In some ways, they're also slow to respond and confused, if not plain wrong, in their public messaging, including advising how the virus is transmitted. Meanwhile, some of the populace remain ill-informed. Personal prophylactic measures aren't heeded. Protesters argue their rights against calls to close public spaces where it has spread (in this case, the bathhouses of the Castro District in San Francisco). The president ignores the problem. And, all the while, many dismiss the epidemic as belonging to a discriminated-against group (here, gay men). Sound familiar?

This HBO movie is an interesting precursor in a cinematic sense as well, being a star-studded ensemble about the spread of a pandemic and with a focus on contact tracing and identification of the virus two decades before Steven Soderbergh's "Contagion" (2011). Being based on a book by journalist Randy Shifts, however, "And the Band Played On" didn't have the same dramatic license to play with facts as did the later movie. Consequently, one of the main dramatic conflicts here, involving the race for the discovery of HIV between researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, two of whom would be awarded Nobel Prizes, and Robert Gallo, who is depicted as an antagonist here, may come across as somewhat muddled and uncompelling to laymen. I, for one, sympathized with the reporter at one press conference shown when he had to ask someone what the French were accusing of Gallo (as it turns out, that he stole their work, basically). On the other hand, the movie's criticism of the big business of blood banks and their obstruction of testing donated blood for HIV--because it would cost a lot of money--is more effective.

The movie has its share of tropes, too. There are those teachable moments where characters blatantly explain things to other characters--but meant for the spectator--in the simplest terms imaginable (Lily Tomlin explaining to Charles Martin Smith at a bathhouse how all peoples like sex is the most egregious to my mind). A character watches TV where each channel he flips to happens to show a program relevant to the narrative, and he has a eureka moment observing a game of Pac-Man (Aha! Pac-Man is the virus, and he's eating T-cells--now I get it!). (Granted, this Pac-Man metaphor still works better than the one in "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch" (2018), but I digress.) But, these are minor objections to what, overall, is a very watchable history lesson, and one that to its credit largely focuses on the issue from the perspective of medical research.

Unbelievable, wrenching film. This movie is told so thoughtfully and well; the sequences are laid out thoughtfully, and this is one of those rare movies literally told from the heart. The cast is just remarkable. What a huge story to tell; this could easily have become garbled due to the overwhelming subject matter. However, it is sequenced well, and acted so well, that you sit there in astonishment that this could happen in a world full of otherwise brilliant people.

I don't know what it will take to remove political considerations from life-and-death struggles...How about we work at saving lives, and worry about who gets credit later? If someone becomes injured due to gang warfare, we don't deny them care or drag our feet because we don't agree with the gangster "lifestyle".

Absorbing, heartbreaking and touching. A fantastic and, obviously, loving job by the entire cast.