Contagious Forewarning
"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.
score 7/10
Cineanalyst 28 July 2020
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw5947427/34992
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