All I ever did was love someone.

Life Support
Nelson George 2007 USA
Starring: Queen Latifah, Wendell Pierce, Evan Ross, Rachel Nicks, Anna Deavere Smith, Tony Rock

HIV and AIDS have become a hot topic in film in a relatively short time and with varying degrees of success. Earlier this year Dallas Buyers Club swept the awards season in much the same way Philadelphia did twenty years ago and, while both have been lauded by critics as well as in ceremony, the paragon is still HBO's Angels In America (strictly a TV mini-series but identified in its credits as a film) with its remarkable ensemble cast and incredible script. At the other end of the scale is Life Support, another HBO production, albeit one more interested in Queen Latifah's pained expressions than great acting or brilliant innovation. It isn't that the film is particularly bad or even badly made, it's just dull and the witty comedy and tragic drama of AIA has been replaced with preaching and support groups talking about safe sex. Overall the whole thing comes off as little more than a lecture on the disease that's not much better (and generally less instructive) than most school sex education films. A good amount of the film isn't even about AIDS, instead concentrating on the main character Ana's selfishness towards her family and her attempts to conquer it, which would be fine if it had a narrative point but it doesn't, it simply fills time. The only time we see the effects of the condition on Ana are when she takes her medication and when a doctor tells her that if she doesn't slow down she'll lose the use of her feet. It could (and probably should) be a horrifyingly traumatic scene but the problem is that she doesn't slow down and we're later told that the real-life Ana (the film is loosely based on a true story) still walks the streets handing out condoms and information so any threat the scene may have held is essentially nullified, they might as well have told her that her nose would drop off for all the fear there was of it actually happening. It sort of says it all when the best actor of the film, Evan Ross (son of Diana), is off-screen for 90% of it with the other less capable performers trawling the streets looking for him. It's a shame because it's only when his deathly, broken Amare appears that the film ironically comes to life, even when the character is dying on a park bench, resigned to his fate and determined to go out with money in his pocket. I understand what HBO were going for and that this was obviously aimed at a different target audience than AIA but for all the effort they gave it you sort of have to wonder why they bothered.


RAPPERS IN FILM