Men at Odds With AIDS
Moving portrayals by Randy Quaid and Eric Stoltz
Diane Werts
Get out the Kleenex.
"Roommates" is one fine tearjerker.
And it's about men, which is surprising.
And it's about AIDS, which is more surprising still.
And it's on NBC, which might be the biggest surprise of all.
Or maybe not. The network that specializes in sentimental "women's" movies about illicit affairs, ailing babies and sex-charged murders might as well turn its emotional attention toward one of the towering tragedies of our day.
What took so long, you could ask? Well, the network had to wait for sweeps to end - no sense putting a fine film like this on when the ratings really count. (Such a messy subject, you know.) And it had to wait for a holiday night like Memorial Day, when everybody's just unwinding from their first summer weekend and hardly seeking wrenching TV drama.
But, hey, "Roommates" is here (Monday at 9 on WNBC / 4). That'll have to be enough.
And it is, considering the wonderful duet turned in by two non-TV types, Randy Quaid and Eric Stoltz, who take a story that vacillates between well-worn stereotypes and honest insight and turn it into something memorable.
Stoltz is the quiet, stylish, neat, bookish rich kid who's gay and resigned to having AIDS. Quaid is the loud, lumbering, slobby, ex-con redneck who had a blood transfusion and is still angry about it all. Wise, all-knowing AIDS hospice administrator Elizabeth Pena thinks they're just the prescription for each other.
And they are, of course, because that's the way things are in these movies. (Maybe it's actually a measure of progress that gays and rednecks get to engage in mainstream cliché’s now.)
Sharing an apartment, they're forced to share their lives and their fears and, eventually, their strength, as the disease saps it all away.
Yet it works, somehow, every Quaid tirade about the "fairy virus" and every Stoltz quote from "MobyDick," and even Quaid's speedy transformation from doltish rage to witty articulation.
"When you know you're going to die, you come to accept a lot of things that you wouldn't normally accept," Quaid said in an informal interview at the midseason press tour, "and you have a lot more tolerance for other people. You just don't feel like fighting about it."
That's kind of the deal with "Roommates," too. For every expected step, there's some wonderful little acting touch - Charles Durning has a nice turn, too, as Quaid's estranged father - that just sucks you further into the emotion and makes all those cliché’s fade away. These are the sort of people we haven't seen before except as plot devices, and now we're living with them, learning from them, and growing to like them. As the disease strips away their defenses against each other, ours dissolve, too.
"I wanted to do this movie because I think it tried to make an honest attempt at dealing with the homophobia aspect," Quaid says. "I think the more you show people out there what it's like on a day-to-day basis, and that these people are just people with a disease, I think we'll be able to bridge the fear - this big gap that exists between those that have the disease and those that live in fear."
Even at the press tour, that gap proved its size: Reporters pressed to know how Quaid and Stoltz had "researched" this AIDS subject, as if two young actors probably hadn't seen altogether too much of the disease in their own circles already. "I've actually been at people's bedsides," Stoltz said quietly, "so it wasn't as though we were about to play astronauts."
But AIDS still is space travel to some. That aberrant. That scary.
"Roommates" makes clear, with one-to-one intimacy, "that when it comes down to it," Stoltz says, "everyone's going to die. It's just a question of how you deal with it. Whether you're a man or a woman or homosexual or black, you have to confront your own mortality in some way."
So Quaid says he does understand why "Roommates" is not a big sweeps attraction. "Where's the love story? Where's the hero, the bad guy? I mean, it's just a slice of human drama that takes place every day, somewhere. It may not be the most popular thing to look at, or the most exciting and entertaining action piece, but it's got real issues, and it deals with it in a very realistic manner. The piece has a lot of integrity, and I'm proud to have been part of it."
And NBC should be proud to be airing it. Wherever. Whenever. At least it's there.
You should be, too.