Horton’s ‘Cure’ departs from movie-of-the-week treatment
Director delves deeper into AIDS experience from child’s
perspective
By Lael Loewenstein
Daily Bruin Staff
A few years ago, when he had a lead role on "thirtysomething,"
Peter Horton asked to have his character, Gary, killed off. Not
many actors would demand such a fate, but Horton had another
agenda: He wanted to direct.
Now, after directing several episodes of that series and two TV
movies, Horton makes a seamless transition to features with The
Cure, a story of friendship between two boys, one of whom has
AIDS.
"This is not a film about a boy dying of AIDS," Horton
emphatically explains, lest anyone confuse it with the
"disease-of-the-week" TV movie genre which plagued networks in the
late ’80s.
"It’s about a boy who has AIDS, who through his friendship with
the kid next door is able to have a childhood that he never would
have had," says Horton.
It’s a subject Horton finds well-suited to film because of the
different ways TV and features approach the subject matter.
"Take an issue like alcoholism," he says. "If a TV movie treats
the subject, then it’s just about alcoholism. If a film does it, or
a play, it’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof  it’s about people and
their relationships that happen to involve the subject matter.
"
Horton wants to dispel the image of his movie as a story about a
terminally ill boy, in part because that notion might turn off
prospective viewers.
"People don’t want to see (dying children) in the way that they
didn’t really want to experience Lorenzo’s Oil. I personally like
that. I was raised on Taxi Driver and The Conversation Â
movies that really hit you in the face with emotion.
"There is a temptation in this market in America today to rely
on contrivance because it’s a sure sale,"he adds. "But there’s a
cynical motivation to that which is manipulative. I wish that we
had more faith in film as a mirror and a little less faith in it as
a roller coaster ride."
Horton envisions The Cure as one such mirror of social
reality.
"One of the things we’d hoped to do in the movie is (to) provide
a chance for people to see the issue of AIDS in all its complexity
and politics, and its adult weight through the eyes of
11-year-olds."
Achieving that goal meant casting two young actors who were
mature and sensitive enough to make the film believable.
"It was a big worry of mine when I first took on the project
that not only did I have to have two boys who had to delve into
that level of emotion, but I had to have two boys who could carry a
movie, which is a daunting prospect given the nature of most child
actors."
Horton found what he was looking for in Joseph Mazzello
(Jurassic Park) and Brad Renfro (The Client). Horton speaks
admiringly of them both.
"Joe is an adult in a boy’s body. He has talents that are
evolved to the level of adulthood at age 11. He can do anything
from a very emotional scene where he has to cry, to an impression
of Jim Carrey that is almost as good as Carrey. And Brad is like a
movie star already. He has this charisma to him and an inner world
that is captivating. I felt like I had miniature versions of Dustin
Hoffman and Paul Newman."
Mazzello, who plays the AIDS-stricken Dexter, had "an
earnestness and a lack of self-consciousness to him that fit the
part of Dexter well. The kids that I’ve met who have AIDS tend to
have a level of awareness and wisdom that other kids don’t, and he
could project that."
Although The Cure is not directly based on Ryan White or the
three Florida brothers who, like White, were forced to leave their
school and their community because they had AIDS, the film
incorporates elements of each of their lives.
"Certainly those cases are indicative of the world and the
reality that the story is based on," Horton says. "There is an
understandable but nonetheless obnoxious reality in this society
which is that we want to segment this disease away into corners. We
want it to be a gay disease, or a disease of poor people or drug
users so we don’t have to deal with it."
But Horton hopes that uninformed viewers will embark on the same
journey that Erik (Renfro) takes toward understanding and
acceptance of AIDS. There’s a subtle message in a scene near the
end that, Horton says, only his gay friends have caught, while his
straight friends have overlooked it.
"Erik starts off by teasing Dexter for having spent time with
homosexuals in the hospital. But by the end of the film, he’s
playing Sorry with an orderly who’s gay and not thinking about it
at all. We very consciously made the orderly gay, but we walked a
very fine line because we didn’t want to make him a
cliché."
Horton has no illusions that his film will help solve the
problems of societal conceptions about AIDS, but The Cure may be as
good an antidote as cinema can provide to ignorance and antipathy
about this epidemic of the ’90s.