TV Review - Social Effect of AIDS in ‘Common Threads’

The social effect of AIDS is often described as similar to war. Young people, senselessly struck down in the prime of their lives. Loved ones, attempting to make sense out the sudden loss in their lives. Even the symbolism of remembering AIDS and war victims is similar: Vietnam has its memorial wall in Washington and the AIDS epidemic has its quilt, sewn together piece by piece by those left behind. “Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt” (at 10 p.m. Sunday on HBO) lifts the disease’s aftermath from the fabric and puts in on film.

Like a cinematic quilt, directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman stitch together five very different stories, alternating between them as the victims’ parents and lovers recall their shared passages of life. Elegantly filmed and enhanced by Bobby McFerrin’s music (and marred by Dustin Hoffman’s lethargic narration), “Common Threads” becomes a documentary with the cumulative emotional impact of great tragedy.

Dr. Tom Waddell had been an Olympic decathlon star and organizer of the gay community’s own Olympics. Robert Perryman had pulled himself out of the morass of intravenous drug addiction to become a deeply devoted father. David Mandell Jr. seemed a strapping, ceaselessly energetic young boy, until he was diagnosed with hemophilia. The viewer can’t help but look into their faces and wonder, what might have been. . . .

“Common Threads” leaves a haunting residue of images: the joint tombstones that Tracy Torrey had made for himself and David Campbell, with Torrey’s year of death still blank; the home movie footage of the virile, athletic Waddell; the last Christmas enjoyed by Mandell. And the images of representatives of the Reagan Administration contradicting each other on the importance of AIDS as a national health crisis wipes away any sense of melodrama. This is one drama that is real.