Dying For The Camera

By Richard Zoglin

SHOW: SILVERLAKE LIFE

TIME: JUNE 15; PBS

THE BOTTOM LINE: Two men with AIDS record their last days in a wrenching -- too wrenching -- documentary.

Tom Joslin always had a thing for cameras. In the mid '70s, while he was teaching at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, he made a film about his coming out as a gay man. So it wasn't surprising that when he and his lover, Mark Massi, got sick with AIDS, Tom picked up the camera once again. The couple, who shared a house in Los Angeles, took turns shooting their day-to- day activities as the disease progressed. When Tom died, Mark finished up, and when Mark died, the film was completed by a friend, Peter Friedman. The result is Silverlake Life, a wrenching documentary that won top honors at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, and will kick off the PBS summer documentary series P.O.V.

By this point in the AIDS epidemic, few will be surprised at what Silverlake Life shows: the inexorable physical decline, the attempts to maintain some semblance of a normal life as long as possible, the last visits with family and friends. What may be less familiar is the film's unsparing honesty. Tom, who talks freely and candidly to the camera before he cannot talk at all, swerves from petulance (left alone in the car while Mark does some household errands: "We were gonna go right home!") to nearly unbearable despair ("I feel so empty, and I feel so pointless, and I have so much trouble remembering anything good I've done").

For all the preparation, it still comes as a shock near the end to see Tom's emaciated face staring at the camera and to hear Mark's quavering voice: "This is the first of July, and Tommy's just died." The succeeding scenes are equally brutal -- a medical official taking down the vital statistics, the corpse being wrapped in a body bag. The film ends, heartbreakingly, with a flashback to Tom and Mark dancing in front of the camera in that spirited documentary of 15 years earlier.

Can a successful work of art be this depressing? One could argue no. Even in the worst circumstances, art buoys us by the sheer galvanizing presence of an individual creative act. For all its journalistic force, Silverlake Life seems to have been animated less by artistic than by therapeutic impulses: filmmaking was a way for Tom and Mark to cope with their grief. Which is not to deny the power of Silverlake Life, only to warn that television doesn't get any grimmer.