3 Needles

3 Needles is a wonderfully sensitive and unexpectedly funny world drama from writer/director Thom Fitzgerald. The film spans three continents and crosses into various different cultures in order to portray the world wide devastation of AIDS in painful yet well measured detail. There is a much more preachy, ugly, and unsympathetic film that could have been made of this material, but Fitzgerald handles this with such a deft hand that it never really over sulks or becomes unbearable. He has an appreciable awareness that his subject is ripe with possibilities for melodrama and maudlin theatrics and works overtime to create a sort of charming wit and deliberate pacing that keep the humanity of the story alive. He even goes as far as to keep the terms “AIDS” and “HIV” entirely out of the script, choosing only to refer to “the virus” and what it has done. Not only does this spare us from redundancies, but it also gives universality to the plot. He is really making a film about all world crises and the way that we fail to come together in defense of ourselves as human beings.

The titular needles come from three separate stories about the AIDS epidemic in various societies. The first features Lucy Liu as a black market blood distributor in China. Shawn Ashmore stars as an infected Canadian porn star in the second. For the third and final chapter, Olympia Dukakis, Chloë Sevigny, and Sandra Oh play missionary nuns in Africa. Each story comes ripe with nuances and complexities that salvage this from being an obvious and unwelcome sourpuss of a film. Despite all the nastiness within the stories, the film still photographs people with warm and forgiving eyes. No one is really cast as a villain here. Everything is done in the pursuit of survival and to survive is quite a difficult thing indeed. The only problem is that in pursuing their own needs, everyone is unintentionally doing damage to the lives of others. That, of course, is the ultimate question of the film. Why can’t we ever seem to work together?

Grade: A-