Angels in America

I had a long weekend with nothing special to do, so I rented from Netflix both discs of Angels in America, the HBO film based on the Pulitzer Prize winning play by Tony Kushner. It was stunning.

I gave up HBO several years ago, figuring it just wasn't worth the money, and I really don't miss it much. I have to back out of any Sopranos discussions, and I probably would enjoy Deadwood, but the DVDs are always there for when I'm retired. Angels in America is about six hours long, though, manageable on a holiday weekend.

The story concerns a group of characters in New York during the mid-eighties, when the AIDS crisis is in full swing. Louis and Prior are two young gay men. Louis is a Jew working at the courthouse, Prior is a WASP who can trace his lineage back to the Norman conquest. When Prior tells Louis he has AIDS, Louis panics and decides he can not deal with it, and leaves him. Meanwhile, Joe Pitt, a Mormon lawyer, clerks for a judge in the courthouse. His wife, Harper, is emotionally unstable, rarely leaving the apartment and gobbling Valium by the fistful. She has hallucinations, usually involving a travel agent, who promises her he will take her to Antarctica.

When Joe runs into Louis in the courthouse men's room, Louis instantly sizes him as a closet case. Over the course of the film Joe comes to realize he is indeed gay, and phones his mother back in Utah to tell her this. Eventually Louis and Joe get together.

This is all backdrop, though, to the bigger picture: Prior is having visions. He is visited by heralds, spectral figures who are his ancestors, who announce the coming of an angel. At the end of the first half of the film, she does arrive, in quite grand fashion, and tells Prior he is a prophet and there is great work to be done. I've also saved for last the dominant character of the piece, the real-life figure Roy Cohn, the despised lawyer who worked for McCarthy during the communist witch hunt days and prosecuted the Rosenbergs. Cohn, has AIDS, but instructs his doctor to tell everyone it is liver cancer. He is also mentoring young Joe. But when his illness becomes severe he begins to see the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, come back to watch him in his misery.

The film is directed by Mike Nichols, and is not typical Nichols. It is full of verbal flourishes, betraying its theatrical origins, and this is a usual trait for Nichols, but the film also is very visual, with many special effects, particularly the arrival of the angel (who is played by Emma Thompson). While this must have been quite stunning on stage, on film it's just another effect (sort of like the chandelier falling in Phantom of the Opera). But even though it's old-hat special effects, several images are quite striking, including when Prior visits heaven to renounce being a prophet (turns out God abandoned heaven after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake).

Kushner's script grapples with some pretty heavy issues, and it's almost impossible for me to wrap my mind around them. On the surface it's a little domestic drama about a few characters in New York during the AIDS crisis. But the inclusion of Cohn as the lynch pin of the piece opens it into new vistas. We really see an analysis of Cold War America, as well as the nature of God and heaven. At one point Louis says that there are no angels in America, but the film begins and ends at the Bethesda fountain in Central Park, which is topped by a statue of an angel (it moves slightly--a lot of statuary in this film tends to move, which is pretty creepy). Prior's ex-lover, Belize (brilliantly played by Jeffrey Wright, who also plays Harper's travel agent), is the nurse attending to Cohn, and provides a counterbalance to many attitudes expressed in the film. He hates America for the collection of racists that it is, and despises Cohn, but for reasons he can not fathom he offers Cohn important advice.

Al Pacino is Cohn, and it allows him to be in his fully hammy glory. This is truly a larger than life figure, a raging man full of hatred and self-importance. Meryl Streep plays a variety of characters, including Joe's mother, Ethel Rosenberg, and surprisingly a very old rabbi. I didn't realize she had played that part until the closing credits. But everyone in this film is great, including Mary-Louise Parker as Harper, Patrick Wilson as Joe, Ben Shenkman as Louis and Justin Kirk as Prior. Angels in America requires an investment in time, but is well worth it.