Angels in America
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Movie Reviews of Angels in America
Movie Review: No wonder "Angels in America" won all those Emmy Awards
Summary: 5 Stars
I have long held that the major strength of dramatic television programming is the able to tell extended narratives. I am thinking not only of the mini-series and such epic classics as "Shogun" and "Lonesome Dove," but of traditional dramatic television series that create lengthy story arcs, such as "Wiseguy" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." I shudder to think of "Angels in America" reduced to a theatrical film half as long and you know full well that network television would have censored the script beyond recognition. Only HBO could have done this and they deserve all the plaudits they are getting after having swept every major category it was nominated for, including all four acting honors as well as Best Miniseries, Directing, and Writing.
"Angels in America" was originally two full-length plays by Tony Kushner, "Part I: Millennium Approaches," which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, "Part II: Perestroika," which won the Tony Award. Taken together the plays look at "the state of the nation" in 1985 when the AIDS epidemic was exploding during the Reagan years. Two of the main characters in the drama have AIDS. Prior Walter (Justin Kirk) is a reasonable young man who has to wonder if he has gone insane as he is visited by the ghosts of his ancestors with the same name and an angel (Emma Thompson). The other is Roy Cohn (Al Pacino), the infamous lawyer from the McCarthy Hearings and the Rosenberg trial, a hateful powerbroker who insists his doctor (James Cromwell) treat him for "liver cancer" because only powerless people get AIDS.
These two characters are intertwined with the lives of others who come into play in various and often surprising combinations. Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson) is a lawyer at Cohn's firm, a Mormon who closes his eyes when he makes love to his wife, Harper (Mary-Louise Parker), because he is imagining she is a man. Louis Ironson (Ben Shenkman) is unable to cope with what is happening to Prior, his lover, and while he walks away he is so consumed by guilt he engages in high-risk behavior. Belize (Jeffrey Wright) is a caring and compassionate African-American gay nurse while Hannah Pitt (Meryl Streep), Joe's mother, arrives from Utah when Joe confesses in a middle of the night phone call that he has left his wife and is a homosexual.
Kushner is able to cover the spectrum of reactions to AIDS, both by those who have the disease and those around them. There is also the clear undercurrent that the nation's reaction to the epidemic is both political and prejudiced. However, with a title like "Angels in America" you know that there will be a strong religious element as well, from the rabbi who opens the play talking about how nothing ever really melts in the American "melting pot" to the revelations that God has abandoned his creation (it happened at the time of the San Francisco earthquake) and that Prior has been chosen to act as a prophet and help the world return to the "good old days." However, Prior refuses to act as the angels want and has a few choice suggestions for them instead.
The true angels in "Angels in America," of course, do not appear until the final scene of this 352-minute drama at the fountain in Central Park with the statue of the Bethesda angel. Those characters represent all faiths, races, genders, sexual orientations, and generations, as well as caregivers and patients, and reinforce the idea that heaven is what we make on earth. For those who need points made directly and explicitly, the play provides a benediction, delivered directly into the camera in close-up in language so plain and firm as to command their assent.
"Angels in America" is both beautiful and profane. The dialogue is witty and searing, poetic and powerful. The collision of characters is compelling, as are the performances. Several of the performers, most notably Streep, have multiple roles, which adds an additional level of resonance to the tale being told. You would think that after almost two decades this play would be dated, but while there is clearly a fierce anger against the Reagan America of that time, ultimately "Angels in America" is about compassion and understanding, even towards that which we hate. The great irony here may well be that the fear and hatred of the homosexual community against those who fear and hate them is just as strong. The difference is that the notion of "community" is decidedly more vital to gays and lesbians.
Director Mike Nichols has shepherded Kushner's brilliant translation of his stage drama to the small screen and confirmed once again how good television can be (even when it is not TV but HBO). I really think that the only thing to compare this to in television history is "Roots," and not simply because it is another example of how television can raise the consciousness of the nation. I say this because of the way this production has been chaining out, with more and more people checking out this monumental work, just as the audience for "Roots" built each night it was on. All those Emmy awards can only help spread the word.
Movie Review: A confrontational and overpowering look at America
Summary: 5 Stars
From some of the reviews below I understand I will qualify as a pervert if I say something positive about this production. I'll just take my chances, in the belief that the true perverts are those who cheer the legalizing of automatic guns and the denial of basic civil rights to whole segments of society, but are deeply offended at the sight of a naked human body. Not, for that matter, that there are more than 30 seconds of full nudity in the whole 6 hours of this miniseries. Let me just state flat-out that Angels in America is by far the best American made TV production I've ever seen, and no doubt one of the most meaningful, wise and healthy things to have come out of that country for a very long time! Why this show wasn't aired in Europe is beyond me.
The original play was premiered in The Netherlands by RO Theater in Rotterdam in 1995, at which occasion I saw it and was completely blown away by it. I was very curious to see whether the intensity achieved in a small theatre through a very spare, minimalist production - very much "actor-driven", as Kushner suggests in his instructions - would hold up amidst the trappings of a big scale multimillion dollar TV-production. I remember how back then the closing scene of Perestroika, where the characters address the audience directly, was almost unbearably intimate and had me stifling my tears. To my surprise the effect achieved in the filmed version is, if anything, even stronger. The whole experience of viewing this was so compelling that I would probably have watched it in its entirety in one go had it not been way beyond my bedtime...
If you like simple escapist happy endings, are allergic to surrealism, have trouble confronting the ravages of serious illness, are deeply religious, are a homophobic or a hardcore republican, beware. If any of these apply then you REALLY need to watch this, but you won't like it! AinA certainly is no innocent family entertainment, as one of my fellow reviewers found out after being fooled by the romantic box cover. This is an angel that deals out orgasms and whose approach is signalled by erections! Tony Kushner's writing is up-front, uncompromising and irreverent in dealing with matters of emotion, sex, politics, religion and the general ugliness of the world. It is also deliberately stylized in places, but realism is never a first concern in a story where the dead mingle with the living, visions and hallucinations abound and angels descend from heaven. It's a tribute to Kushner's genius that no matter how surreal the context, the people in this story are nevertheless profoundly touching. They may be thwarted characters, but they aren't flat ones! I was glad to find that the whole production adheres very closely to the original text of the plays. It is a heady mix of razor-sharp (and at times hilarious) sarcasm, anguished tragedy, gay cliché, biblical allegory and political pamphlet. The outward appearance, a story centring on AIDS victims in '80s New York, may seem dated, but the underlying message is universal. AinA addresses some fundamental questions about the nature of the USA that have rarely been more to-the-point than they are today (the quip about the word "free" in the national anthem being deliberately set to such a high note that nobody can reach it struck me as particularly topical...).
To see these highly charged lines delivered by such a cast as this one is of course pure delight. Al Pacino trumps his own satanic performance in "Devil's advocate" as a thoroughly corrupt, yet strangely intriguing Roy Cohn. It's good to see Emma Thompson out of period costume and in angelic garb for a change, and to my non-american ears the twang she gives Nurse Emily sounds quite convincing; the power of the words is even such that they succeed in turning Meryl Streep into somebody else than Meryl Streep. But though these big names are the ones touted on the box, it are Justin Kirk, Ben Schenkman, Patrick Wilson and Mary-Louise Parker who act the true core of the story, and in no way does the power and passion of their performances yield to that of the "stars".
Angels in America offers you a lot to think about and has a powerful potential to move. Some of its characters may seem hard to identify with, but soon enough you'll find that you have more in common with them than you thought (and like, possibly). On top of all that this series is beautifully produced. Rather than going all out on special effects, the supernatural events retain a theatrical feel. "It's OK if the wires show", Kushner says in his staging instructions; of course, there are no wires showing here, but scenes in Antarctica (stage set) or Heaven (Hadrian's villa in Tivoli, Italy, with the Golden Gate bridge blended into the background) have been realized through artistic creativity rather than the nowadays ubiquitous and bloodless computer tricks. It only adds to the sincerity of it all. Thomas Newman's music is, as always, a treat in itself. Please don't miss this.
Movie Review: A Magnificent Epic Opera to Be Savored...Mandatory Viewing
Summary: 5 Stars
For those who are afraid of taking the dark journey into the soul of the mid-eighties AIDS epidemic, this adventurous film will not allay your fears of experiencing its brutalizing effects and the unrelenting aftermath that holds us hostage to this day. What is surprising about this movie is that it captures not so much the play's dramatic impact (a given with this production's pedigree), but rather the epic sweep, fantastical elements and brittle humor with a heart-pumping gusto rare for any movie. But this is no ordinary movie given that playwright Tony Kushner wrote a groundbreaking two-play masterpiece over a decade ago that serves as a sweeping indictment of Reagan-era homophobia, medical apathy and social ignorance. It certainly doesn't hurt that legendary director Mike Nichols has guided this ambitious drama with an amazing cast that only starts with Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson.
The story primarily follows three characters whose lives intertwine - Prior, a young man dying of AIDS; his ex-boyfriend, Louis; and Joe, Roy Cohn's ambitious protege, a closeted Mormon married to a woman slipping into delusional depression while he starts an affair with Louis. The fictitious characters are counterweighted by a subplot that centers on Cohn, the demagogic McCarthy-era lawyer who willingly convicted the Rosenbergs and whose closeted promiscuity led him to his 1986 death from AIDS. In his heartfelt adaptation, Nichols allows Kushner's poetic soliloquies full reign and films New York City as an epic backdrop to depict an epochal time. With a six-hour running time, the story certainly takes its time winding through several stories to its conciliatory conclusion, but not a single moment seems wasted here. A major part of its pleasure is how unexpected the plot turns are and how seemingly jarring images and scenes gradually make sense within the torrential stream of the storyline.
The acting is uniformly superb but not in a way that one would have expected. The veteran leads are predictably strong, yet they do not dominate the ensemble. As Cohn, Pacino rages like he was onstage in an Italian opera, seducing and poisoning everyone around him as he produces his own kind of virus in embodying the corrupted American Dream. Streep, as ever the acting chameleon, gets to play three characters - a pallor-white ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, a bravura turn as an aged rabbi and most significantly, Joe's repressed Mormon mother who unlike her son, gains greater self-awareness by the movie's end. Thompson gets to play three smaller roles in a stunning fashion equal to Pacino and Streep, most memorably as the angel crashing through Prior's ceiling. I have to admit though that as impressive as Streep and Thompson are, it is rather distracting to see them cast in multiple roles for their obvious versatility, which takes away somewhat from the veracity of the story.
Regardless of the veterans' contributions, it is really the acting by the younger actors that makes this movie transcendant, especially since they have the bulk of the screen time. Justin Kirk, Ben Shenkman and especially Patrick Wilson are all excellent as Prior, Louis and Joe, respectively. Kirk avoids mawkishness with fiery intensity. Wilson gets kudos for greatly underplaying his role to haunting effect against the dramatic fireworks spewed on him in scenes with Pacino and Mary-Louise Parker. His sense of lost identity is palpable at the end. Parker movingly plays Joe's wife, Harper, who takes Valium to insulate herself from the world crashing around her. She mixes self-pity and humor seamlessly into a character that alternately rankles and cowers. And as the film's moral center in a blazing performance that cuts to the heart of the messages of intolerance and ignorance, Jeffrey Wright plays Belize, a flashy but truthful confidante to Prior and Louis and acerbic nurse to the dying Cohn. When the ensemble acting is at this high a level for six hours, it is hard to imagine what the effect of a mediocre performance would have had on such a potentially unwieldy project.
There are a lot of grandstanding speeches of self-revelation that may alienate some viewers, especially those who may not be able to appreciate the story within its historical context. But I like to view "Angels in America" as grand opera with powerful themes that need to play to the back rows. It is impossible to think of a movie, much less a TV-movie, with a more ambitious emotional scope and a deeper sense of revelation. I only wish the DVD included extras commensurate with the production itself, but alas, that will happen in future commemorative editions, I'm sure. For now, this is an epic to be savored.
Movie Review: This is a masterpiece (...and not an X-rated movie)
Summary: 5 Stars
The shocking intolerance on display below, in some of the negative reviews of this production, is one of the main subjects of this series, and only helps to show how direly we need productions like this one. It ought to be broadcast on prime time national TV. Much of Angels is about how 'keeping up appearances' can destroy people's lives; its core subject is the fundamentally inhuman nature of conservatism. The Angels are "cosmic reactionaries", as one character has it; one of them (Emma Thompson) descends on the main protagonist, Prior Walter (Justin Kirk), to tell him that people have to stop moving. Movement shakes up Heaven, which relies on stasis, eternal sameness. Walter is promoted to a "prophet" of this message, a mission he grapples with but ultimately refuses. This central story interweaves with his conflicted relationship with Louis (Ben Shenkman), his politically engaged liberal boyfriend who runs out on him because he can't deal with the ravages of Prior's illness, AIDS. Louis in turn upsets the marriage of valium-addicted Harper (Marie Louise Parker) and closeted homosexual attorney Joe (Patrick Wilson). Joe breaks away from his stifling routines, much to the dismay of his Mormon mother Hannah (Meryl Streep), who comes over from Salt Lake City to intervene, and ends up finding typical (or even "stereotypical") homosexuals not quite as bad as she thought. Harper meanwhile escapes into her own Antarctic dream world. Another person not pleased is Joe's employer, none other than Roy Cohn (Al Pacino), a viciously homophobic homosexual, who tells his doctor that he hasn't got AIDS, but liver cancer. This of course doesn't save him from a lonely AIDS-death, haunted by the specter of Ethel Rosenberg (Meryl Streep), whom he put on the electric chair in the fifties through corrupt manipulation of the justice system. All these manifold plots are connected by the character of Belize (Jeffrey Wright), an "ex ex drag queen" who is Cohn's nurse, Prior's ex lover and Louis's friend, and clearly the morally superior force in the play.
Angels is incredibly rich and complex; the writing is terrific. The brilliant surface of Angels, that abounds in wit, tragedy, humanity, political debate, campiness, even occasional sentimentality, conceals a multi-layered message of universal appeal. The acting in this production fully realizes the text in all its dimensions. (Pacino's brilliant performance attains an extra edge due to his uncanny physical resemblance to Cohn - just take a look at Mapplethorpe's terrifically horrific portrait of that man, and than watch Pacino: it's chilling.)
The blatant factual falsehoods contained in some of the negative reviews demand contradiction. Some people would have you believe this is an X-rated film, but the references to "explicit sex scenes" in several reviews are utterly exaggerated. There are exactly two scenes in the whole series that, with a considerable stretch of the imagination, could be called explicit. Neither of them involve nudity, both are of tragic rather than erotic portent, and one (the much maligned Central Park encounter) is mainly ludicrously absurd and comical. The supposedly "explicit" sexual activity in these scenes in total accounts for less than a minute of the whole six hours of the series.
Several actors play double or triple roles, not to show off their versatility or to let the make-up department have a ball or whatever, but simply because the original play dictates it that way (I will not go into the symbolic depths hiding behind this device). Many viewers of this series seem completely unaware that this is a faithful televization of a tremendously successful two-part stage play. That people hungry for superficial entertainment run into their video rental store and take home anything with an appealing box cover without having a clue what it is, ending up shocked or disappointed, seems to me to be their own fault, not that of the film at hand.
It is very simple: if your are of conservative or religious bent, or a homophobic, you will quite probably hate AinA. So don't watch it - problem solved. But you will deprive yourself of simply the greatest thing ever made for American television.
Movie Review: On the Threshold of Revelation
Summary: 5 Stars
It turns out that while my wife and I watched "Angels in America" on DVD, it was winning a huge pile of Emmy awards. Frankly, it doesn't take watching the award show to see why it got so much notice this year, and I'd rather watch the series itself than the Emmy Award show any day of the week.
"Angels in America" is by turns funny, touching, whimsical, serious, and most of all surprising. I wasn't too surprised to learn that it was adapted from a stage play, as it has the feeling of a play at several key points in the story, but it's not distracting or annoying, and even adds to the effect in some ways.
"Angels in America" is essentially the story of several people of different backgrounds in New York City in 1986. This is the time of Ronald Reagan, the advent of AIDS, and a time of great uncertainty for many people in America. The characters of "Angels" are several gay men, a Mormon husband and wife, a mother, an angel, a ghost or two, and perhaps most surprisingly, McCarthy-era lawyer Roy Cohn. How these people's lives touch one another, how they weave together to form the tapestry of America, is the real theme of "Angels in America."
The performances in "Angels" are all memorable, especially when you keep in mind that several of the actors play multiple roles (again, as often happens in a stage performance). See if you can spot Meryl Streep's first appearance in the film when you watch "Angels" for the first time! While all the actors were excellent, the performances that really stood out for me were Justin Kirk, Ben Shenkman, Emma Thompson (always a favorite of mine), and Al Pacino, who plays Roy Cohn in perhaps the best performance of his career. It takes top-notch performances to convey this sort of material convincingly, and these actors deliver all that and more.
The direction of "Angels" was refreshing as well, at times lighthearted and at times deadly serious. Mike Nichols gets the point across in each scene with a steady hand, and despite some pretty tricky scenes never falters. The film is brutally honest in what it depicts when honesty is needed, but also whimsical at times when trying to be too serious would come off as outright cheese. I found the scenes with Emma Thompson as the messenger angel especially effective in this regard, as just when it seems like it's getting too over-the-top serious something surprisingly light happens. It's a combination used throughout the film, and always to good effect.
The score for "Angels in America" deserves mention as well, especially as it was the score that originally brought the series to my attention. I'm a pretty stalwart devotee of Thomas Newman's work these days, and couldn't be more pleased with his music for "Angels." It's the perfect accompaniment for the series itself, and like the series the music rides the fine line between heartbreak and hope quite well. The music is lovely to listen to on its own as well, but more importantly, I can't really imagine any other composer's work who would match the emotions and themes of the series as well.
Make no mistake, "Angels in America" is a complex work, much moreso than my simple summary of it would seem. No matter where you come from or what your background is, you are likely to find something in this series which challenges something you believe in -- not in an in your face sort of way, but in a subtle, nuanced way. This is not a presentation which is trying to offend you or change your mind, but it is certainly trying to make you think.
Check your pre-conceived notions of religion, politics, sexuality, and even sanity at the door. In this vision of America, you'll find that they simply don't apply. That revelation is perhaps the most inspiring thing about "Angels in America" -- it is about what America means, in the best sense.