"Angels" in a colder America

Noel Vera

Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" perhaps the best piece of theater
ever to come out of that country in the past ten years, finally got
the swanky HBO treatment--a $60 million budget, a known director
(Mike Nichols) at the helm, a stellar cast that includes Simon
Callow, James Cromwell, Emma Thompson, Meryl Streep, and best of all
Al Pacino as the fire-breathing monster at the center of Kushner's
epic, Roy Cohn.

It's difficult to describe if you've never seen it, over six hours
(the HBO version has been trimmed and divided into six discrete
episodes) of acid wit, harrowing drama, and grand metaphysics. At
one point we're shown the horrifying effects of AIDs on the human
body; at another long-dead ancestors come to life and give their
descendant a hilarious (if unwelcome) perspective on his history; at
yet another a man climbs up an endless staircase to what we assume
is heaven, which resembles San Francisco. The climax of the first
part comes when the earth shakes, the ceiling splits open, and an
angel with huge wings makes an apocalyptic entrance.

That was on the theater stage; on the smaller TV screen, the
experience is necessarily diminished, though there are other
advantages: the use, for one, of close-ups to allow the actors to
give subtler performances; the fact that HBO reaches millions more
than theater ever will…

As for Mike Nichols as director--best thing I can say of him is, he
doesn't ruin it. The CGI-enhanced entrances and exits of the
apparitions are annoying, and the angel (played on HBO by Emma
Thompson) isn't half as impressive as, say, Terry Gilliam's
in "Brazil" (maybe they should have let him co-direct). This was all
done onstage on Broadway, presumably (I saw Monique Wilson's New
Voices production in Manila), so Nichols could have at least asked
the people who staged it how they did it, and followed their lead.

Some of the staging seems uninspired: part 1's dramatic high point
amongst the four leads--Mormon lawyer Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson)
telling his wife Harper (Mary-Louise Parker) he's gay, played
simultaneously against Louis (Ben Shenkman) telling his dying lover
Prior (Justin Kirk) he's leaving him--I remember onstage as being
gripping theater. On the small screen the sequence is still good
drama, but jumping between two different scenes in TV isn't
realizing the potential of either stage or television, it's just
plain old crosscutting.

I can't help wondering how Robert Altman might have handled this (at
one point he was supposed to direct); his style onscreen seems
already theatrical, with all those wide shots of entire casts
talking together, all those sinuous long takes that seem to imitate
the audience's eyes panning from one end of the stage to the other.
Nichols directs like a TV movie director with a big budget, but not
much more.

That said, it's still recognizably Kushner's "Angels"--a recklessly
ambitious, wonderfully imaginative, even poetic panorama of life in
Reaganist America; to be fair, it's probably to Nichols' credit that
most of the cast is terrific--Pacino's outsized Cohn, Justin Kirk's
tremblingly courageous Prior, Mary Louise Parker's spaced-out
Harper, Ben Shenkman's neurotic Louis, Jeffrey Wright's earthbound
Belize. Even Meryl Streep, whom I'm not especially fond of, does
sharp and funny work in various roles, but especially as the prim-
mouthed Ethel Rosenberg.

Most critics prefer part 1 (The Millennium Approaches), but I liked
how part 2 (Perestroika) develops; this is the payoff for a lot of
what seemed pointless, and you know and like the characters that
much more, even (or especially) Cohn. Pacino's Cohn is by turns
moving and infuriating--the performance lacks the intensity of stage
acting, but Pacino nevertheless does the huge role justice, and his
scenes with Streep's Rosenberg are among the best and funniest.

I liked the second part's incarnation of the angel better--no
distracting digital fires, and Nichols actually seemed to have built
a set and used wirework to float Thompson. I'd have preferred a
fiercer angel--someone who looks as if she'd tear you to shreds as
bless you. The angelic sex was annoying--onstage they simply writhed
in orgasm, no floating around or CGI flames leaping between
crotches, thank you.

I also liked Nichol's directing in the second part better, maybe
because there's more comedy; I especially enjoyed the confrontation
between Prior and Pitt and between Prior and Hannah, Pitt's mother
(again Meryl Streep, again in top comic form). I guess I've
forgotten how good Nichols can be at comedy; just don't ask him to
do grandeur, or special effects, or large ensemble casts.

It's interesting to note that Kushner found it in himself to
empathize with all his characters, even a demon like Cohn, but
Wilson's Joe Pitt, whose heedless affair with Louis drives a wedge
between Louis and Prior, is left practically in the dark--I guess
you can be on the good side or even wrong side magnificently, and
Kushner would grant you a measure of respect. It's the shirkers, the
sinners in omission rather than commission, the ones who fall short
in their goodness or evil that are totally shut out from his
sympathy.

It's also interesting to note the differences and similarities
between "Angels" and Dennis Potter's 1986 masterpiece "The Singing
Detective," an obvious influence. Kushner and Potter use similar
means to achieve almost diametrically opposite ends: both crisscross
deftly between clinical reality and fantasy, both make sharp use of
black comedy, both juxtapose spectacle with personal drama. But
Potter uses these devices to burrow into the individual's psyche in
all its infinite idiosyncrasies, performing a form of self-therapy
along the way; Kushner takes the same techniques and gives us a
sweeping state-of-the nation vision of '80s America, from its
lowliest homosexual to its most powerful Republican. Potter's focus
is profoundly inwards; Kushner's encompassingly outwards; Potter's
is perversely, cantankerously intricate, Kushner's life-affirmingly
passionate. My tastes lean towards the perverse and cantankerous,
but I find much to enjoy and appreciate in the affirmatively
passionate.

Finally, it's interesting to note how "Angels," a work that
summarizes the American '80s, has stayed relevant in the new
millennium (please skip this paragraph if you haven't seen the
series). Prior is abandoned by Louis just as the heavens are
abandoned by God just as America was abandoned, in effect, by a
president whose mind was never quite all there. Today, with a
president more empty suit than leader, a government more concerned
with national security than civil liberty, a nation obsessed with
controlling the world rather than helping others improve it, you
feel as if nothing has really changed. Prior, the heavens and
America remain as abandoned as ever.

In the meantime there's this: six hours of powerful writing,
translated adequately if imperfectly to the small screen. Even in
its flawed state, I'd say this is the best six hours of cable
television you're likely to see this year.

(First printed in Menzone Magazine, March, 2004)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)