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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Mike Nichols' HBO production of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" brings the most glorious, most thrilling and most painful work of contemporary American theater into the living room.
Dec 6, 2003 | Revelation is hard to come by these days. Whatever crisis -- spiritual, political, cultural -- the attacks of Sept. 11 precipitated, so far no American artist has been able to seize or shape it in words or images. The raw, ragged trauma just stands there, unassimilated. Poetry, which once had the job of telling us what was going on around us and what it meant, is, according to Wordsworth, "emotion recollected in tranquillity." But there's not much tranquillity left in which to work, and poetry has dwindled into a tiny backwater of the cultural landscape, populated by cultists.
Theater sometimes seems nearly as esoteric, so for those of us who saw Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" back in the early '90s, the shock was physical. I remember walking with a friend out of a small theater in a dicey neighborhood in San Francisco after seeing the first incarnation of the play's first installment (subtitled "Millennium Approaches"). We felt as galvanized as Kushner's poor, sick character, Prior Walter, when a radiant angel comes crashing through the ceiling of his apartment, promising the advent of "great work."
Those of us leaving the theater, blinking in the sun (it was a matinee), knew that what we'd just seen was a great work, almost a miracle in and of itself, when you consider how mediocre most theater is these days. "Angels in America" was no recollection, though. It spoke to us directly out of what we were living through at that very moment: the friends and lovers lost in their youth to a hideous disease, a government that congratulated itself for its righteousness in turning its back on them, and more -- junk bonds, the Iran-Contra scandal, the feeling that America would never shed its uglier habits because it no longer especially cared to.
Kushner somehow managed to capture all this without waiting for a patch of tranquillity, and the immediacy of "Angels" supercharged its already formidable dramatic power. A tiny percentage of the audience for Mike Nichols' film adaptation for HBO will consist of people who saw the play, and they will probably need to watch the movie once to reconcile it with the stage version and then once more to see it for what it is: not a great film, exactly, but a film that makes the greatness of Kushner's play readily available. Kushner's play is too powerful to allow Nichols' film to have its own independent life, and Nichols knows this. He submits to it, and lets his film become its vessel. That's more than enough. (Part 1 of Nichols' "Angels in America" premieres this Sunday at 8 p.m., with Part 2 premiering next Sunday, Dec. 14. Check listings for a full schedule of repeat broadcasts.)
Why should anyone who hasn't seen the play -- the majority of people reading this -- care about the comparison? Because you will see a very different work from the play that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and enraptured audiences at the dawn of the Clinton presidency. You might not recognize the film you see in the descriptions of the play from that time. Some fairly small alterations have been made in converting "Angels in America" to the screen, but it is the shift in context that makes it something new. The play was urgent and momentous and filled with portent; it looked forward. The film is ruminative and mellowed; it looks back.
The key question is: Does the film also look out and in? At some point, to its readers, "War and Peace" changed from a novel about the Napoleonic wars to a novel about War. Has "Angels" undergone the same transformation? Has it morphed from a story about America in the 1980s to a story about America? It has.
Less grandly put, "Angels in America" is also the story of two men who are diagnosed with AIDS and two relationships that are falling apart. One of the men is a historical figure, the lawyer Roy Cohn, whose public actions Kushner represents with some accuracy and whose private thoughts and feelings the playwright guesses at. Cohn, a protégé of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and a crony of several Republican presidential administrations, is, according to one character, "the polestar of human evil." Roy announces that the accomplishment of which he is proudest is making sure Ethel Rosenberg went to the electric chair, a feat that required violating an assortment of ethical codes.
Cohn is a scabrous, blaring closet case, a creature of free-floating rage and thunderous vitality -- in short, a plum role. Al Pacino comes just shy of overplaying him, if such a thing is even possible. It's the performance that everyone will exclaim over, even if it's not the best in the film, but that shouldn't detract from its finer points. The strength of it lies in the rare moments when Cohn isn't shouting, when Pacino's staring eyes seem to be trapped in Cohn's face, peering down the length of a long, red-rimmed tunnel. Cohn's view of life is utterly without comfort, yet he clings to it with a bleak zest. Even in dying -- especially in dying -- he is so alive that he fascinates the one character who is his complete opposite, his "negation," the black male nurse Belize (Jeffrey Wright).
Roy's theme, both screeching and percussive, is just one in the symphony of "Angels in America." Characters are paired and divided, providing each other with counterpoints and echoes. The play often puts two conversations happening in different places on the stage at the same time, alternating the focus back and forth in a technique that resembles cinematic crosscutting, although it feels more forceful. Nichols can only crosscut, but some of the impact is still there.
While Roy talks with his own protégé, Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson), a strait-laced Mormon lawyer, in the old Oak Room bar at the Palace Hotel, another character, Louis Ironson (Ben Shenkman), seeks out anonymous sex in Central Park. Roy, who is luring the unwitting Joe into his network of corrupt officials, explains that every young man needs the help of an older man to succeed in their business. When Joe complains of his own father's coldness, Roy replies, "Sometimes a father's love has to be very hard." Meanwhile, Louis asks his pickup, a leather daddy, to "hurt me, make me bleed."
Louis seeks punishment because he's deserted his lover, Prior (Justin Kirk), the other man in the play with AIDS. Theirs is one of the relationships that dissolves in the course of the play. The other is Joe's marriage to Harper (Mary-Louise Parker), a misfit he cherishes because "she was always doing something wrong, like one step out of step. In Salt Lake City that stands out." Harper's out of more than just step now, sitting in their Brooklyn apartment drifting in through Valium-induced dreams. In one of them (a tribute to Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast") she meets Prior (who has been reading a Cocteau biography), who tells her what she already doesn't want to know: Joe is homosexual.
Louis and Roy are Jews obsessed with America. Louis and Joe betray the people they love. Roy and Prior have AIDS. Louis and Harper chatter about global disasters when unable to cope with personal anxiety. Prior and Harper hallucinate -- maybe. Harper receives visits from "Mr. Lies," a member of the International Organization of Travel Agents (IOTA), who promises to take her away to "Antarctica." And Prior hears a beautiful voice, the voice of a "messenger," urging him to "prepare the way."
