The increasingly surreal manifestations of this messenger were some of the most thrilling moments in the stage production of "Angels," and also some of the funniest, partly because Prior is such an unlikely and unwilling prophet. In one scene, during a fairly routine doctor's visit, an enormous book on a pillar smashes up through the floor to the sound of a choir and flings itself open to reveal burning alephs, then slams shut and disappears. Stephen Spinella, the original Prior, contracted into his examination gown like a hermit crab, mouth agape at the sight. The nurse, who has turned briefly to write something on his chart, notices nothing.

The same scene on film, achieved with the banal wizardry of CGI, is less audacious. It lacks the magic, the physicality and the hilarity of the original. Likewise, Emma Thompson's angel seems less magnificent that her predecessor because she is not as brazenly implausible; you just never saw stuff like this -- so unironic, so spectacular -- in the serious theater in 1992. As for the message itself, revealed to be something less than revelatory in "Perestroika," the second part of "Angels," Kushner's dramatic powers made you more than half believe he had some kind of answer, that he could see the future.

Now that we've lived through a portion of that future and realized that even after unimaginable catastrophe, history stumbles onward, the sweep and the polemics of "Angels in America" recede. Now the play's human element comes forward, the relationships and the inner struggles of its characters, rather than their causes. "Angels" was always a profoundly human play, but as its timeliness fades, we can see the full dimensions of that quality. Kushner's characters are enmeshed in the difficulty of finding the right balance between personal freedom and their responsibility to others, but their creator recognizes how complicated the task can be.

Louis is wrong to leave Prior, but Joe is wrong to stay with Harper. Yet each man's choice is understandable. Joe, a closeted Republican who has been ghostwriting decisions for the conservative judge he clerks for, has done damaging things, yet he is a kind, decent man. He loves Harper and fears for her, even if he can't give her what she wants: his desire. Louis has better politics, but a weaker character. Yet Louis will find more comfort in life than Joe does, perhaps because he can better live with his own failures. Nobody's fate is simple here, and for such a politically passionate writer, Kushner never resorts to caricature.

What you notice this time around is the epic compassion of "Angels in America," a compassion that extends itself even to Roy. This is why Belize, played in the film, as in the much-celebrated Broadway production, by Jeffrey Wright, is its heart. Wright can manage, better than any of the other performers, the script's vertiginous shifts from conversation to poetry. Every so often, Kushner lets loose with a Whitmanesque flight, as when Belize describes his vision of heaven to Roy, as a place where "all the deities are Creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers." The lines are pretty good, but Wright makes them sound like Shakespeare or Rimbaud; you shiver.

On the other hand, Belize often has the task of pulling the other characters back to earth, which requires him to puncture their airier moments. "If I want to spend my whole lonely life looking after white people, I can get underpaid to do it," he tells Prior (whom he loves dearly) at the end of a hospital visit. Another terrific line, but only a terrific actor can make you believe that both have come from the same, breathing human being, and Wright does just that.

Each of the performances in Nichols' film version -- including Meryl Streep, who plays a rabbi, Joe's mother and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg -- is a marvel, with the exception of Mary-Louise Parker's Harper. Parker is just too knowing a performer to make Harper's zonked-out naiveté believable. Wilson's Joe is particularly heart-rending. Joe, more than Roy, is Kushner's great creation in "Angels," someone whose fierce struggle to do the right thing is no less moving for being horribly misguided. We can respect Roy's animal commitment to survival, the same way that he learns to admire some particularly virulent pubic lice: "I learned to identify. You know? Determined lowlife. Like me."

Roy makes his politics serve his own needs, but Joe, the play's other conservative, is a true believer, to his own misfortune. When Harper asks him what he prays for, he replies, "I pray for God to crush me, to break me up into little pieces and start all over again." He tells her about a picture he once saw of Jacob wrestling with the angel, and how it reminds him of his own life, his daily battle with desire: "The angel is not human and it holds nothing back. So how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It's not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God's. But you can't not lose."

As unnecessary and destructive as this fight may be, Kushner recognizes it as heroic. He gives Joe that much. He can see the similarities between the courage of Louis' immigrant ancestors, much like his own, and the Mormon pioneers from whom Harper and Joe have descended. And then he can invite Belize to step in and take the swelling music down a peg by reminding us that "some of us didn't exactly choose to migrate." Everyone gets to speak his or her piece, and if "Angels in America" seems a struggle toward Louis' dream of a democracy "shifting downwards and outwards," in which power moves inexorably to the people, he puts that dream in the head of a man unequal to his own love.

"Angels in America" is not what it was in 1992, and not what it will be in 2012. Who knows what we'll see in it 20 or 50 years from today. I suspect that no matter how many times we come back, we'll always find something more, something unexpected, painful, glorious, ugly and awe-inspiring. Something human. Something American.

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