Angels in America

Angels in America (2003, Mike Nichols)
"Angels in America" isn't an empty pleasure -- it's a thematic wonder and, thanks in part to Thomas Newman's score, an often rousing film. It's by its nature political, and I don't just mean left and right American politics -- although there's certainly a lot of dialogue spilled on that -- but rather the debating nature of argument. Tony Kushner said the following about the relation of scriptwriting, novels, and playwriting: "Screenwriting is primarily a narrative art -- and I don't think that's true of playwriting, which is dialogic and dialectic, and is fundamentally always more about an argument than it is about narrative progression."

That pretty clearly explains Kushner's interest in "the argument," how his plays are like long, drawn-out essays. He clearly intends that, and I think it's his mistaken view of art in general. He's so wrapped up in the differences of mediums that he fails to realize that all great artists are interchangeable. Of course the mediums of Edward Hopper, Miles Davis, and John Cheever are different. But the effects they have on a human soul are very much the same.

There is a great deal to admire about Nichols' version of Kushner's play, not least of all in how he refuses to play it safe. He routinely lays it on the line with big statements: living statues, hospital rooms cracking open for angels. And his approach isn't humorless. Meryl Streep in particular has a couple of zingers. But it's not enough to make me view the film as anything other than a folly, despite my increasing eagerness during the first few episodes.

You can't necessarily blame Nichols for the novelty of actors playing so many roles -- it was that way on the stage -- but the result is the astonishment we're meant to feel at how they adopt so many visual and vocal disguises. Emma Thompson as a psychotic homeless person! Meryl Streep as a man! Nichols allows his actors to embarrassingly chew the scenery, and ironically it's the three most revered actors that do the worst of it: Streep, Thompson, and Al Pacino. Thompson's and Streep's performances are overly fussy and yet shamelessly broad. Thompson in particular doesn't play people at all, but rather constructs for the play. Al Pacino has a lot of energy, but thinks the best way to play a horrible disease is to start jerking his body around at various moments. Jeffrey Wright and Justin Kirk give the best performances in the film, Wright's nurse loaded with attitude and style complimenting Kirk's gentle, funny performance as an AIDS victim.

The content of the play, and of the film, is a lot of stereotyped situations and finger-pointing. By the end of it we don't really know a great deal about any of the characters except their surfaces. We don't understand AIDS any better, except that there's some political obfuscation involved and that AZT medication was hard to come by 20 years ago. But we don't have any kind of a profound experience, we don't really "experience" at all. The Pet Shop Boys' "Dreaming of the Queen" does what Kushner's play does and more, with much more subtlety, finesse, formal elegance, and compassion, and in five minutes as opposed to six hours.

Cocteau's theatricality must have influenced Nichols, and there's a scene where Kirk's character is reading a Cocteau book just in case he doesn't think we'll catch the allusion by ourselves. But Nichols rarely achieves any kind of poetry, even with his go-for-broke brazenness. It's an issue movie writ large, political time-stamping. The play itself may be a genuine artistic statement, and I can't imagine the topical impact it must have had on the gay community and the world in the '90s. The idea of the play and its size -- a big red flag demanding not to be ignored -- may be its great contribution. But a great work of art it is not.