Movie Review – Angels in America

Angels in America (2003)
Written by Tony Kushner
Directed by Mike Nichols

Theater & queerness have always gone together. With my American Theater on Film series wrapping up to make room for our Pride film run coming in June, this is a perfect transition. Airing as a mini-series on HBO in 2003, Angels in America was based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name. It’s a story primarily about being a gay man amid the rise of Ronald Reagan & the Christian conservative movement, all while AIDS is ravaging the LGBTQ community. It’s an epic play, premiering in parts with Part I debuting in 1991, followed by Part II in 1992. Altogether it’s six hours which is quite bold for a theater piece. Yet, the AIDS crisis was deserving of such a dense, heavy piece. How could it not be? 

Starting in 1985 and going into 1990, Angels in America is an ensemble story featuring various people’s experiences with the AIDS virus. Prior Walter (Justin Kirk) tells his partner Louis (Ben Shenkman) that he has contracted the disease. Despite being together for four years, Louis abandons his partner and sinks into a spiral of guilt & shame. Then there’s Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson), a Mormon and Republican appeals attorney, wooed by infamous New York lawyer Roy Cohn (Al Pacino). Cohn wants Pitt to take a job with the Justice Department to be his man on the inside. It turns out both Pitt and Cohn are hiding secrets, their homosexuality. Cohn is diagnosed with AIDS, uses his clout to disguise it as liver cancer, and tries to secure his legacy while he rots away. Pitt ends up watching his marriage with Harper (Mary-Louise Parker) fall apart as he becomes honest about his attraction to men. His mother, Hannah (Meryl Streep), rushes to the city from her home in Utah to try and convince her son he’s gone crazy. 

Meanwhile, Prior is cared for by former lover/professional nurse Belize (Jeffrey Wright). The ailing man begins having visions telling him an angel is coming and he will be the vessel of prophecy. The Angel America (Emma Thompson) does indeed arrive, shattering the ceiling and pronouncing. America tells Prior that humanity and its mortality are offensive to the immortal—the Eternal see constant movement & transformation as obscene. The only way to save humanity, she says, is for Prior to spread the word of freezing in place. Something has shifted among the heavens, so God has abandoned the angels, and they need humans to stop doing what they are doing while the celestial bureaucrats figure things out.

The AIDS crisis served as a forced de-closeting for many gay men in America. Celebrities like Rock Hudson were outed while still trying to maintain it was only cancer. Not many died embracing their identities and instead kept trying to hide even when circumstances indicated they would die. Think about that. They would rather die pretending to be straight than live out their last few months being honest about who they were. It’s another tragic byproduct of the hierarchies that rule America. Even today, we have public figures like Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham, a poorly closeted homosexual with no qualms attacking the community he is a part of because it affords him political capital amongst the ghoulish powerbrokers he seeks to charm. 

One of the things Kushner’s play touches on is the intersections of Judaism, homosexuality, and communism. Cohn became famous as a lackey of Senator Joe McCarthy during the communist witch hunts of the 1950s. The play reminds us of the Rosenbergs, a married couple who spied for the Soviet Union, providing them with nuclear secrets, and were straight-up murdered by the United States government for that. Their executions were made into a public spectacle of death that would have impressed the Romans. We have hordes of reactionary degenerates who attempted a comically inept insurrection on America’s capitol and are given light slaps on the wrist. The message is clear: Communists who work to undermine the United States die while brain-dead reactionary chuds can wreak all the havoc they want and, at most, get a few years.

The ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (Streep) appears to haunt Cohn in his final months, smirking and enjoying his misery. Cohn rails against her and clings tightly to his hateful ideology, bitter to the end. His one shining hope is that he will die with his law license intact as New York state tries to disbar him. He almost makes it, though, and Ethel takes quite a bit of pleasure in breaking the news to him. Cohn’s life is a wonderful lesson in the futility of fascist thought. Such a hyper-individualistic way of thinking means the deeper you go, the more alone you end up until, in Roy Boy’s case, you’re a shriveled-up corpse whose name is forever associated with the worst in humanity. If only Henry Kissinger would join him already.

The play’s final message is that humanity cannot freeze in place. Angels in America happened at a moment when American theater was transformed. Someone with far more expertise in this area could elaborate better than I can, but here is what I see. Theater as a populist form of entertainment & political education seemed to have been a regular thing since its inception. Class often leaked in, but opera appeared to be the preferred performing art of the monied types. In the 1990s, there was a backlash against the National Endowment for the Arts, a U.S. government agency that offers funding for projects of cultural interest. By this time, you saw less theater staged on television than in the 1950s and 60s. Even the simple morality plays of Rod Serling had begun to fade. Populist theater was effectively killed off in the 1990s and replaced with hyper-inflated ticket prices. Spectacle musicals like Phantom of the Opera were the name of the game, foreshadowing the coming of the Marvelization of movies decades later. People spoke more about the scope & scale than the humanity on stage. 

Jump to the present day, where something like Hamilton is lauded despite simply being a rebooting of American imperialism under the guise of diversifying the Founding Fathers. No, they cast people of color in the roles of slave owners, and that should disgust anyone who is intellectually honest. Not only that, but one of the major headlines surrounding Hamilton was the exorbitant ticket prices. It’s clear now that theater is a form of art overtaken by neoliberalism. Angels in America ends on a note saying, “We have to keep changing; history is happening around us all the time; when we live as who we are, we can reshape the world for the better.” The neoliberalism of Hamilton tells us, “Wouldn’t it be cool if Thomas Jefferson was a Black rapper? Let’s not talk about the slave-raping thing, okay? We’re just trying to have fun here.” That musical sums up the whole neoliberal concept of “the death of history” in a disturbing way.

The theater is powerful, even plays some may consider old & musty. I had some incredible experiences during this series watching these plays. Looking back, the highlights for me were A Streetcar Named Desire, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and Death of a Salesman. Though, almost every film I watched was fantastic (except for Picnic, ugh). I am intrigued to see how these plays have been reinterpreted not just within the United States but by other cultures, bringing their own perspectives to the work and creating something new. Right now, from the perspective of mass media, the theater feels like a dead art form. But some stories can only be told in this context, which is heightened by the forms & structures of the stage. I already have a hefty list of more stage-to-film productions ready to go sometime soon.