Wings of desire

By FRANCES GRANT

If an angel comes crashing through your ceiling, says God has left the world and wants to have sex with you, watch out. This could be a medication-induced hallu-cination, a projection of your terrified psyche in the face of loneliness and death, or simply a sign that the world is coming to an end.

The celestial beings are taking an active interest in the affairs of men — or rather, ailing gay men — in the much-lauded, HBO miniseries Angels in America, on TV One.

The six-part series is a lavish, US$60 million ($87.1 million) screen version of Tony Kushner's landmark Broadway play, which won a Pulitzer Prize and two Tonys and became the 1990s' definitive theatrical statement on Aids.

Directed by Mike Nichols (The Graduate, Silkwood, Primary Colours), it boasts a star-studded cast, led by Al Pacino as a real-life character, fanatical McCarthyite lawyer Roy Cohn.

Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson both play multiple roles.

The HBO drama has been showered with laurels. It won seven Golden Globes and 11 Emmys. In addition to best mini-series, the show won for directing, writing and acting in a mini-series (Pacino, Streep, Jeffrey Wright and Mary-Louise Parker).

The six-hour telefilm is epic, not so much in scene and character, but in the sheer scope of its themes. Set in New York in the mid-80s, the story follows idealistic law clerk Louis Ironson, a young man of liberal politics wrestling with his Jewishness and his guilt at deserting his Aids-stricken lover, Prior Walter.

He is attracted to his married colleague Joe Pitt, a Mormon and fervent Republican, whom Louis is convinced is gay. Pitt is unhappily married to pretty Harper, who is so sexually frustrated and depressed she spends her days in Valium-induced dream world.

Pacino's Cohn is also attracted to Pitt and offers him a leg up the career ladder straight to Washington and the heart of power — a real devil's bargain. Cohn, a closet gay, is sick with Aids, which he bullies his doctor into diagnosing as liver cancer.

Meanwhile, a deserted Prior, alone and afraid, is suffering deliriums of angelic dimensions, confiding in his friend and nurse, Belize. Belize is also nursing an angry Cohn, who uses his contacts to score a huge personal stash of hard-to-get experimental drug AZT.

Angels in America is a searing critique of the conservatism of the Reagan era, with its triumph of capitalism over the crumbling communist regimes of Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. It also examines the place within the mainstream culture of a minority suffering a frightening and ignored modern plague.

The drama opens with a funeral presided over by an old Jewish rabbi telling his congregation that the great American melting pot has not, in fact, merged all creeds and cultures, introducing another key theme of racism and its effect on US democracy.

As its characters look towards the turn of the 20th century and the new millennium, the drama is also shot through with apocalyptic references to environmental destruction and the end of the planet.

Playwright Kushner agreed in an interview with Newsweek it is a product of its time. "Of course, the world has changed enormously since the play was written, and thank God. But I was scared about that in terms of the film. I thought, 'is it just going to be very old hat?'

"But the way [director] Mike has made it, it doesn't insist that you go back into the period by shoving it at you. 'This was back then, when things were like this.'

"It simply uses the basic tool of drama, which is empathy and compassion, and says, 'This kind of suffering was the consequence of this kind of oppression'."

Kushner subtitled Angels in America a "gay fantasia on national themes". The play, which blends action with extravagant hallucinations and fantasy sequences in which angels, historical and imagined figures intersect with the characters, was praised for its innovation. The screen version tries to preserve some of the stage artifice, although the translation isn't always successful.

In the Newsweek interview (with Kushner, Nichols and key members of the cast), Nichols said he was also determined to keep to the original play's multiple-character roles. Streep plays three characters. Her most striking performance is as Hannah, Pitt's mother who comes to New York to save her son's marriage — and soul.

Pacino revels in playing the villain of the piece, although he also manages to make Cohn sympathetic: "I don't think you set out to do that. I think it's innate in the characterisation that Tony has made. It's impossible to do that character without getting to the humanity of it," he says.

In the same interview, Emma Thompson likens Cohn to Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost, a description which Kushner finds particularly apt.

"The great trap is that when you fall in love with the Devil, you're recapitulating the fall of the human race. That's why we fall," he says.

Despite all the awards, Angels in America has not been an unmitigated critical success, with some reviewers finding its marathon length, speeches and staginess far too ambitious or contrived for the small screen.

Filmcritic.com's Chris Bar-santi neatly sums up its strengths and flaws: "Heavily (and correctly) lauded, but possibly quickly forgotten, Angels in America is a landmark piece of work that stretches too far and flies too high, but even when plummeting back to Earth, makes for a riveting and heady spectacle."

* Angels in America, Sunday, 9.35pm, TV One