Angels in America

Hello friends, I am recovered and ready to bite things with my cool mouth.

This week's theme: Favorite Movie

As Emma and Naoni pointed out, we have indeed had a few movie/media themed questions already, and while I am always down to talk about movies, I'm not so sure what my favorite is. (most people likely share this opinion?) Some of my favorite movies include: The Social Network, Whisper of the Heart, Juno, and the inimitable I Killed My Mother (I took inspiration from Rachel's letterboxd and made this more in depth list a few months ago)

So, today, I am going to cheat and write about something that is actually not a movie, but a TV show technically. It's a miniseries, so I feel like it gets a slight pass. I'm pretty bad with watching TV shows (as my anime watching friends well know...someday I will get around to finishing FMA, I promise) but this miniseries is one of the few things I will sit down and watch all the way through in one day, even though it's about six hours in run time: Angels in America.

The miniseries is an adaptation of the Tony Kushner play of the same name, and it's quite faithful to the original script. I was actually watching it earlier with the book of the play in my lap following along earlier. Actually the title is Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and it was written in 1991, about the AIDS crisis which had reached its peak in the mid-eighties. Full disclosure: I have never seen the stage show (though it's a goal of mine at some point), so my whole context for Angels in America comes from the series and from reading the script in an English class at Smith.

I don't really know what to say about it, so I think I'm just going to walk through the basic plot. For uninterested folk, this may be the spot to turn away. Basically, it's just a really cool, sensitive story about AIDS, homosexuality, religion, and the idea of America as a nation. It's got everything. Meryl Streep playing an aged rabbi, people suddenly speaking Hebrew, revelations from angels, ghosts, travelling salesmen who can take you to Antarctica in your hallucinations, Communists. What more could you want?

But anyway, the basic plot is split into three main interweaving stories. The first is about Louis and Prior, a gay couple who find out that Prior has AIDS at the beginning of film. Louis gets freaked out by Prior's sickness, leaves him, and gets caught up in his guilt over it but won't actually go back to Prior or visit him in the hospital. They only really interact through Prior's friend Belize, who's an RN who visits Prior in the hospital. Meanwhile, Prior begins having visions of angels and the ghosts of his ancestors (he comes from an old WASPy family with many generations of "Prior Walters" going back) who tell him that he is a prophet for the new millennium who is meant to restore the city of Heaven, which has been abandoned by God. Perhaps needless to say, things get kinda trippy in Prior's storyline.

The second story is about Joe and Harper, a married Mormon couple who moved to New York to advance Joe's career as a lawyer. Harper is depressed and a Valium addict who has drug-induced hallucinations (about living in Antarctica) and feels unsatisfied in her marriage. We find out pretty early on that this is because Joe has been repressing his homosexuality due to his religious and political beliefs. In one of Harper's hallucinations, she visits Prior, even though the two have never met, and he tells her that her husband is gay. (I really tried to find the scene because it's super otherworldly and one of my favorite scenes from the whole series, but alas YouTube does not have it). Joe strikes up a kind of flirtation with Louis, who works as a word processor at the law office.

Then the final plotline is about Roy Cohn, the real life lawyer who was a major player in the McCarthy Red Scare trials and was responsible for Ethel Rosenberg's execution. He also targeted a lot of government employees and other Americans for being homosexuals during the so-called "Lavender Scare," when a lot of people were fired for being gay, despite being secretly homosexual himself. He has AIDS, but hides it, claiming that he has liver cancer instead. In the show, he works with Joe and tries to get him a job in Washington to protect himself from being disbarred for misconduct. He's played by Al Pacino in the show, who's incredible.

Anyway, I'll cut the synopsis. The show is weird and complicated and truly ethereal and sad and really profoundly moving. It's one of the best pieces of writing I think I've ever read or watched, and the performances are spectacular. It also feels like one of those rare stage to film adaptations that actually uses the medium of film to improve upon the work, playing to film's strengths to create a work that is both faithful to the original script and innovative in terms of sets, staging, visuals, etc. My other standards of comparisons are mainly musical to film adaptations, which are notoriously lackluster in most cases, so maybe I'm being unfair, but still.

This just remains one of my favorite things to read, watch, and think about. Rewatching it today, I'm surprised how much of it I can quote from memory. The "Bless me anyway" monologue that Prior gives (linked above) is revelatory. The fact that Rent has somehow become the de facto piece of AIDS media in our culture when Angels in America exists is a crime.