Oh Cinema: Films for the Trump Years: Angels in America

“Nothing’s lost forever. In this world there’s a kind of painful progress…longing for what we’ve left behind and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.”

Angels in America originated as one of the early stage works of playwright Tony Kushner, better-known to movie aficionados as the Oscar-nominated screenwriter for Munich and Lincoln. Originally debuting in 1991 and reaching Broadway in 1993, the play is a massive enterprise that delves into the world of the 1980’s AIDS crisis in America. The two parts of the show (respectively named Millennium Approaches and Perestroika) bind together themes of homosexuality, politics, health care, inequality, race, theology, immigration, and much, much more into a massively detailed storytelling tapestry that, depending on the adaption, usually clocks in between 7 and 8 hours in its live performances.

A decade after it took the theater world by storm, Kushner returned to adapt the play into a 6-part HBO miniseries in 2003 (Mike Nichols directed), which went on to net numerous Emmys and Golden Globes, including Best Miniseries. Looking back now, the series is an early reveal of Kushner's ability to write screenplays as excellent as his stage works. There is much in the dialogue to remind one of the theatrical roots of the show, especially the longer monologues, but Kushner’s writing combined with a stellar cast sells every moment of it. Taking a speech meant for the intimacy of a stage and giving it the same power in a cinematic setting is a challenge not every writer, performer, or director is up to.

The cast stars Justin Kirk as Prior Walter and Ben Shenkman as Louis, a gay couple in NYC who suffer a falling out after Prior is diagnosed with AIDS. Parallel to their story, a heterosexual Mormon couple- Mary-Louise Parker as Harper and Patrick Wilson as Joe- are facing their own marital struggles, centered around Patrick’s clearly very repressed homosexuality and Harper’s Valium addiction. Rounding out the cast are Jeffrey Wright as Prior’s best friend Belize, Meryl Streep as both Joe’s mother and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (in what might be my all-time favorite performance of hers), and Emma Thompson as both Prior’s nurse and the angel that starts visiting him after his illness starts to advance.

The ultimate scene-chewer, though, as well as the most unambiguously villainous one of the bunch, is Al Pacino’s Roy Cohn (who in the play is Joe’s boss), a figure with such a cartoonishly evil resume you might first assume Kushner invented him as a conglomerate character meant to symbolize the worst aspects of post-WWII American conservatism. But nope- very nearly every word about him in the show is true; he served as a key prosecutor in the Rosenberg trial and claimed afterward to be personally responsible for their death sentence; he did work closely with McCarthy; he was a major figure in Ronald Reagan’s rise to the Presidency; and yes, he was a repressed homosexual who died of AIDS shortly after being disbarred in 1986, insisting all the while it was…..wait for it….liver cancer.

Oh yeah, and he did legal work for both Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch in the 1970’s and is credited with introducing the two to each other. So there’s also that.

Al Pacino is, somehow, ever slimier in this role than he was in The Godfather Part II. I didn't think that was possible, but here we are. As insane as everything about Roy Cohn is, it ends up being rather perfect that Kushner chose him to be a central figure in this story. He functions, as no invented character ever could, as the best-possible example of what the GOP already was by the Reagan years and is even more so now. He is a pure distillation of the notion of power, seeking itself out for its own sake, to the detriment of everyone else.

Roy has a pivotal monologue at the end of Chapter One that cuts right to the heart of what made the AIDS crisis so bitter and the fight against it so drawn out- the assumption, at first, that it was a disease that only touched "those homosexuals," that “those homosexuals” were always and only nameless, powerless schmucks who got what they deserved, and those in higher positions could never be linked to such barbarism. As always, such bigoted assumptions paid themselves out in blood, many times over, and now they are doing so again.

Roy also plays a part in what, watching the series now (I write this in the midst of the nomination process of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court) is one of the most viscerally painful scenes in the whole show to revisit. It is a restaurant dinner where an associate of Roy's breaks down to Joe, in excruciatingly clear detail, the foundation of the decades-long movement by conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation to dominate the GOP and stymy liberal goals, especially if they are the will of the democratic majority, by packing the federal courts, seat by seat, with arch-conservative judges.

This scene touches on something numerous writers have examined over the years about why, exactly, American conservatism went so consciously and determinedly insane over the past three decades. Underlying the dialogue of the scene is the clear, yet unspoken, assumption among conservative intelligentsia and power brokers that, with Reagan's rise, their position was not only the One True And Moral Way, but was in fact destined to never fail again- Joe is assured that the Presidency is already locked Republican for 2000 and beyond, with Congress and every federal court soon to follow.

Except that it didn't actually turn out that way- the “lock” was never as secure as many thought, and only once in the last six Presidential elections has the GOP candidate won a majority of the national vote. And for many on the right, it ultimately proved too unforgiveable that both a slick, politically-savvy white man and a profoundly intellectual and moral black man could beat them at their own game not only once, but twice apiece. Any system where such "wrongness" could be allowed to win over what’s “right,” so the logic inevitably goes, is an abomination, and so no measure to destroy it is too much if it means that "those people" are kept in their proper place- under the boot of the white man. Even if it means the democratic process itself and the very notions of civic virtue and human rights must be sacrificed in the process.

There are moments when the show is very much of its time- I too remember that period in the 90's when the ozone hole was supposed to be the worst possible sign of the end times. Compared to what we face today, it almost seems quant that that used to be the great casus belli for aggressive leftists. But the core principle of the story, that of the need for our souls to come together to heal what's broken, still stands untouched by time, as it is precisely the sort of vision necessary to heal the even greater harms being inflicted on our planet now.

Angels of America is a story about the endurance of life even in the face of immense suffering, and about how the marginalized of every shape, size, orientation, and color are still here, growing and thriving, in the face of all who would destroy them. Light scatters into pockets too small for the darkness to snuff out, and it's worth reminding ourselves of its continuance even when it seems to be cast out of the higher reaches of power. It is a humanist vision that sees how sparks within the smallest of people can allow hope and goodness to survive the times of darkness, prompting remembrance of a time when things seemed similarly bleak, when a Republican-dominated government considered itself to be unaccountable for the sufferings of the marginalized.

A single question pervades much of the story- are there angels in America? Is there salvation, anywhere, to be found here? Can the vision of Belize as he describes heaven to Roy be believed to be achievable? Or is any effort at such doomed to miserable disappointment and failure?

It is to the story's credit that it does not try to "prove" one answer or another. Its focus is on the quiet glory of how we stumble about in the dark, even though we can never truly know if we are on the right path or not. Sometimes, the simple act of living out each day to its fullest is the most profound sort of revolution there is. After all, even angels are flummoxed by it.