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FORLORN IN THE USA
Magazine / Source: The West Australian, June 2004 |
Angels In America is a challenging, theatrical television epic that tackles AIDS, loss, sexuality and Reaganism over three episodes. Ron Banks reports.
One of the initially puzzling aspects of the epic TV series Angels In America is why writer Tony Kushner should integrate the Mormon religion into his searing study of AIDS, Reaganite conservatism and the loss of faith.
The answer gradually unfolds when Prior Walter, a young man depressed and dying of AIDS, decides that belief in God is dead and that he must become a prophet for a world with a new set of beliefs.
In his AIDS-fevered hallucinations, Walter is visited by an angel - one of God's messengers (played by Emma Thompson) - in the same manner as Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism who visited by God as a young man. Smith was told in his visitation that he should start his own religion, which he promptly did.
This belief in founding your own religion fascinated Kushner, who uses it as one of the central metaphors of his sprawling saga of mid-80s America. It's one of the positive aspects of America, he suggests, this ability to get around old belief systems and strike out with new values.
Before we get to this optimistic conclusion with its suggestions of redemption, though, viewers of the saga over three nights might well begin to think that the America of President Reagan was horrifyingly conservative and punitive.
The evils of Reaganism are represented by the real-life character of lawyer Roy Cohn (played by Al Pacino), whose conservatism dates back to the 1950s when he helped Senator Joe McCarthy in his anti-communist activities.
When the story begins in 1985, Cohn is dying of AIDS, although, as a closet homosexual, he insists his illness is liver cancer. As he lies dying in hospital, he is visited by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (Meryl Streep), whom Cohn helped sentence to death for passing atomic secrets in the 50s. Her manner is reproachful, but Cohn will not offer any remorse for her death. With ghostly pallor and whispering voice, Streep's Ethel is a baleful presence at the bedside, but the famous actress just as impressive in her other role as Hannah Pitt, the Mormon mother who comes to New York after her son Joe's marriage breaks down.
Her son, a protégé of Roy Cohn, faces his own personal crises when he realises he is gay. He leaves his wife, Harper (Mary Louise-Parker), a depressed Mormon whose pill-popping leads to a series of hallucinations, one involving a journey to Antarctica where the ozone layer is thinning out. (Plenty of politico-social issues get woven into the narrative.)
Angels In America is complex in its interweaving of narratives, but at its heart is the story of relationships that cave in under pressure of illness, loss (of love, of faith) and politics (personal and political).
There is the story of angel-seeing Walter (Justin Kerk), who is abandoned by his lover, Louis Ironson (Ben Shenkman), after the AIDS diagnosis; the disintegration of the marriage of Mormons Joe and Harper Pitt; the slow dying Cohn and the efforts of Streep's Mormon mother Hannah to make sense of what is happening in a world not sustained by the Mormon certainties.
Added to this stew of shifting relationships is Thompson's special effects turn as the angel (she also doubles as an AIDS nurse) and Jeffrey Wright's campy yet appealing performance as the gay nurse and friend of Walter who is forced to care for the spiteful Cohn.
It's an impressive cast and an intensely theatrical television series, not surprising given that the original Broadway play (in fact, two plays called The Millennium Approaches and Perestroika) was regarded as one of the most intense drama experiences of the 1990s.
Kushner won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Broadway Tony award for his epic tale, which, in the television version directed by Mike Nichols, is reduced by about two hours. Still, 6˝ hours puts a big demand on audiences and Angels in America will not be for everyone.
It is filled with ideas, hallucinatory imagery, fantasy, brutal realism and gay love-making. We've probably become inured to the gay scenes after the liberated 90s on TV, but parts of it will shock some people. Those who stay with this demanding, visually and verbally rich television event should find both intellectual and emotional rewards.
Angels in America screens tomorrow, Wednesday and Thursday at 8.30pm on ABC.
