An epic takes wing

By Carina Chocano

Dec. 5, 2003 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Heaven is a city that looks like San Francisco, or so an angel tells the ailing Prior Walter (Justin Kirk), one of the main characters in Mike Nichols’ spectacular adaptation of Tony Kushner’s award-winning 1993 play “Angels in America.”

Fittingly, the celestial beings -- who, with one exception, are not revealed until near the end of the sprawling six-hour epic that premieres Sunday on HBO -- turn out to look a lot like the owner-managers of a Humboldt County food collective, or the film studies faculty of some Northern California state college. Scruffy, wool-swathed and grimly above-it-all, the angels are as consumed with righteous anger as they are powerless and afraid, having been abandoned by a thrill-seeking God around the turn of the last century.

It’s a sublimely wry and only slightly dated joke: In the brash, reckless and apocalyptically angsty Reagan-era America in which “Angels in America” is set, the characters that most resemble old-school progressives are holed up in the clouds, calling for stasis and retreat as the millennium inexorably approaches.

Blaming humanity’s unrelenting forward motion for God’s disappearance, the celestial beings send a messenger (Emma Thompson) down to Earth to demand stillness, to try and put a stop to human motion. In 1985 -- as the AIDS virus launched a full-scale attack on major urban centers, a hole was discovered in the ozone layer, Reagan dreamed of putting missiles in space, a vast superpower started to come unglued and the Balkans were some five years away from exploding -- it looked as though this just might be attainable.

Twenty years later, some of these premillennial terrors and preoccupations feel slightly misaligned as our current end-of-the-world anxieties have taken a different course. But, inasmuch as “Angels in America” feels like an artifact of its time (its central characters would have had as much difficulty envisioning the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s recent decision to uphold gay marriage, for instance, as they would have imagining a massive terrorist attack on American soil), the play’s central themes have aged surprisingly well. The fitful message of hope it extracts from all the turmoil -- change hurts, but such is life -- is, if not entirely comforting, at least nicely timed.

Oddly, the first night’s installment at times feels static and weighed down as the first chapter, “Bad News,” foists the big themes -- death, faith and the meaning of love -- on each of the characters

The story’s expansiveness is a big part of the point, after all. “Angels in America” is not just about a time; it’s about all of time. The lives of the five New Yorkers on which the plot hinges (plus the respective friends, family members and caretakers who alternately haunt, visit and minister to them) are just pinpoints on a timeline that aims to span the whole shebang from creation to apocalypse.

Appropriately, the angels of the title come in all sorts of celestial, terrestrial, hallucinatory and ghostly forms. (Thompson, Meryl Streep and Jeffrey Wright take on roughly seven of these among the three of them.) All hands are needed on deck here: It takes at least this many guides and guardians to help the main characters through their crises of faith and transformations.

The first half of the film begins as Prior Walter, a witty, blithe WASP, is diagnosed with AIDS and subsequently abandoned by his lover, the light-as-an-anvil Louis Ironman (Ben Shenkman). Prior, who can trace his ancestry past the Mayflower all the way back to the Bayeux Tapestry, is left to suffer the ravages of his illness alone. He also endures unwelcome ancestral drop-ins by prior Priors (Michael Gambon and Simon Callow), and nocturnal visits from Thompson’s bellowing drama queen of a heraldic angel, who informs him that he’s been chosen as a prophet.

While Prior suffers alone, Louis, a word processor at the Hall of Justice, quickly becomes involved with Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson), the married, closeted, Republican chief clerk of the chief justice of the New York Supreme Court. Joe is a devout Mormon, whose mentor, the sleazy, Commie-bashing crusader Roy Cohn (Al Pacino), is dying of AIDS in a Manhattan hospital. There he is cared for by the compassionate, if snippy, Belize (Wright), a close friend of Prior’s. A lawyer and former aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Cohn was active in the prosecution that led to the execution of Ethel Rosenberg, whose mocking ghost, also played by Streep, begins haunting him shortly after he is diagnosed. Cohn kept his sexuality -- and the real nature of his illness -- a secret until his death, while Joe wrestles with his own sexuality.

Meanwhile, Joe’s wife, the depressed, agoraphobic and Valium-addicted Harper (Mary Louise Parker), retreats into fantasy in their Brooklyn apartment. Left alone with her fears, Harper takes off on hallucinatory flights to the ends of the Earth, accompanied by a groovy, imaginary travel agent called Mr. Lies (also played by Wright). Eventually she is joined by Joe’s Mormon mother, Hannah (Streep), a chilly but comfortingly philosophical pragmatist, who sells her house in Salt Lake City and moves to New York when Joe comes out.

Faith being the leitmotif of “Angels in America,” it appears, and is tested, in every possible incarnation. The characters’ crises take on personal, religious, historical, political and secular dimensions. Harper’s and Prior’s faith in love is shattered, and Joe’s faith in religion and justice is tried. Of all the characters, Louis and Joe are the ones who most devoutly believe in America -- although the momentum of the conservative movement restores Joe’s faith in his country as it tests Louis’. After leaving his lover, Louis becomes more than usually consumed by guilt and obsessed with politics. During an especially unhinged political tirade, he unloads on the beleaguered Belize, saying, “There are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there’s only the political.”

Of course, he’s wrong -- Harper, Prior and Cohn hardly get a metaphysical moment to themselves. And the statement rings especially hollow in light of the fact that Louis is a product of all of those things. As the ancient rabbi (Streep, in her most stunning turn) points out in the eulogy for Louis’ deceased grandmother, “You do not live in America. You do not grow up in America. No such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl ... because she carried it over on a boat and put it down on Flatbush Avenue.” Faith is the engine that has brought each of these characters into the same place at the same time. And each is the product of a belief strong enough to move entire populations (Eastern European Jews, Puritans, Mormons) halfway across the Earth. “An angel,” Mother Pitt tells Prior, when he confesses his visions to her, “is a belief with wings.” So the 747 that Harper boards to strike out on her own in San Francisco -- heaven! -- counts as one too.

Only Cohn, who goes to his grave convinced that he has done good, holds on to his belief in the law as an instrument of coercion. (His faith eventually excommunicates him, however, when an ethics committee has him disbarred.) “Lawyers are the high priests of America,” he tells Belize, suggesting that he sue someone sometime, because it’s good for the soul. Instead, Belize swipes Cohn’s private stash of AZT to distribute among needy friends. Then again, this nurse is a real angel, unlike the somewhat less forgiving Prior, who suggests the heavenly co-op sue if God ever decides to return. The note of self-reliance feels apt, given the country these particular angels oversee.

‘Angels in America’

Where: On HBO. All over the various HBOs, in several formats.

When: To re-create the experience of the original, “Millennium Approaches” airs Sunday, 8-11 p.m.; “Perestroika” airs Dec. 14, 8-11 p.m.

When else: For those who prefer mini-pieces, HBO Signature will play one chapter every Sunday night (9:30 p.m.), beginning Jan. 4.

Then when else: The full six hours-plus film airs on HBO Signature beginning at 6 p.m. Jan. 3.

Al Pacino...Roy Cohn

Meryl Streep...The Rabbi/

Hannah Pitt/Ethel Rosenberg

Emma Thompson...The Angel/

Nurse Emily/Homeless Woman

Ben Shenkman...Louis Ironson

Justin Kirk...Prior Walter