Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Or at least, he’s seen the first half of it. Good god, I love these plays. I was slightly obsessed with Kushner’s masterworks at the start of the ‘90s, and I’ve been waiting the better part of a decade now to see what Mike Nichols was going to do with them as film properties. Now, it sounds like he’s pulled off the unthinkable and actually created films that match the epic, brilliant power of the stage productions. Check this out...
Hey there Harry -
While I don't normally see reviews of cable movies on AICN (although I was crushed to read your Battlestar Galactica review), I thought I'd pass along my reaction to HBO's upcoming ANGELS IN AMERICA, an adaptation of Tony Kushner's Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning play from the early 90s. I was forutunate enough to attend a screening last week of the first (3-hour) half, Millennium Approaches.
Directed by Mike Nichols, adapted by Tony Kushner from his play, and starring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Mary Louise Parker, Jeffry Wright, Patrick Wilson, Justin Kirk, and Ben Shenkman (many of them in multiple roles) my immediate thought after the movie was had it been made for film and not television, we'd have our runaway Oscar hit and all other films could just go away. The acting, the directing, the music (by American Beauty/Six Feet Under composer Thomas Newman), the photography - all go well beyond anything I've seen for HBO. But it is Tony Kushner's story that almost a week after viewing is still keeping me up at night as just too amazing for it's own good. It is brilliant without screaming "look at how smart I am"; it is hysterical as it is devastating; it is epic on the grandest of scales while being an intimate story of two couples on the verge of something catastrophic.
The basic story (and there's no way to break this down without doing disservice to the story, because there is so much story there!) takes place in 1985: Couple #1- Harper and Joe, a married Morman couple. She's addicted to valium and suffers from hallucinations; he's a closeted gay Republican lawyer who's mentor is the real Roy Cohn. Couple #2- Louis & Prior, a gay couple. Prior, a waspy/New England wealthy guy who is entering the first stages of AIDS (this is before AZT and the current cocktail of inhibitors existed) and thinks he's hallucinating (or is he) voices from heaven and ghosts from his family tree, all announcing that 'something major' is about to happen; and Louis, a nebbishy Jewish New Yorker who works in the same building as the gay closeted Republican Morman lawyer, suffering from his complete inability to step up to the plate and care for his boyfriend. Least he be forgotten, there's Roy Cohn, the horrible true life character played amazingly a few years ago by James Woods in another HBO film, and played here by Pacino, in a great Pacino performance.
There's always a fear when a great book or play is made into a film that whatever made it great will be lost. The stage version of ANGELS IN AMERICA was a two-play, 8 hour event that, when I saw it on Broadway and again at A.C.T. in San Francisco, seem to go by in 10 minutes; you were that involved. The cuts made by Kushner to his own script are brilliant and serve the medium well. He does not shy away in the least from skewering the Reagan administration (take THAT CBS!) nor from presenting love in all its glory and all its nastiness.
So, why I felt I should write this to you, and why I thought readers of AICN would be particularly taken with ANGELS IN AMERICA, is that this film does what every great supernatural/science fiction work does - and make this clear - this is a ghost story in every sense of the word; it uses the devine and supernatural to spotlight the trials and tribulations of our daily lives. It makes the ordinary extraordinary. It makes the foreign normal. For a 3 hour film (which again, is only the first half) it moves and moves and spirals until you have no doubt that devine intervention is the only way to deal with a country so confused as to who we are, why we are, and how we deal with the consequences of our actions, that we have no choice but to hope that there are angels in America.
Do not miss this movie.
Ticketboy
Dude, if HBO would send me preview tapes of this like they did with BAND OF BROTHERS, I would believe in angels. Absolutely. Can’t wait, and thanks for the review.
"Moriarty" out.
