Angels In America (TV) [2003] Mike Nichols

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"Angels in America" (2003)


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318997/

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is a play in two parts by American playwright Tony Kushner. It has been made into both a television miniseries and an opera by Peter Eötvös.

The first part, Millennium Approaches, was commissioned and first performed in May 1990 by the Center Theatre Group at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, as a workshop. Kushner developed the play with the Mark Taper Forum, with which he has a long association. It received its world premiere in May 1991 in a production performed by the Eureka Theatre Company of San Francisco.

The second part, Perestroika, was still being developed as Millennium Approaches was being performed. It was performed several times as staged readings by both the Eureka Theatre (during the world premiere of part one), and the Mark Taper Forum (in May 1992). It received its world premiere in November 1992 in a production by the Mark Taper Forum, directed by Oskar Eustis and Tony Taccone.

The play debuted on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre in 1993, directed by George C. Wolfe, with Millennium Approaches being performed in May and Perestroika joining it in repertory in November.

In 2003, HBO Films created a miniseries version of the play. Kushner adapted his original text for the screen, and Mike Nichols directed. HBO broadcast the film in various formats: three-hour segments that correspond to "Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika," as well as one-hour "chapters" that roughly correspond to an act or two of each of these plays. The first three chapters were initially broadcast on December 7, to international acclaim, with the final three chapters following. "Angels in America" was the most watched made-for-cable movie in 2003 and won both the Golden Globe and Emmy for Best Miniseries.


Patrick Wilson ... Joe Pitt
Al Pacino ... Roy Cohn
Meryl Streep ... Ethel Rosenberg
Emma Thompson ... Homeless Woman
Mary-Louise Parker ... Harper Pitt
Justin Kirk ... Leatherman in the Park
Jeffrey Wright ... Belize
Ben Shenkman ... Louis Ironson
James Cromwell ... Henry - Roy's Doctor
Michael Gambon ... Prior Walter Ancestor #1
Simon Callow ... Prior Walter Ancestor #2
Robin Weigert ... Mormon Mother


Kushner made certain changes to his play (especially Part II, "Perestroika") in order for it to work onscreen, but the HBO version is generally a remarkably faithful representation of Kushner's original work. Kushner has been quoted as saying that he knew Nichols was the right person to direct the movie when, at their first meeting, Nichols immediately said that he wanted actors to play multiple roles, as had been done in onstage productions

Executive producer of the series, Cary Brokaw worked for over ten years to bring the 1991 stage production to television, having first read it in 1989, before its first production. In 1993, Al Pacino committed to playing the role of Roy Cohn. In the meantime, a number of directors, including Robert Altman, were part of the project. Altman worked on the project in 1993 and 1994, before budget constraints forced him to move out, as few studios could risk producing two successive 150 minute movies at the cost of $40 million. Subsequently, Kushner tried squeezing the play into a feature film, at which he eventually failed, realizing there was "literally too much plot," and settling for the TV miniseries format. While Kushner continued adapting the play until the late 1990s, HBO Films stepped in as producer, allocating a budget of $60 million.


Brokaw gave Mike Nichols the script while he was working with him on Wit (2001) starring Emma Thompson, who also co-adapted the play of the same title. The principal cast, including Meryl Streep, Al Pacino and Emma Thompson, having recently worked with Nichols, was immediately assembled by him. Jeffrey Wright was the only original cast member to appear in the film version, and had won the 1994 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor for his stage performance. The shooting started in May 2002, and after a 137-day schedule, ended in January 2003. Filming was done primarily at Kaufman Astoria Studios, New York City, with important scenes at Bethesda Fountain, Central Park, Manhattan. The heaven sequence was shot at Hadrian's Villa, the Roman archaeological complex at Tivoli, Italy, dating early 2nd century.

Special effects in the series were by Richard Edlund (Star Wars trilogy), who created the two important Angel visitation sequences, as well as the opening sequence wherein the angel at the Bethesda Fountain opens its eyes in the end, signifying her "coming to life."

It took 12 years from the first staged reading in San Francisco until the debut on HBO as a made for television film. But was the wait because it was a two-part six hour play or because it was about gay men with AIDS and the refusal of a society to adapt to this change?

In the end, it didn’t seem to matter. It won 11 Emmys, 5 Golden Globes, the DGA and the WGA. The only Golden Globes and SAG losses it had were actors in the cast losing to other actors in the cast. It reminded us that Mike Nichols is an Oscar winning director, that Tony Kushner is a writer to be reckoned with, that Emma Thompson has not been used properly in a long time, that Jeffrey Wright and Mary-Louise Parker are ridiculously under-rated and that Meryl Streep and Al Pacino would be the first ones up if American actors could be knighted.

It is so many things all at once. It is a powerful drama that looks at the way people choose to live their lives and the price they can pay. It looks into relationships, between husband and wife, mother and son, lovers, friends. It is the “gay fantasia on national themes” of its subtitle that deals with the literal angel that comes down to Earth. It is a social commentary that addresses not only AIDS, but religion and politics the hypocrisy of all sides. Yet, it has wit in its substance, right down to the very end (“right, Louis, like not even the Palestinians are more devoted than you . . .”).

Many directors were attached to the project over the years, the most important being Robert Altman in that he convinced Al Pacino to play Roy Cohn, in the best performance Pacino has given since the seventies, but in the end, it was Mike Nichols who again teamed with Emma Thompson and HBO (as he had two years before for Wit) and brought the play to life. Of course, by making an HBO film they never got a national release, didn’t make large amounts of money or win any Oscars. But it never would have made much money and it got enough awards, and in making it for HBO, they were able to do full justice to the play and make use of all of it, not having to cut characters or scenes. In fact, even with the full length and a solid budget, they still decided to go with Kushner’s original doubling up of roles, including the very smart use of Meryl Streep as a rabbi and Justin Kirk as the one night stand for his own lover.

Though it is the direction and the acting that bring Angels to real life, the power is in the words, especially the final words in the film. It is here where Angels, like Longtime Companion and Jeffrey before it offers so much more than a film like Philadelphia ever could. At the end of Philadelphia we have the videotape of the young Andy, the kid who will grow up to be Tom Hanks with AIDS. We look backwards. But what do we have at the end of the other films? In Jeffrey, we have two potential lovers, one with HIV, pushing a balloon up in the air (“that’s God,” it’s been explained “the good in all of us”). In Longtime, we have the four friends on the beach who look back at their friends who are gone, but who are hoping for the day when AIDS is gone. “I just want to be there.” Then we have Angels. We have one character who flees a city she hates and a husband she doesn’t love, who says “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.” She looks ahead. And then we have the final scene and the final words.

Prior is right. The world only spins forward. And those could have been the last lines for Milk, had Harvey Milk not been killed before all this began. It could be the last lines for so many social dramas about so many different repressed groups. But he looks forward to what could be. He hopes and he prays and best of all, he blesses. And it is a good blessing, the best blessing, the thing we all need.

Credit must be given to Nichols for, above all, not interfering with what was already perfect about Angels in America: the beauty of its language. The magnificence of Kushner’s language, and the astonishing breadth of his ideas, were the most exceptional aspect of the original play, and they exist, for the most part untouched, in the film version. Kushner is universally acclaimed as the great playwright of our times because of his ability to simultaneously create a highly credible contemporary reality, and place it in an appropriate historical and social context. This may sound like a matter of little consequence, but try and think of the last film (or cultural product of any kind) that managed to provide such a wide-ranging snapshot of a time and place while proving at the same time to be capable of insightful historical critique.

Any where you turn in Angels in America, history intrudes, peeking through in the most unexpected places. Contrary to the postmodernist assumption that we are adrift, cut off from our past, and unable to make any but the most perfunctory, nostalgic reference to what has come before us, Kushner suffuses his entire play with the ever-living past. It’s a burden, but it can also be an object lesson for the future. Perhaps the most affecting scene in Angels in America is Prior’s meeting with his two forebears, both also named Prior Walter. In an astonishing leap, Prior’s ancestors tell him of their untimely deaths. As the first Prior notes, “The pestilence in my time was much worse than now. Whole villages of empty houses. You could look outdoors and see Death walking in the morning, dew dampening the ragged hem of his black robe. Plain as I see you now.” The past is alive in our times, and in our bodies, and as Ecclesiastes tell us, there is nothing new under the sun. For those suffering under the burden of contemporary existence, be it the scourge of AIDS, the horror of September 11, or the Republican revolution of Ronald Reagan, this is the essence of wisdom, and enormous comfort.

Nichols ingeniously creates a cinematic language that works somewhat similarly, making reference at crucial points to great films of yore. Rather than the empty quotations of a film-school grad, Nichols’s references, much like Kushner’s, pay specific homage to touchstones of the past to invest his work with the grandeur and heft that he (appropriately) feels it requires. When Prior and Harper meet in their shared fantasy, Nichols pays homage to the dreamlike mise-en-scene of Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, undulating arms protuding from the walls grasping torches, Harper gazing into a makeup mirror when surprised by the Beast (Prior). Not unlike Cocteau’s Beast, Prior is an exemplary individual cast out by society for his disfigurement. Nichols, seeking to place the scourge of AIDS in its appropriate historical context, uses Cocteau here for his sense of sympathy for the stricken. Later, he makes oblique reference to The Seventh Seal with the monk’s cowl Prior dons after receiving word from his angel that he is to serve as a prophet. He is one of Bergman’s monks come back to Eighties New York, and the result is both farcical (it is hard not to laugh at the idea of Prior as a prophet of old) and suitably petrifying. After all, what is the prophet’s task but judgment?