Angels In America: A Boytoy Review

[TotallyOz]

Angels In America

Sometimes, a work is of such staggering genius that words fail you when you want to talk about them. Angels In America is an example of just such a film. While it actually aired over two nights on HBO and has been classified by some people as a mini-series, the quality of the direction, acting and writing pushes it to be more properly classified as one of the finest examples of cinema ever made.

Set at the height of the AIDS crisis, the movie is broken into two parts one called Millennium Approaches, and the other called Perestroika. It has a unique structure that allows us to follow several stories that may or may not intersect, with each actor playing two or more characters often ones whose views are at odds with each other.

The heart of the film is a series of visions of angels that speak to several of the characters. It is unclear if these angels exist, or if they are hallucinations caused by serious illness or drug abuse. A case could be made either way, but the fact that some of the visions intersect with each other implies that angels really are guiding these people through their lives.

This, of course, freaked out Christians when the film came out, because they didn't really want to believe that angels may have been helping gay men going through the final stages of slow, painful deaths.

We are also given two polar opposite characters as the main leads. Justin Kirk plays an out gay man who will spend the entire movie in a hospital dying of AIDS. His parents have disowned him. His boyfriend will abandon him. We never see any friends coming to see him. He's out and proud, but in many ways still alone. But then the angel, played by Emma Thompson, makes her appearance, as a reward for his purity of soul.

On the other end we see the infamous Roy Cohn, played brilliantly by Al Pacino. He is a deeply closeted gay man who makes his living trying to persecute gay members of the government and the military. He is evil personified but of course, he too will come down with AIDS, and end up in the hospital next to Kirk's character.

Does the angel come to him, too? Kirk's character thinks she does, but Cohn acts as if he can't see her. It's up to the viewer to decide.

While these characters represent pure good on one side and pure evil on the other side, the rest of the people we meet will occupy some morally ambiguous place in a Manhattan that was undergoing an HIV holocaust.

For example, we meet Joe Pitt, played by Patrick Wilson. He's a married man and very Mormon, and struggling hard to deal with and repress his homosexuality. He and his wife are visiting New York, which puts him in contact with open, obvious gay men for the first time in his life.

He ends up giving in to his desires, first having unprotected sex with a leather daddy in a park and later hooking up with Louis Ironson, who we are led to believe is the man who infected Kirk's character with the HIV virus.

This leads to a scene where his wife, played by Mary Louise Parker, wants unprotected sex in order to start a family. When he turns her down, she thinks that he doesn't find her attractive anymore. She doesn't realize that he's worried he's just been infected, and doesn't want to infect her as well.

She will learn this, however, when after taking a ton of Valium the angel comes to visit her and explains what's going on. Is the angel real, or did she always know that her husband was gay and the drugs just letting her admit it? That the answer is ambiguous keeps you riveted.

Then, we get the strangest character of all Ethel Rosenberg, played by Meryl Streep. She was executed as a communist spy back in the '50s based on the actions of Roy Cohn.

Clearly a ghost now, she visits Cohn in the hospital as he lays dying. He accuses her of making him sick; she accuses him of killing her. The angel watches all of this.

So, these are the main characters. To talk about any of the other characters would be giving things away that should be kept secret until you see the film, because of the fact that the non-main characters are played by the main actors. (Streep's alternate character is an incredibly creative bit of casting.)

By the end of the play, the angel has said that there is a prophet in the hospital room. Is Kirk's character the prophet? Is Roy Cohn the prophet? Is it Ethel Rosenberg?

For those answers, you'll have to see the film. You'll be surprised at some developments and less so at others, but along the way you'll always be amazed at just how well-crafted it is from start to finish.

If you are a younger gay man who has never seen Angels In America, I highly recommend that you give it a look. You'll see what life was like for gay men in the late '80s, before there was decent HIV prevention and treatment. If nothing else, the movie is an awesome advertisement for safer sex practices.

Some people find the movie sad. Others find it uplifting.

I think it's simply beautiful.

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