Angels in America soars

"Greetings, prophet!" intones Emma Thompson, dressed in full angel regalia, as she descends through the ravaged ceiling of manic AIDS patient Prior Walter. She is awash in a blinding golden light that suffuses every corner of the wrecked room and held aloft by two immense feathery wings that make her appearance both breathtaking and formidable. Staring the panicked Prior in the eye, she continues, "The great work begins. The Messenger has arrived!"

The angel's prophetic words are apt in describing HBO's Angels in America, a gloriously constructed message and much needed wake-up call to humanity. This scene, the ending to Part One: Millenium Approaches, captures both the visual and thematic brilliance of the entire six-hour event. Rich in characters, wrenching in emotion, and drenched in dark humor, Angels in America is indeed a magnificent work.

The beauty of Angels in America lies in its subtle complexity. The plot begins with AIDS, dives into law, skims McCarthyism, and still works in religion, tolerance, addiction, and love, to name only a few of the themes and concepts explored. Yet the story remains a cohesive whole because of its small cast of multifaceted characters. No stereotypical, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy homosexuals roam in this television universe. One of the film's main characters, Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) is a homosexual homophobic who formerly worked for the Attorney General to eradicate Communism in America. Hardly the man who will be presiding over your next makeover.

Roy is one of many characters whose life is affected by AIDS in America during the mid-1980s. First, we are introduced to Prior Walter (Justin Kirk), a young thirty-something who announces to Louis (Ben Shenkman), his lover of four years, that he has been stricken with AIDS. But instead of sticking by his love like a typical romantic hero, Louis, utterly terrified and unable to cope, flees the relationship.

Though we despise his cowardice, the audience still deeply pities Louis, who will spend the rest of the movie participating in emotional and physical self-flagellation to exorcise his guilt. His total breakdown in the men's bathroom at the courthouse where he works, sobbing over the dirty sinks, elicits as much sympathy as Prior's physical deterioration.

Also weaving into their lives is Roy Cohn, described by Louis as the "polestar of human evil." Roy is best known for rigging the trial of Soviet spy Ethel Rosenberg to get her a death sentence. Though he, too, is clearly in the throes of AIDS, he is in denial of his own homosexuality, explaining to his doctor with the patience of a man instructing a three-year-old, "AIDS is what homos get. I have liver cancer." In one of the many twists of fate of Angels in America, Prior's best friend Belize, a flamboyant, African-American male nurse, ends up caring for the racist Roy in his dying days, using his position to funnel some of Roy's personal AZT stash to the seriously ill Prior.

Abandoned and desperately lonely, Prior begins hearing the sounds of angels and often descends into hallucinations. During one such trip, he meets Harper (Mary Louise-Parker), the Valium-addicted wife of Joe (Patrick Wilson), a Mormon Reaganite desperately attempting to suppress his own homosexuality. Both Prior and Harper's voyages into fantasy are some of the highlights of the film. They provide much of the dark comedy, for not even the angels in this show can escape their lingering humanity, and their reactions to Prior's oddities are often comic. When Prior wrestles a threatening angel (Emma Thompson again) to the ground after a tremendously stunning fight, she demands sullenly that he release her immediately because she has torn a muscle.

What keeps this marathon movie fresh and engrossing is the re-shuffling of characters and relationships. Writer Tony Kushner is constantly throwing the most incongruous characters together to see how they react with one another. After abandoning Prior, Louis takes up with Joe, despite being disgusted with his new lover's politics. Prior, meanwhile, in the most bizarre pairing of the movie, bonds with Joe's homophobic Mormon mother (Meryl Streep). By allowing his characters to interact in multiple settings, Kushner explores every facet of their personalities. Joe, so upright with Roy, his boss, is passive-aggressive and sometimes violent with Louis. Ironically, Roy becomes less repulsive when confronted with his hallucination of Ethel Rosenberg (another stunning Streep performance), who presides over his deathbed with nothing but righteous mockery.

Kushner, who wrote the Pulitzer-prize winning play, adapted Angels in America to the screen. It never strays from the original in script; instead, director Mike Nichols (The Graduate, HBO's Wit) chooses to alter the presentation of the play's weighty subject matter. Whereas the Broadway version emphasized sparseness, the TV movie is done in opulent settings and makes full use of digital technology to enhance the fantasy aspects of the story. Prior's frequent hallucinations (or are they visions?) are often rendered solely in shades of gray. In one particularly surreal sequence, in which Prior wanders through a barren Heaven, only his blood-red robe is shown in color.

Kushner never quite clarifies whether Prior is hallucinating out of his disease and emotional trauma or in fact receiving prophetic visions. His first angelic visitor tells Prior that he is a prophet, sent to stop mankind from evolving, for in their change they have destroyed the beauty of heaven and caused God to abandon them. As Belize is quick to point out, themes of abandonment and time as a disease smart strongly of his recent life, but yet the experience is so real to Prior and so overwhelming to the audience that illness is simply not a sufficient explanation.

More than just a web of storylines, Angels in America is a pre-apocalyptic indictment of God, religion, and man. When Louis turns to his rabbi for advice in dealing with Prior's illness, he gets only riddles and jokes. Joe's strict Mormon upbringing is one of the severest causes of his inner battle, and his ensuing inattentions to his wife drive her to Valium-induced companionship. Instead of bringing an end to AIDS, which is portrayed as the bringer of the apocalypse, God, like Louis, walks out. Through Prior, Kushner accuses mankind of turning its back on a plague and innocents that it destroys.

Thankfully, Nichols has assembled a spectacular cast to handle Kushner's vision. Particularly noteworthy is Pacino, who endows Roy with a tangible toughness and unfailing wit that you have to respect, even as he repulses. Parker brings a childish innocence to Harper that achingly strains against her character's brutal reality. Streep and Thompson are often completely unrecognizable in their multiple roles, binding the film together with their force of presence.

Angels in America is a rare gift to the soulless vacuum of the television movie drama. It will elicit a reaction from the most jaded viewers, for Kushner refuses to dilute his message with stereotypical characters and a familiar world. Shocking, funny, uplifting, depressing, and chaotic, Angels in America is simply a revelation.

Angels in America contains mature content, including male and female nudity, adult language, and discussion of adult themes. For information about when it airs, click here.