Angels in America

With all due respect to The Corner, it now stands as an anomaly to the rule: that when HBO makes a miniseries, that miniseries is amazing. John Adams intrigued me from start to finish. Band of Brothers blew me away. And now Angels in America has impressed me beyond any and all expectations. The miniseries - or really, the six-hour movie, if you want to look at it that way - is set in 1986 amid the outbreak of the AIDS crisis. (It's adapted from a 1993 play and it debuted in 2003 and I just watched it here in 2011. That's twenty-five years spanning four different decades. Timeless? Yes. Absolutely.) The three big names in the cast were Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson. But while each of them was as amazing as you'd expect, it was really the less known actors (or maybe just the characters they played) that carried the heart of the film. There are six or seven main characters who start out with three or four different story arcs but all end up crossing paths at various points in the lengthy film. A closeted gay Mormon man and his bored, frustrated wife have marital issues. The man works for Ray Cohn, a (real life) closeted gay lawyer suffering from AIDS but hiding it from the public eye. Meanwhile, another gay man discovers that he has AIDS. His partner of five years, scared and unsure of how to handle it, leaves him. His jilted lover suffers now not only from the AIDS slowly ravaging his body, but the humiliation and pain of being abandoned. The guilt-stricken man soon begins a relationship with the closeted Mormon. The Mormon's wife has long had wild and vivid Valium-induced hallucinations, but in the wake of her husband admitting his homosexuality to her, she really goes off the deep end. Meanwhile, the AIDS victim's long time ex is a male nurse for Ray Cohn, who despises him. And then the Mormon's mother comes to town, unsure of how much of his homosexuality is her fault, before befriending several of the other gay men we've seen so far. Oh, and the whole thing is interspersed with angels and supernatural phenomena. It's shot and scored beautifully, and I've already heaped praise upon the cast. Just a very impressive undertaking all around and something I do think most people would really appreciate seeing at some point. It really captures the uncertainty, dread, and depression of AIDS in the '80s among the gay community. Since this movie/miniseries is six hours long, there's such a gradual but obvious decay in health for the two AIDS victims. That's something I've never really seen in a movie before. It's obvious that AIDS is a death sentence, but to watch two very different characters deal with ever-worsening conditions - hey, is that a new lesion? was he limping this hard in his previous scene? - was a surreal and eye-opening thing. Huge props to both Al Pacino (expected) and Justin Kirk (Uncle Andy from Weeds, whose initial appearance in this miniseries was responsible for my biggest "Wait, is that that guy?" moment in a long time). Actually, Kirk may have even outdone Pacino, and this was Pacino at his best. Just incredible, really. Final tidbit: Mary-Louise Parker, also of Weeds (its main character), was also in Angels in America (as the Mormon wife). I don't know if I can ever watch Showtime's quirky black comedy the same way again.