MCN Voices: Andrea Gronvall

Few directors are as ideally suited as Mike Nichols to film Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America.

Already a stage legend when he made his theatrical feature debut in 1966 helming Edward Albee's drama Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Nichols immediately earned recognition as a serious filmmaker, tackling controversial adult subjects and guiding talented--and sometimes notoriously difficult--actors to virtuouso performances. From The Graduate through Silkwood, he charted the cultural tides of a nation in upheaval. Even when he shifted to lighter fare such as Working Girl, his touch was equally deft and his commercial instincts unerring. Now, following the success of Wit, his last HBO effort, Nichols and his co-executive producer, Avenue Pictures' Cary Brokaw, have delivered a $60 million, 6-hour-long, darkly humorous epic about the ravages of love, AIDS and the political and religious Right in the Reagan years. Setting a new precedent for HBO and HBO2, Angels in America will initially be shown in two parts, as well as in six separate installments and, eventually, in an entire block. It is a staggering achievement, ambitious in scope, viscerally compelling and intellectually dazzling--and surpassing Dennis Potter's BBC masterpiece The Singing Detective as the most daring film ever developed for television.

Kushner adapted his work for the screen, and in so doing has trimmed a few speeches, updated historical references, eliminated some scenes and reconfigured others and, freed from certain physical constraints of live theatre, revisualized key sequences depicting dreams and revelations. But the raw emotion, sexual frankness and heady brew of potent ideas and concatenating plot lines that distinguished Angels on stage remain, gaining another level of intimacy through this medium.

In Part 1, Millennium Approaches, three distinct story threads are quickly established, soon to be woven together. Louis Ironson (Ben Shenkman) attends his grandmother's funeral in the Bronx with his lover Prior Walter (Justin Kirk), and learns that Prior has AIDS. Meanwhile, in his fancy Manhattan law office, power broker and closeted queen Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) tempts his protege Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson), a clean-cut Morman and zealous young Republican judicial clerk, with a promotion if he'll move to Washington. The offer unnerves the already anxious Joe; his depressed wife Harper (Mary-Louise Parker) refuses to leave their Brooklyn walk-up, except in Valium-induced reveries, accompanied only by an imaginary tour guide.

Rounding out the principal cast are Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson and Jeffrey Wright, each tackling multiple roles.

In Part 2, Perestroika (debuting December 14), the action splits focus and their characters move from supporting status to center stage. Streep's roles afford the most opportunity for chameleon-like transformation: Part 1 begins with her in the guise of an aged rabbi, while Part 2 sees her rigid Hannah Pitt --Joe's strict, religiously observant mother -- dissolve into a wise caregiver to the infirm and the heart-broken. And as the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, matching wits with Cohn, the man who sent her to the electric chair, Streep is a paragon of economy: the minute gestures, the smallest shifts in facial expression, the measured silences and knowing glances show an incomparable master at work. As Ethel, almost all her scenes are primarily with Pacino's Cohn, inarguably the flashiest role in the piece. His fire and her ice are perfectly balanced by an author and a director who understand how to translate dialectics into character, to rich effect.

The legit stage has historically functioned as the platform from which big ideas are launched, to sparkle downward and outward into the American mainstream. Astronomically rising costs increasingly have made theatergoing an activity for more privileged consumers. For HBO to make such a hefty investment in Angels in America ten years after its Broadway opening signals that much of the culture has caught up with the plays' issues. But as the new venue is a premium cable channel, the audience is still somewhat select until the film is widely available commercially on DVD.

Perhaps, like the platforming of specialized movies that require careful handling, this is the best way to introduce Tony Kushner to viewers who up to now haven't had the singular good fortune of luxuriating in the dizzying pleasures of his craft. Language courses furiously throughout his narrative, like floods through desert canyons after a thunderstorm, incising and replenishing. The awesome beauty of his words, challenging and alluring, intoxicating and sobering, bracing and healing, finds metaphorical embodiment in Emma Thompson's angel, with whom, Jacob-like, Prior has a climactic showdown.

Ancient themes are revisited here: what does it mean to be a Jew? How does one live as an authentic Christian? What's most important: what we owe ourselves, or others, or the Divine? How does one overcome an insidious, culturally imposed mind-body split to break through and reconcile desire and belief? These questions, most pressing in the mid-80s when the scourge of AIDS was uppermost in the media, are even more important today, in an age when seemingly omnipotent forces co-opt religious concepts to wage war on bodies, both foreign and domestic, and our national social concerns recede before an orchestrated effort to redirect a vast population's considerable energies, abilities and resources overseas. Emphatically reminding us that God does not govern so much as depart ceding leadership to us, and that the physical body is the true garden of the ineffable soul, the clarion call is wake up! Listen, process, engage! Life is not only the gift, it is the responsibility. Whoever said it was supposed to be easy?!

Angels in America reminds us what it is to be fully human.

Angels in America debuts Sunday, December 7 on HBO.

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