Monumental and fascinating

ANGELS IN AMERICA, the cable TV mini-series version of the Broadway play -- actually two Broadway plays (subtitled Millennium Approaches and Perestroika) shown with the same ensemble six months apart in 1993 -- done with a all-star cast chockablock with performers who have already carried feature films by themselves and seem organically incapable of giving bad performances. It helps that Tony Kushner's play is very good.

The year is 1984. AIDS stalks American gay men like a plague of Egypt. Roy Cohn, the notorious (and closeted) rightwing lawyer (here done by Al Pacino, filling the Broadway shoes of Ron Leibman) get the grim diagnosis from his doctor (James Cromwell). There really is no cure but some experimental potions, like AZT, still going through blind tests. Cohn twists arms to get into Sloan-Kettering Hospital - but listed on paper as a cancer patient - and to get the AZT and not the placebo. Once the disease sinks its teeth into him, he hallucinates visits from the ghost of his most famous victim, Ethel Rosenberg (Meryl Streep, in one of many roles; well after this play was written and a half century after her death the two primary witnesses against Ethel recanted and conceded that she was innocent and Cohn's posthymously released memoirs admitted he had rigged the trial against her).

At that moment, bright young lawyer (and Mormon) Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson) arrives in New York, with his tense young bride Harper (Mary Louise Parker, filling Marcia Gay Harden's and Cynthia Nixon's shoes). What we gradually find out is that Joe is beset with urges utterly forbidden by the Mormon Church - and by Reagan's Justice Department, where he hopes to work - as he is attracted to the gay Louis Ironson (Ben Shenkman), and coached by a failing Roy Cohn. Poor Harper knows something is wrong but cannot grasp at the answer, as she sinks slowly into a pill-induced fantasy world occupied by a stylish South Pole travel agent (Jeffrey Wright, in one of many roles, and the only member here of the Broadway cast).

Louis was the roommate/lover of Prior Walter (Justin Kirk) - the last (apparently) of a long English family line with that unusual name, but he moved out when Walter got his own grim diagnosis. As Walter's health deteriorates, he is repeatedly hospitalized, where he is tended by tough-as-nails nurse played by Emma Thompson (in one of ...).

Back at Sloan-Kettering, Roy Cohn manages to reach a tiny compromise with his (gay) physical therapist (Wright, again) by giving up some of his AZT to get a few privileges. Joe Pitt leaves Harper to be with Louis (a scene, for the heteros amongst us, that features Mary-Louise Parker full frontal nude, an image I hope someday to see on postage stamps). At the same moment, Joe's mom (Streep, again), a very devout Mormon matron, arrives in New York to try to straighten out, as it were, things between Joe and Harper. She has to stay, for the simple reason that she sold her Utah home in order to make the trip. Once in New York she gets a job at the LDS's disneyfied Visitor Center on the Upper West Side (I've been there and the movie very impressively recreates it ... without any help from the LDS Church I am sure).

Harper visits her mother-in-law at the Visitor Center, sitting all day in the animatronic theater of Mormon pioneers, until she hallucinates a visit from a woman of that original wagon train to the Salt Lake (Robin Weigert, later to play Calamity Jane in the cable series Deadwood, and, although you wouldn't know from either role, an extremely attractive young lady). Since Harper is Joe's wife, and Joe is now living with Louis, Prior Walter has been shadowing her in hopes of finding Louis.  Much weakened from his disease, Prior hobbles about leaning on a cane, and wraps himself in a dark cloak with hood - looking much like the Image of Death in that old classic, <i>Seven Seals</i>.  Instead of Joe, Prior encounters Joe's mother. A number of firsts for that dear lady; the first time she's met an uncloseted gay man and the first time she's met an AIDS victim.

Back at home, Prior's health continues to deteriorate. In a feverish delirium he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors who were also named Prior Walter (one is Sir Michael Gambon, in a short but memorable performance). Worse is to come for him. In his delirium he sees the sky open and an angel (Emma Thompson, again) tells him that he is destined to be humanity's champion in a cataclysmic confrontation. (Pay attention to the Angel's wings. Don't the wings look familiar? Here's a hint: Look at the back of a $1 bill.) Prior already has enough to contend with than to be burdened with this responsibility. He struggles with this Angel, who beats her wings to shreds trying to escape him.

Eventually, on the cusp of death, Prior is carried into heaven to confront the committee of Angels - each representing a different nationality or ethnicity (remember what I said about this Angel's wings?) - who have plans for him and for all humanity.

In the meantime, Roy Cohn is visited one last time by Ethel Rosenberg, and once he's dead, the therapist calls on Louis, as a Jew, to say the appropriate words over his deathbed - and plunder Cohn's supply of AZT. (Historical note: Cohn died at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, after weeks of incoherence and intermittent coma, attended by his last boyfriend,  not in a NYC hospital. Kushner owes a debt to the 1992 HBO movie of Citizen Cohn, starring James Woods, which also featured visits from the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg.)

All in all, a fascinating movie. Eventually, as AIDS becomes less and less obviously a death sentence, and homosexuality is more tolerated, younger audiences may have trouble fully appreciating the pressures on the characters. But, for us, this is a terrific story of our times.

The movie version is able to fill in, and fill out, enormous chunks that could only be hinted at in the stage play. As I said, this is a cast incapable of giving a bad performance, and they were all topnotch for this movie. It's no wonder that this film collected an armload of awards, including Emmys and Golden Globes. It runs almost six hours, start to finish, so I suggest watching it in at least two equal parts. There is both comedy and tragedy, and deep emotion throughout. See it with someone you love (but maybe not a date you're hoping to get lucky with). Definitely not for children. (PS: Mary-Louise Parker and Justin Kirk are now co-stars in the enormously successful Showtime miniseries Weeds.)

There are not many other movies so affecting about AIDS but one good choice might be AND THE BAND PLAYED ON (1993) another Cable TV miniseries based on Randy Shilts's book of the same name, about the tussles in the medical arena as the start of the AIDS epidemic. This was a major breakthrough, garnering some very famous stars even for small parts. But the movie deliberately avoids at least two crucial phenomena that the book emphasized -- the almost total resistance of the Reagan Dept of Health & Human Services to acknowledge, much less do anything about, the epidemic, and a similar resistance within the gay community of the time -- back then they had bathhouses -- to take the epidemic seriously enough to take precautions.