Something to watch tonight: Thursday 6 June

Angels in America (Nichols, 2003)

Several reviews that I’ve read have described Freud’s Last Session in terms of the con­straints of its ori­gin as a stage play.

I con­fess I fell into this trap too – “Don’t get me wrong, two people talk­ing in a room for 90 minutes can be riv­et­ing – on stage or screen – but only if the con­ver­sa­tion goes some­where.” – but on fur­ther reflec­tion I was unhappy at some of the assump­tions being made.

Namely, that cinema adapt­a­tions of theatre pro­duc­tions need to be “opened up” some­how and that the con­straints of the stage are things that need to be over­come by filmmakers.

But I’ve been involved in tiny theatre shows that were epic in ambi­tion. New Zealand shows that recre­ate Scott and Amundsen’s race to the South Pole, for example.

So, when you watch Mike Nichols’ 2003 adapt­a­tion of Tony Kushner’s 1991 Broadway hits Angels in America, be aware that you are watch­ing Nichols’ cine­mat­ic rep­res­ent­a­tion of things that already exis­ted on stage and in Kushner’s imagination.

Watching the first three epis­odes of the six-part series (rep­res­ent­ing the first play in the dip­tych, Millennium Approaches) I was sur­prised at how much I remembered from a pro­duc­tion of that play 17 years ago (at the Hannah Playhouse in Wellington). Whole scenes came back to me, moments of stun­ning the­at­ric­al inven­tion were rep­lic­ated with cine­mat­ic tech­niques, and char­ac­ters and their rela­tion­ships returned vividly.

The two plays (the second is Perestroika and takes up the final three epis­odes of the mini-series) are set in New York in the mid-80s. AIDS is tak­ing its toll on the gay com­munity. Prior (Justin Kirk) is get­ting sick­er from the dis­ease and his part­ner Louis (Ben Shenkman) doubts that he has the strength to sup­port him through it.

Mormon law­yer Joe (baby­faced Patrick Wilson) is closeted and fight­ing a truth that his emo­tion­ally troubled wife Harper (Mary-Louise Parker) is already guessing.

Joe is also being wooed by the most feared law­yer in New York, Roy Cohn (Al Pacino). Cohn – Trump ment­or, rabid McCarthy-ite, and the man who sent the Rosenbergs to the elec­tric chair – has secrets of his own.

Through a com­bin­a­tion of dream sequences, hal­lu­cin­a­tions, vis­ions, we real­ise that the inner lives of all these people are deeply con­flic­ted and spir­itu­ally unre­solved. Arguably, one of the points of the play/film is that their con­flicts and spir­itu­al depriva­tion are symp­to­mat­ic of a mal­aise in America itself, a fun­da­ment­al lack of reckoning.

The fact that these debates are played out with won­der­ful vivid prose – the tempta­tion is to stop and rewind which you can’t do at the theatre – as well as incred­ible and ingeni­ous leaps into the fantastic.

The arrival of two of Prior’s ancient ancest­ors (Michael Gambon and Simon Callow) to pre­pare him to become a proph­et and expect a heav­enly vis­it­a­tion are par­tic­u­larly amusing.

Angels in America was a huge hit for HBO. At the time it was the only show to win every Emmy award for which it was eli­gible, includ­ing all four act­ing awards: Pacino, Parker, Meryl Streep (for mul­tiple roles), Jeffrey Wright (who had won a Tony for play­ing the same role on broadway).

Aside: One thing that I think might have changed in the inter­ven­ing twenty years is that none of the gay char­ac­ters in the film are played by ‘out’ gay per­formers. I’m not sure that would fly these days.

Where to watch Angels in America

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon

Australia: Streaming on FoxtelNow or Binge

Canada: Digital rent­al from Apple

Ireland & UK: Streaming on Sky or NowTV

USA: Streaming on Max

Further reading

For RNZ, I spent most of last week­end invest­ig­at­ing TubiTV, the free stream­er that offers about 40,000 dif­fer­ent titles, many of which are ancient TV shows. But there is gold in there, if you are pre­pared to dig. I’m going to keep a close eye on it, that’s for sure.