Angels In America

HBO has given us a 6 hour mini-series by Mike Nichols about living with AIDS in the late 1980's, and the names are very promising: Al Pacino, Emma Thompson, Meryl Streep, and Mary Louise Parker to name a few. However, I daresay it was not their best work.

I don't understand why the Academy (Emmy) was all over this thing. All that I can say is "meh..."

Supposedly, in the story, God has abandoned heaven, an angel appears to a young man named Prior who is dying of AIDS, and she claims that he is the prophet who will bring God back. There's just one catch- he must die. He doesn't want this responsibility because he is burdened with disease and losing his lover who cannot handle illness. By chance, he meets a mormon woman who tells him how to shake the spirit, refuse his duty as a prophet, and convince the Angels in Heaven that he deserves to have more time on earth. The scene in which he does this is all very campy and cheesy and the mini-series itself is little more than a glorified soap opera.

As far as the acting goes, Al Pacino is great in whatever he does, from Serpico to Scent of a Woman, or from something as awful as Insomnia to something as brilliant as Heat. Even the worst movie has promise because Pacino is in the cast. He makes an otherwise horrible film bearable. In Angels in America, he plays the conservative District Attorney, full of power and prestige, supposedly having access to the confidential information regarding the Iran-Contra scandal, with connections that make him able to obtain a small refrigerator full of AZT before it even hits the market. Not wanting people to know that he is gay and has been diagnosed with AIDS, he convinces his doctor to tell everyone that he has liver cancer. Lucky for him, his nurse is a gay man whose friend is the prophet (who is also dying of AIDS) and when the nurse recognizes the symptoms, he gives him some medical advice that prolongs his life by a few months.

Streep plays 3 parts, as does Thompson. As the angel, Thompson is unimpressive; as the nurse, she is very basic. Streep's best part is actually the Rabbi, and Thompson's best is the homeless woman. Strange how the role in which both do the best is the smallest role that they have and the one where they wear the most makeup.

Parker plays a crazy woman who takes imaginary journeys with an imaginary travel agent. Her husband is gay, Republican, Mormon, and works for the conservative District Attorney. Everyone in the story is related in one way or another, and they all show up as angels in the scene where Prior the would-be Prophet tells the Angels he doesn't want the responsibility and that they should forget about God because he is never coming back.

Personally, I was unimpressed by the whole thing, and rather disappointed that I had wasted 6 hours on it. What confused me most was that no distinction was made between having HIV and having AIDS. The sick characters were shown to have AIDS and not HIV at all. Granted, 20 years ago we didn't know as much as we do now, but I would think that something would at least have been mentioned about it.

I have said it before... people hear that the critics are crazy about something and they have a terrible time disagreeing. Shame... it seems that the rarest commodity in the world these days is an individual opinon.