Angels in America Review

Kushner adapted his own plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, into six chapters, and Nichols had the sense to trust the words. It is 1985. Prior Walter tells his lover Louis he has AIDS and Louis walks out; Joe Pitt, a closeted Mormon lawyer, is courted for a Justice Department job by Roy Cohn; Joe's wife Harper drifts through Valium hallucinations; and an angel comes through Prior's ceiling to make him a prophet.

The cast is why it lasts. Al Pacino's Cohn is a roaring, terrified monster, Meryl Streep plays four parts including a rabbi and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, Jeffrey Wright repeats the Belize that won him a Tony on Broadway, and Mary-Louise Parker's Harper is heartbreaking. All four won Emmys, part of a then-record eleven, and the Golden Globes followed.

Nichols's realism costs something. On stage the angel is theatre, wires and nerve; on screen Richard Edlund's effects and Emma Thompson's working wings make the visitations literal, and literal is smaller. The second half sprawls, as the play's does, and Stephen Goldblatt's photography is handsome rather than inspired. None of that touches the writing, which is as alive on screen as it ever was on stage.