Bay Windows - December 11, 2003
Robert Nesti

Tony Kushner once said that "Perestroika," the second half of "Angels in America," is a much different work than "Millennium Approaches." Hopeful and forward-looking, it is more a cosmic comedy - a meditation on the progress of man as he approached the new millennium. On stage it felt wordier than its first half; but also showed how brilliantly Kushner could tie up the diverse narrative threads, as well as illuminate its theological and political subtexts that distill down to a simple idea: "Even sick," his hero Prior Walter tells a group of angels in the climatic scene, "I want to be alive."

With those words Kushner articulates the central message to his great play and, as it turns out, great film adaptation, which concludes its first broadcast this Sunday night on HBO with "Perestroika." If the first half was darkly foreboding, its second half is lighter, funnier, and surprisingly optimistic (And shorter: he trimmed his stage version by a half-hour.). Who would have thought Prior would even be around after his cosmic encounter with an angel at the end of Part One? And who could have prophesized that Roy Cohn, the embodiment of evil, would turn out to be an angel of mercy to AIDS sufferers?

These are some of the more interesting twists in "Perestroika," which brings together the characters introduced in "Millennium Approaches" and unites them in unexpected ways: Prior and Hannah Pitt, the starchy Mormon who reels at the mention of homosexuality; Louis, Prior's ex-lover, and Joe Pitt, the closeted lawyer who ghost- writes homophobic legal decisions for a federal judge; and Cohn and Belize, the male nurse who outwits Cohn for possession of the much coveted drug AZT.

It is that relationship that is perhaps the most riveting in this second half, largely because screen acting rarely gets a good as it is here. Al Pacino, long his own worst enemy in performance after performance, reins in his operatic tendencies and gives a performance of such frightening believability as to induce both goose bumps and pity. When Cohn crashes down the corridor in a morphine-induced stupor, Pacino embodies a kind of crippled horror that is almost too painful to watch. And Jeffrey Wright as Belize, Cohn's nurse and tormenter, is equally sharp, exhibiting a self-possession that never squints when facing his adversary: together they make cinematic fireworks.

What "Perestroika" does so extraordinarily well is amplify the themes and ideas of its first half, while answering the curious questions it raised, such as the meaning of the Angel's visits to Prior. When she does, she's confused and earthy, horny even: one of Kushner's cleverest devices is to have his angel be a sexual, as well as spectral, being, which leads to one of the film's funniest scenes that puts a new meaning to the term "rapture." The Angels, it turns out, have an agenda, and it is quite imaginatively revealed in a number of fantasy sequences involving Prior culminating in a visit to heaven that looks like a 1980s black and white Calvin Klein ad.

As in Part One, the center of the story is how two men confront AIDS: Roy Cohn, who uses his influence to secure a huge stash of the (then) promising treatment called AZT thinking it might save his life; and Prior Walter, whose increasingly eccentric behavior leaves his friends thinking that he's suffering from some kind of AIDS dementia. "I'm a prophet," he tells them, as he stalks Joe Pitt, the Mormon lawyer who is involved with Louis, Prior's ex. While there's a soap operatic element to the narrative, it never succumbs to it; instead Kushner complements the melodrama and politics with doses of irony and camp. It's not surprising that Prior should speak words spoken by Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" when his fever breaks and he returns to his old self.

Director Mike Nichols pivots between the intimacy of the human drama and the grandeur of the supernatural one, seamlessly moving between the two worlds Kushner so imaginatively evokes. He also elicits superb performances all around; especially Justin Kirk who plays Prior with heartbreaking subtlety; Mary-Louise Parker, spunky and hilarious as Harper, Joe Pitt's valium-addicted wife; and Meryl Streep, whose rigid exterior breaks when confronted by Prior's illness.

It takes six hours to get to the film's epiphany: a quiet scene in front of the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park where Prior gathers with his friends to argue politics and look hopefully to the future. It is a moment that you never suspected would happen when the film began with Prior revealing his KS lesions to Louis; yet, as is pointed out a number of times, he is one of the lucky ones. And he speaks with amazing prescience of where we've been and we're where going. "The disease will be the end of many of us," he says, "but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and we will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come."

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