To start with, a general comment. In an era of high-paced, content-free movies, it's a delight to watch a television series based on a play, with ideas and character explored through dialogue and argument. If 'Angels in America' has necessarily retained a certain constructed, theatrical feel, that's far from all bad, although on the box we have to do without the immediacy of live performance that in the flesh compensates for the staginess of drama such as this. Unfortunately, this "serious" play is not actually that good, and has little real merit beyond its refreshing form.
One problem is the tendency to seem too serious, in that the script is clearly written by someone (as it happens, playwright Tony Kushner) with an absolute certainty in the importance of what he (through his characters) has to say. Everything about the work encourages us to see the protagonists as America in microcosm, and, in spite of its liberal bias, still to think of "America" as not just a rich, powerful nation but as some kind of idea of importance to the world. Yet for a "state of the nation" drama, there's remarkably little political content, just some anachronistic name-dropping, with the names chosen because of their resonance to the contemporary audience, rather than their importance back in 1985. And while the coming of A.I.D.S. was a terrible thing, this film extends the feminist maxim "the personal is the political" almost to the point where it seems to be arguing that only the personal is political. It never seems to have crossed the mind of Kushner that to some of us, the sex lives of other people, gay or straight, are not that important.
'Angels in America' might still merit a middling score, for at least having the intelligence to provoke this backlash, but it lets itself down in its fantasy scenes. Magic realism works in books because literature is less literal than film. The scenes featuring the normally admirable Emma Thompson as an angel are absurdly camp; tonally off with the rest of the film; essentially meaningless; and smack of someone trying far too hard to be funny. They also serve to pad an already over-long drama, and to deflect the viewer's attention from the real story. The fact that they (presumably) were written with a degree of self-consciousness does not make them fundamentally any better than the worst B-movies of the 1950s. To spend this much money and make something this bad is an achievement of the worst kind.
Al Pacino is great as a homophobic (but homosexual) lawyer, though his story seems at one remove from the bulk of the film. Overall, not without merit, but self-indulgence, and self-importance, seem to have detached it from a sense of (human) perspective.
One problem is the tendency to seem too serious, in that the script is clearly written by someone (as it happens, playwright Tony Kushner) with an absolute certainty in the importance of what he (through his characters) has to say. Everything about the work encourages us to see the protagonists as America in microcosm, and, in spite of its liberal bias, still to think of "America" as not just a rich, powerful nation but as some kind of idea of importance to the world. Yet for a "state of the nation" drama, there's remarkably little political content, just some anachronistic name-dropping, with the names chosen because of their resonance to the contemporary audience, rather than their importance back in 1985. And while the coming of A.I.D.S. was a terrible thing, this film extends the feminist maxim "the personal is the political" almost to the point where it seems to be arguing that only the personal is political. It never seems to have crossed the mind of Kushner that to some of us, the sex lives of other people, gay or straight, are not that important.
'Angels in America' might still merit a middling score, for at least having the intelligence to provoke this backlash, but it lets itself down in its fantasy scenes. Magic realism works in books because literature is less literal than film. The scenes featuring the normally admirable Emma Thompson as an angel are absurdly camp; tonally off with the rest of the film; essentially meaningless; and smack of someone trying far too hard to be funny. They also serve to pad an already over-long drama, and to deflect the viewer's attention from the real story. The fact that they (presumably) were written with a degree of self-consciousness does not make them fundamentally any better than the worst B-movies of the 1950s. To spend this much money and make something this bad is an achievement of the worst kind.
Al Pacino is great as a homophobic (but homosexual) lawyer, though his story seems at one remove from the bulk of the film. Overall, not without merit, but self-indulgence, and self-importance, seem to have detached it from a sense of (human) perspective.