#270: THE WORLD ONLY SPINS FORWARD.  IN 2003, HBO filmed and aired a six-part miniseries of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.  The play, subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on American Themes,” was performed onstage in two three-hour-plus chunks, Millenium Approaches and Perestroika; it was controversial, highly lauded, and swept the year’s theatrical awards.  Its ambition and reach was obvious from the first.  Playwright Mayo Simon wrote, “It was about the Jewish experience, the gay experience, McCarthyism, the Mormon experience.  It was exploring a whole world of politics, feeling, religion. And it was about the AIDS experience, which was enormous and enormously scary—like a biblical plague.”  Any attempt to sum up the plot is going to leak all over the carpet.  You have one gay couple, one of whom has come down with AIDS, a straight (apparently) Mormon couple, rabbis, doctors, nurses—one Italian, one Black ex-drag queen—a Mormon mother who gets lost trying to find the Bronx, Roy Cohn (a fictionalized version of the political manipulator who was one of the absolute best reasons not to have been alive in the nineteen fifties), a prophetic angel who crashes through the ceiling, winged and suspended—oh and yes, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg.   Simon asked a friend what the play was about; the friend’s answer was: “Everything.”

       In the theatrical performances most of the actors played multiple roles, often cross-gendered.  In the filmed version, where such things can look more like a stunt than a statement, this was curtailed, which had some advantages.  The character Prior Walter has an AIDS-induced hallucination in which he sees two of his homonymous ancestors—prior Priors, as it were—which means we get a few minutes of Michael Gambon and Simon Callow, who are obviously having a fine old time.  Jeffrey Wright plays three characters, one of whom, Belize, is one of his first great film roles; as an African-American, a drag queen and a nurse, Belize has seen a great deal of human folly, and Wright makes his irony-soaked observations at once withering, engaged and vulnerable.  Meryl Streep plays four roles, including a rabbi (maybe not the best idea) and Hannah Pitt, a Mormon woman who has sold her home and come to New York in a panic when her son has told her he’s gay.  As Hannah, Streep has a whole battery of frowns and moues to convey a woman who’s stuck in a situation she finds baffling and repugnant (it’s rather like her later role in Big Little Lies, one of the most memorable passive-aggressives in film history).  But Streep also plays the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, sitting quietly in a hospital room observing the dying of Roy Cohn, the man who helped get her sentenced to death. She does almost nothing, and you can’t take your eyes off of her—you can’t quite figure out how she does it.  The big bravura role of the play, though, is Roy Cohn, and in the film it’s Al Pacino.  Pacino brings the role his sense of barely-controlled violence—a hand-grenade with its pin pulled.  Watching Pacino as Cohn is a dire chance to look right down into the cesspool.  Dying of AIDS, he threatens the doctor who dares to acknowledge he’s “homosexual”—Pacino pronounces each syllable of the word as if naming an alien species.  Cohn’s looking at death, and he’s raging and bargaining right to the end.  It’s one of Pacino’s great performances—the terror (both his and ours) and, somehow, the pathos of a moral bankruptcy case.

       A lot of the HBO version was never great filmmaking; some parts which doubtless play on stage—the prophetic angel, the Mormon diorama—look predictable on film, and the extended fantasy sequence towards the end, filmed at Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli, look like bad sixties Italian art cinema.  But without that ballsy reach-exceeding-grasp, the play probably wouldn’t exist; it really is a whole greater than the parts of it which wheeze and gasp.  In an afterword to Perestroika, Kushner writes of wanting to “attempt something of ambition and size,” even at the risk of “ambition’s ugly twin, pretentiousness.”  “But here I risk pretentiousness, and an excess of optimism to boot—another American trait.”  Seeing the work—set in 1985, first performed onstage in the early nineties, filmed in 2003—we remember, uncomfortably, that it was created at a time when the worst we had to face was Reagan, and Russia was in the hands of Gorbachev, not Putin.  In 2025, American optimism has been painfully challenged.  At the end of the play, Prior says “The world only spins forward.”  Nowadays, we wonder, towards what?

      But the ending, Hannah Pitt and her three newfound gay friends talking politics, sitting on the edge of the fountain in central park under the statue of the Bethesda angel, crowns the play majestically and convincingly. In his afterword, Kushner writes, “Marx was right: The smallest divisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction.  From such nets of souls society, the social world, human life, springs.”  The end scene is like seeing a tree, pruned severely by death and disease and prejudice down to its nub, form a bud from which it might flower again.  Prior’s last speech is “This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and 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.”  His last line, the last in the play is, “The great work begins.”  Let’s hope.