Against The Hype

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The Best Shot of Angels in America

August 12, 2010 By: Colin Low Category: Capsuled Thoughts

I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist. When that topmost shot appeared, it instantly triggered the latent Lust, Caution part of my brain. Not to suggest that Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) and Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson) share an… acrobatic relationship like Mrs Mai and Mr Yi’s, of course, but they are quite similar in other ways:

The title Lust, Caution fits their situation aptly. In Angels in America‘s multi-protagonist narrative, Roy and Joe take the parts of conservative, anti-gay Republicans forced to face up to the realities of the people they’ve demonised: Roy contracts AIDS through one of his illicit, off-screen encounters, while Joe finds himself losing the battle against his desire. Playwright Tony Kushner, who adapted his own script for the screen, conjures a few other such doublings across political lines. By this point, Joe has fallen for and cohabited with his out gay co-worker Louis; both have spurned their lovers of a few years for each other. The spurned lovers, Joe’s wife Harper and Louis’ ex-boyfriend Prior, meet via some sort of arcane telepathic corridor, and acknowledge that they signed into their failed relationships mostly due to erotic attraction. And both Prior and Roy, stricken with AIDS, start having rather different visitations upon them of an afterlife-y sort.

They’ve made their choices about power. The framing says it all. (more…)