The Desertion of Joe

The best and most comprehensive review of Angels in America I've been able to find online is the one by Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books. Mendelsohn pinpoints many of the movie's strengths and virtues, but also lays emphasis on what he sees as a major failing: Kushner's "desertion" of Joe Pitt, the play's (and the movie's) central character:

Of all the sufferers in Angels, only Joe is left alone at the end, the only character who is neither forgiven nor redeemed in a way that conforms to Kushner's sense of "Perestroika" as a "comedy."

Why is this? When you look over the cast of characters in Angels and think about whom we're supposed to sympathize with, and who gets forgiven, you can't help noticing that the most sympathetic, the "best" characters are either ill, or women, or black, or Jewish. Looking over this rather PC list, it occurs to you to wonder whether, in the worldview of this play's creator, the reason why Joe Pitt, who alone of the characters is the most genuinely and interestingly torn, who in fact seeks love the hardest and suffers the most for self-knowledge, can't be forgiven by his creator, and is the only character who goes unredeemed in some way at the end of the play, is that he's a healthy, uninfected, white, Anglo-Saxon, male Christian. This in turn makes you realize how much of the second part of this play depends, from the in-joke of San Francisco as Heaven to the closing scene in which Prior addresses the audience and in a valedictory blessing vapidly declares us all to be "fabulous creatures, each and every one," on a certain set of glib, feel-good, politically correct gay assumptions about the world, assumptions that in the end undercut the ambitions and, occasionally, the pretensions of what has come before. I, for one, would have respected much more a play that invited its presumably liberal, often largely gay or gay-friendly audiences to see as its central and truly tragic figure a white, healthy, Protestant male on the verge of something truly transformative and redeeming: not illness and suffering, but self-knowledge. When all is said and done, Angels itself is guilty of its own kind of reprehensible abandonment: abandonment of the tragic for the merely sentimental, of real intellectual challenges for feel-good nostrums, of hard questions about guilt and responsibility for easy finger-pointing at all the usual suspects.

And, Mendelsohn concludes, this detracts from the work's central message of reaching-out and reconciliation:

Within Angels lurks that great work about America itself, one that could well speak to the heartland, a work about migrations and revelations and about the essential tragedy of American and possibly even human experience, in which one person's liberation —now more than before—often means another's suffering. But the play as we have it is a more limited affair, one meant to reassure not the heartland but the marginal groups whom the play cozily addresses. What, in the end, can the "heartland" be expected to make of the play's real message: that those who come from it are unforgiven, and unforgivable by those of us who reside on the coasts?