Exclusive Angels

I just watched the Mike Nichols television adaptation of Tony Kushner's Angels in America for the first time (I haven't seen or read the original play). This was in some ways a disorienting experience, as the the genuineness of the movie's emotional and human appeal seems to clash irrevocably with so many of the philosophical and ideological concepts that underlie it. The film's "absent God" theology, and its implicit suggestion that Marxism would have worked as a creed for social renewal had not those nasty prelapsarians in the Kremlin subverted its original aims, seem rooted in an earlier age - and although Ethel Rosenberg emerges strongly as a character in the plot, the actual implications of her role are never clearly drawn, or drawn at all in any meaningful way. As a disquisition on AIDS and the domestic problems of America in the mid-1980s, the film is probably unique and without rivals. So powerful are its action and rhetoric that the viewer begins to expect it to carry out its apparent intention of revealing a universal message to the world. And yet, with the exception of some oblique references to the now almost forgotten era of Gorbachev and "perestroika" (the film's second part bears this as its title), and some unimaginative commentary, right at the end, about the aftermath of the events of 1989-90, it somehow manages to ignore the rest of the world - and in particular the realities of the world of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe - altogether. For a work that claims to be rooted in principles that are "dialogic and dialectic", that seems strange.