Angels in America

I finally saw the HBO adaption of Angels in America recently: better late than never. I can see what all the fuss is about, but I must admit that the first chapter did nothing so much as place me in an ill humour. If you're thinking of seeing it, and are neither gay nor Jewish, you may run in to the same problem, but it is worth persevering past the opening instalment. And it helps to know that the original play was subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.

There are some truly glorious things about this miniseries:

Al Pacino is extraordinary as Roy Cohn --- lively and terrible and unrepentant --- and the illusionless compassion that the play expresses at the death of this monstrous man is quite moving. Much more so than the usual American TV pieties, because more realistic: and I use the term advisedly, not excluding Meryl Streep's appearance as the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg.

Joe and Harper Pitt's misery is taken seriously, and not patronised. Nor is Joe's Mormon matron of a mother.

And Jeffrey Wright as Belize. If you are going to have a designated truth-telling character, and he's going to be a camp black guy, you might as well do it in style.

But I remain unpersuaded about the angels. Like the confectionary old rabbi whose paean to the immigrant struggle opens the play, the angels are a theatrical conceit and they just don't translate convincingly to film. Not to put too fine a point on it: Emma Thompson does a better job of looking numinous when she doesn't have a silly great pair of wings stuck to her back. And as to the discussion in Heaven, and the angel's messages generally ... OK, OK: on one interpretation, these are the hallucination of a fevered AIDS sufferer, so I should probably cut the scenes some slack.

[For those with a New York Times subscription: Alessandra Stanley's reveiw of the HBO miniseries (2003/11/30) and Frank Rich's review of the theatre production, in both parts (1992/11/10) are both worth reading.]

The end of the affair

In tonight's episode of Big Love (on SBS) Bill Henrickson had an affair. With his wife. Which was an affair because he is a polygamist, with two other wives who had rights to him on the relevant days, as part of their agreed rotation. Except of course that they are not legally his wives, the Mormon church (and thus Utah) having ditched polygamy in the process of making peace with the rest of the United States. So was it still wrong?

Pretty clearly yes, but to say that without also making some comment about the Henrikson family's wider behaviour is plainly inadequate. The show's writers dramatise this by depicting Bill having the affair with his first wife, rediscovering the extent of his love for her through (get this) a display of her maturity and accomplishment at an official function. "Rejoice in the wife of your youth" says the Scripture (Proverbs 5; specifically verse 18, but context is everything) and that is exactly what Bill is doing. His exhilaration with his wife is the realisation of an ideal, too little matched in real life, and this is what makes the wrongness of his behaviour so hard to admit --- what makes it something to be admitted through gritted teeth. If the affair had been with the gorgeous, immature little third wife Margene, it would instead have been "natural" in a more depressing sense.

This is intelligent drama of a rather high order, the Mormons' moralising gripes about the program notwithstanding. (It's easy for me to say that, of course: it's not my ox that is being gored.) The situation is naturally dramatic; likewise the marginal nature of most of the characters, given the strong conventions within which they are living. Bill is an independent polygamist, rather than a member of an organised group, having been turfed out of the (fictitious) Juniper Creek compound as a teenager; first wife Barb is a regular Mormon by upbringing, and has been dragged semi-willing into this lifestyle after about 10 years of regular marriage; second wife Nikki is the daughter of the compound leader, and a true believer in this sense, but has acquired an uncontrolled taste for the wider world; and Margene by her background is a stranger to any kind of settled family life, and has been sucked into the family almost by accident. One of Bill and Barb's teenage children is old enough to have critically watched all of these events unfold, and is openly opposed to plural marriage. And so on ... it's even more complicated than that, but the complexities have been rather clearly dramatised. It's well executed, in addition to being well-conceived.

I cannot speak to whether the circumstances are in any way credible, even by television standards. I have only ever been acquainted with one Mormon; with no polygamists, to my knowledge; and with only one fan of polyamory (the current secular analogue), and that rather slightly. And as a Christian rather than a Mormon, it is not as if I have a dog in this fight. There was polygamy in the patriarchal period, of course --- that was how it was --- but the Jewish Scripture narrates it with one eyebrow firmly raised, and the Christian church has never felt the need to second-guess that judgement.

But this is yet another example of the new golden age of series television in which we live. Three cheers for HBO. And if I have to pick out anyone from the stellar cast (another notable feature of these times), it must be the exquisitely odd Chloë Sevigny, who seems to know no fear whatsoever. I would not choose to be locked in a room with her, but she deserves some kind of award for the nuance that she brings to her portrayal of Nikki.

(I cannot establish a stable URL for the official response to Big Love on the website of the Mormons, or [their own name for themselves] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But if you go to their website, click on "Newsroom" on the right-hand side, and then do a search on "Big Love", you'll find it.)