...Contd from part 1 reviewed in episode 1
Pacino is at his strongest and is the strongest of the cast here, making us feel a little sympathetic towards his character Roy's horrible suffering while loathing almost every shameless ideology of the jerk. You'd think 'What kind of enlightenment will this b-----d gain from his suffering? Just die already!', and indeed he's just as repellent in hospital as he was outside and we never expect the man to change completely, but we see a sort of relation grow between him and people whom he usually wouldn't even look at, people like Belize (a black homosexual, that's two things to p-ss Roy off already). Do expect to hear plenty of racial slurs in their scenes together.
While Pacino has only one character to handle, Streep has three (if you include the Angel of Australia, four) characters to handle; one is the Rabbi, the second is Mother Pitt and the third is Ethel Rosenberg. Meryl's rabbi has been given a complex characterization, and you are barely aware of 'her' presence in the rabbi and I'm saying this because when you know someone's playing a particular character, you start hunting for the actor in the character and this never happens here. And her voice is perfect for a rabbi (plus,she's part Jewish) who like priests, gurus and spiritual leader have a dulcet, persuasive tone that can make any person stop, listen and sometimes even fall for a belief that may be untrue or anachronistic. Her 'Mother Pitt' is the best of the characters, and her scenes with Prior (watch out the part when she tells that it isn't good to make assumptions about somebody) are brilliant and touching. Meryl has her funny moments too in the scene with the homeless man as Mother Pitt and probably all her scenes with Roy as the ghost of Ethel. Emma Thompson is really smart here because she doesn't give the archetypal version of an angel, and that gives her scenes the ambiguity that very-real looking dreams have: you never know whether it really happened or not!
Apart from three acting Tysons, we see plenty of other talented and young (though one close up of Emma Thomson as the angel and you have a pretty pointy sandcastle in your pants... Seriously, how did she look so young and hot in the scene?) actors not just filling up but taking full control of their scenes (ironically playing out-of-control characters). Justin Kirk as Prior is sick as hell, he's funny as hell, he's funny as sick and quite a queen indeed! Ben Shenkman plays his partner Louis, and unlike stereotypical gay men who are shown to have an unending passion for fancy clothes and gossip, Shenkman's Louis is more like Mitchell from Modern family; he wears average Joe clothes, can't tell the difference between purple and mauve (as his friend Belize points out), loves (and I mean 'loves') talking politics and bashing conservatives (common hatred among gays though) and yes, Louis' peculiarity, loves abandoning people: first his grandmother whom he hadn't seen in ten years, then Prior and then... We'll keep that in the closet for now. Shenkman has to act like a jerk but not be a jerk and he succeeds at doing that. Patrick Wilson's Joe has in some ways the most difficult role of playing a thoroughly conflicted Republican Mormon married attorney who is a repressed homosexual and he doesn't really get the most charming resolution, and Patrick is really good. Both Mary Louise and especially Jeffrey Wright have acted well, the latter having to show different traits and shades (in his scenes with his pals and those with Roy) so as to remain engaging.
Angels in America runs for six hours, but I have no problem seeing it again. There are things I know I've missed, meanings still not fully understood, questions still running in my mind, characters whose brilliance I haven't fully relished. It's really a play written which seems to have be written when the playwright himself was exploring USA, and all his ideas explode into Angels in America. It's well worth your time.
