HBO movie clips wings of ‘Angels’

"Angels in America," Tony Kushner's blisteringly intelligent tragicomedy set in the mid-'80s, begins with the Manhattan funeral of an aged Jewish matriarch.

A pioneer who left the shtetl for a new beginning in the New World, she was, the rabbi wryly eulogizes, "the last of the Mohicans."

Her grandson, Louis Ironson (played by Ben Shenkman), certainly didn't inherit her grit. After the funeral, when his longtime boyfriend Prior (Justin Kirk) breaks the news that he has AIDS, Louis freaks — and, soon after, moves — out.

Death and reinvention are the forces driving Kushner's end-of-the-millennium fairy tale, notably the Reagan-ignored deaths of thousands of gay men from AIDS and the related disappearance of such hallmarks of civilized society as compassion, community and conscience.

Produced first in San Francisco in 1991, the acclaimed play has now been adapted by Kushner and director Mike Nichols into a two-part, six-hour HBO movie. The first half, "Millennium Approaches," airs 8 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 7 followed by "Perestroika" at 8 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 14.Unfortunately, the famous magic realism of the stage production hasn't survived the transition to the small screen without being rendered absurd. That's unavoidable to a degree, as a TV program can't possibly replicate the unique mood and spell that a play casts over a live audience.

But Nichols' generic, uninspired direction robs "Angels" of its audacity and ambition and, at its worst, turns a courageous sociopolitical screed into a cutesy multicultural melodrama.

Kushner, whose writing here has lost none of its pizzazz but a little of its sting in the decade since "Angels" debuted, views 20th-century history through a particular American Jewish prism.

He recognizes that the wave of immigration at the beginning of the century held the great promise of a new Jewish homeland in the United States. Then came the Holocaust when, he suggests, both God and American Jewry abandoned the 6 million. (By walking out on Prior, Louis is following in that tradition.)

Kushner goes on to salute the contributions of Jews to the civil rights movement, while simultaneously acknowledging the subsequent self-congratulation that so many African Americans found irritating.

The apparent villain of the piece is Roy Cohn (Al Pacino), the McCarthy lawyer (and closeted homosexual) who was so intent on executing Ethel and Julius Rosenberg that he interceded illegally with the (Jewish) judge to ensure the sentence.

To Kushner, Cohn is the quintessential brilliant, well-educated Jew who betrayed Jewish values by dedicating his talents to reactionary causes. A silver-tongued viper and irredeemable bigot, Cohn also has AIDS — an irony in which Kushner takes no vengeful pleasure.

He does, however, mine Cohn's disintegration to rail against the FDA's slowness in approving AZT and other AIDS treatments, to expose the ability of those with clout to obtain the drug (even when they proclaim they have liver cancer, as Cohn does) and to summon Ethel Rosenberg (Meryl Streep, in one of several roles) as the manifestation of Cohn's AIDS-related dementia.

Kushner is actually harder on the weak Louis, an intellectual who's always expounding on his deeply felt positions yet stands for nothing. Secular, assimilated, spiritually dislocated and — in his own mind — persecuted, Louis is the poster child of American Jewry.

It is only when he is called on to say Kaddish for Cohn, in one of the many unexpected, but not contrived, intersections of characters that compose "Angels," that Louis' voice gains a measure of authority.

Funny and caustic, self-lacerating and unexpectedly generous, "Angels in America" is a work of great heart and imagination. Even if the HBO production is far from transcendent, Kushner's hard-earned optimism still shines through.