“Angels: Part 2”
Dec. 14, at 8 p.m. on HBO
½ (two and one half stars)
WHEN we last left our heroes, AIDS- stricken Prior Walter sat spellbound in his sickbed as a great winged angel played by Emma Thompson crashed suddenly through his ceiling.
Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) was beginning to die from AIDS while denying to everyone that he had the disease or was in any way a homosexual.
Doe-eyed Harper Pitt (Mary-Louise Parker) was escaping from her troubled marriage to a fantasy Antarctica, complete with park benches and street lights.
And her husband, the troubled Mormon Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson), was about to engage in the first homosexual acts of his closeted life with the promiscuous Louis (Ben Shenkman), the self-loathing ex-lover of the sickly and sensitive Prior.
Welcome to the magical, epic, yakkity-yak world of “Angels in America, Part 2,” a made-for-TV saga of such obvious importance that no critic dare dislike it.
I can’t honestly say I disliked it either, even if there were times when I couldn’t wait for it to be over. That goes for the first half as much as the three-and-a-quarter hour second half, which premieres a week from Sunday (Dec. 14) at 8 p.m. on HBO.
Like Part 1, Part 2 is superbly filmed and wonderfully acted. But at the risk of sounding like a dummy, I have to admit I didn’t always get it – like in Part 2 when Prior (Justin Kirk) has flaming sex (literally) with the naked angel in midair.
Then later, Prior takes a trip up a fiery ladder to a place that looks something like heaven and insists he’s not ready to die. And as he leaves to return to earth he declares that God should be sued for allowing so much tragedy to inflict the human race.
It was a juvenile speech, as was another one delivered by Louis about the Army-McCarthy hearings that was straight out of a high school history book.
I actually liked Part 2 marginally more than Part 1. For one thing, Meryl Streep thankfully gets more to do in the role of the Mormon’s mother from Salt Lake City.
However, when Streep shows up at the dead Cohn’s hospital bedside as the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg to recite kaddish, it was one of those moments when I also wanted to pray – for “Angels” to hurry up and end already.
