Since I recently watched the film version of Angels in America I was interested in this Andrew Sullivan.com link discussing the work. Included in the post is a link to David Mendelsohn's interesting review of the film for The New York Review of Books. I bring this up again because both the post and the review get at a key reason why I so dislike the ending of the play (and movie), and I dislike the ending immensely. The way that the Joe Pitt character is abandoned really doesn't fit with the tone of the play, and the fact that he's not redeemed while the completely loathsome Louis is ... well, it's just one of several ways that Perestroika doesn't work (in terms of fitting together coherently), but morally it's possibly the most appalling. That said, I think in a lot of ways the play does work (Millenium Approaches certainly does) and to critique the politics of the play on the basis of the movie, as is done in the Sullivan post, is really pretty silly even if Kushner's politics are themselves silly. The play and the movie aren't the same work.
Posted by armand at January 3, 2005 02:10 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Culture