Este post foi escrito para a série Hit Me With Your Best Shot do blogue The Film Experience de Nathaniel Rogers, sendo que é aqui apresentado em inglês, ao invés do que é usual neste blogue.
When thinking about HBO’s Angels in America, I always feel that I’m predisposed to miss
something, not being American and never having seen a staged production of Tony
Kushner’s play. Despite this, I’m unable to deny the impact of the TV version,
which I’ve rewatched numerous times. It helps that Kushner’s text is so good
that I can’t fathom an adaptation that wouldn’t regain some of his brilliancy,
even a merely functional adaption.
Mike Nichols was the director in charge of the
production and it’s an understandable choice, one must only look at his past
filmography to see the play adaptations he gloriously adapted to the screen.
He’s a director whose filmography is rich in amazing performances, I would even
say that directing actors was his greatest achievement, despite the keen eye
for theatricality he shows in this production. From the production design to
the framing, there’s a constant presence of the play’s stage origins, but even
so, while rewatching the series I couldn’t keep my mind from wondering what a
more adventurous director than Nichols would’ve done with the material. A
director like Derek Jarman, Todd Haynes or even Sally Potter, who could embrace
the formalistic possibilities of the material, and truly explore the
theatricality of the text with a bit more creativity than Nichols inevitably
shows.
This is not to say that Nichols does a subpar
job, far from it. His talent to direct actors is well alive here, filling the miniseries
with a collection of some of its cast members’ best work as well as imbuing the
film with a certain sense of intimacy and reliance on the actor’s performances
that I doubt any of the directors I’ve mentioned above would be able to fully
achieve.
Anyway, here are my six best shots, one for
each of the chapters:
Chapter
One: Bad News
One of my personal obsessions is the way
different directors shoot the space in which they set their films. Here, we’ve
got a shot set inside the kitchen of Harper and Joe’s apartment, after Joe
arrives home and starts closing the several cabinets and drawers his wife has
left opened throughout the apartment in what seems to be a usual part of their routine. It’s an
incredibly cluttered shot, with objects cutting Patrick Wilson in unattractive
places, not to mention the presence of Harper’s head, filling half the shot in
shadow. It’s a simple but effective way of showing a trapped man, a world where
there’s an unbalance which here is manifested in an uncomfortable and even ugly
composition. Its effect is only exacerbated by the way Nichos has showed the
audience their apartment until this very moment. When Harper is alone, the
director seems to emphasize the emptiness of the apartment, focusing on Harper
as if she were a ghost wandering aimlessly through an undefined, incomplete
space. Harper may be distant and aloof, but Joe is here deeply physical,
instead of floating through the space, through the home, he is blocked by it,
trapped, almost visually threatened by the set itself.
Chapter
Two: In Vitro
The deterioration of Prior’s body is never
better visualized than on this amazing composition, where he is seen crawling
out of the darkness, suffering and crying for help. The lighting here is both
beautiful and horribly ominous, as if death is embodied in the very shadows of
Prior’s apartment. Still, my favorite detail in the shot is probably the almost
cruel detail of the bicycle’s shadow looming over the dying man. A symbol of
athleticism, health and exercise haunting the frame, almost mocking the
sickness and frailty of Prior in this painful moment. The contrast doesn’t seem
to want to create humor or pity, rather it seems to only underline his
perseverance and his struggle as he drags is own body, finding strength and
even a glimmer of tragic hope in this vision of human suffering.
Chapter
Three: The Messenger
In comparison with the lonely suffering of the
previous shot, here we have a moment of peace and profound sadness. One of the
fantasies that appear throughout the miniseries, especially regarding the
character of Prior, and one of the sweetest. After being abandoned, and seeing
his sanity and bodily health deteriorate, Prior is given this simple moment of
rest, of emotional calm and in the process gives such a moment to the audience
as well. Like many other scenes in the film, there’s a strong sense of
theatricality and artificiality mixed with a beautiful intimacy, even if just
dreamt intimacy. The two ex-lovers dance, slowly, to the sound of Moonriver, transported to a pastiche of
an Old Hollywood romance. Artifice turned intimate, fiction turned into a
moment of brief happiness. I was briefly torn between this shot and the wide
shot and the circling camera close-up of this same scene, but the static use of
the camera, and the way the opulence of the set is only partially hinted made
me choose this one in particular. It’s as refreshingly peaceful in form as it
is in emotional content.
Chapter
Four: Stop Moving
I absolutely adore Emma Thompson’s performance
as the Angel. It’s not that she’s giving the best performance, but, at least to
me, it’s certainly the most rapturously entertaining. Her biggest
accomplishment existing in the way she’s able to give the figure its gravitas,
grandiosity and overt dramatics, while never seeming to let go a certain
silliness and humor that turns her angel into both a messenger of the
apocalypse and a self-aware, overdramatic, celestial bureaucrat. Most of her
appearance in this chapter is marked by an abundance of dramatic theatrical
visuals, with showy lighting, and impressive, if rudimentary, special effects.
There’s not a lot of humor to be found, at least not in the visuals. Well, there
is, in this shot in which the Angel brings the prophet to orgasm. Here, some of
that humor seems to manifest in the visuals. There’s the epic scope of the
imagery but also a certain silliness with the use of CGI fire, framed by the theatricality
of the composition itself, which creates a proscenium out of the architecture
of the apartment. It’s a beautifully lit and framed, funny, epic, ecstatic and
exhilarating image. Plasma Orgasmata
indeed.
Chapter
Five: Beyond Nelly
While wandering, drugged out of his mind, Roy
Cohn has one amazing dialogue with Belize, probably my favorite character from
this miniseries and wonderfully realized by Jeffrey Wright. During this
encounter the audience is shown this shot, a close-up of Roy and Belize, where
the camera moves around them in movements similar to the drunken unbalanced
motions of Roy himself.
The movement, and the way the background is out-of-focus,
isolate the two characters in a sort of perverse dance, almost reminiscent of
the moment referred previously between Prior and Louis, only here it’s not a
scene of fleeting bliss but an uncomfortable show of desperation and pain. The
actors’ performances are brilliant, but, to me, it’s the constant movement that
really makes the shot. Informed by the text, this movement doesn’t only create
a perverse dance of Roy and Belize’s dialogue, but also turns their scene into
dance between a dying man and the Grim Reaper, history and fiction, fantasy and
reality, hatred and compassion. It’s terrifyingly beautiful.
Chapter
Six: Heaven, I’m in Heaven
I chose this shot because it’s pretty. The
End.
Not really, please bear with me…
In 1966, Mike Nichols presented the world with
his first film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?, starring two of the world’s most glamorous movie stars, stripped of
their beautiful public images and presented in a cruel and unattractive way.
The glamour of their star personas was necessary for the contrast to appear,
but the negation of that glamour of that Hollywood glow, was one of the most
jarring elements of the film. We’re now used to de-glam, and Hollywood had certainly seen it before (Grace Kelly’s
Oscar), but in that film, at that particular point in cinema history, there was
something poignant and almost revolutionary about it. The film was the first
film to receive the now common R-rating. A new period has just started for
Hollywood cinema. The soft-focus, glamorously lit, glowingly romantic image of
the Hollywood Golden Age’s movie star was fading. Nichols’ films mostly avoided
embracing the romantic glories of yore, even when shooting the Hollywood
celebrities in Postcards from the Edge.
In Angels in America, by embracing theatricality and fantasy in a way I’ve
never seen so completely in his filmography, it’s predictable that he would
access some of that artificial beauty of the Hollywood of the past. And so he
does, even if only sparingly.This shot is my favorite where this cinematic
heritage is visible. Most of the series avoids this sort of glamour in its
filming of the cast, but here Nichols shoots Thompson as a veritable movie
star. Soft-focus, backlighting illuminating the hair and almost creating a
halo, soft lighting that avoids harsh shadows in the face of the actress, and a
good dose of drama with that turn of the head, that reveals the fiery
background. It’s as beautiful as it is seductive, an appropriate pair of
adjectives when one considers the fireworks inducing climax that follows. This
Angel is really from another world, an older world, a world of glamour and
distant images of perfection, a world of stars bigger than mere mortals.
So yes, I actually chose this shot because it’s pretty.
