Plot
It is 1985: Ronald Reagan is in the White House, and AIDS is causing wide-scale death in America. In Manhattan, Prior Walter tells Lou, his lover of four years, that he has AIDS; Lou, unable to handle it, leaves him. As disease and loneliness ravage Prior, guilt invades Lou. Joe Pitt, a Mormon and Republican attorney, is pushed by right-wing fixer Roy Cohn toward a job at the United States Department of Justice. Both Pitt and Cohn are in the closet: Pitt out of shame and religious turmoil, Cohn to preserve his power and image. Pitt's wife Harper is strung out on Valium, causing her to hallucinate constantly (sometimes jointly with Prior during his fever dreams), and she longs to escape from her sexless marriage. An angel with ulterior motives commands Prior to become a prophet. Pitt's mother and Belize, a close friend and drag queen, help Prior choose. Joe leaves his wife and goes to live with Lou, but the relationship doesn't work out due to ideological differences. Roy is diagnosed with AIDS early on, and as his life comes to a close he is haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg.
As the film continues, these lost souls come together to create bonds of love, loss, and loneliness and, in the end, discover forgiveness and overcome abandonment.
Read more about this topic: Angels In America (TV Miniseries)
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“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)