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)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“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)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)