Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

I really like Tony Kushner as a writer. ANGELS IN AMERICA blew my mind when I saw it performed onstage in the early ‘90s, and I think the film adaptation of it is a rare case of someone getting that sort of dense stage material right onscreen. And I love what he did on MUNICH as well. I know he’s a controversial figure, and I can admire his work without agreeing with all of his positions, but it seems like the mere mention of him pisses many people off. At any rate, I’m curious about this documentary, and I am curious to see what Capone thinks of it:

Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

As with many non-New Yorkers, non-Jewish, and non-gay people in the world, my knowledge of the works and influence of award-winning playwright Tony Kushner. If all the man had ever done in his life was write Angels In America (the Tony-winning play and the Emmy-winning television adaptation), that would have been enough. But of course, for a man of his convictions and passion, one remarkable work would not do. The documentary on Kushner, Wrestling with Angels, from director/writer/producer Freida Lee Mock follows the writer around the country from 2001 until the evening of the 2004 Presidential election (shockingly enough, the man was not a Bush supporter), a period when both his Jewish heritage and his life as a gay man seemed under attack from all sides.

While Mock's access into Kushner's world seems limitless and watching him stump for all of the causes that mean so much to him (anti-war, AIDS, civil liberties, anti-Semitism, gay rights) is very interesting, I found myself more intrigued by his personal and working life. Kushner visits the home in Louisiana where he grew up and ties those times to the works that he is writing even today. The play that was new at the time of this film was his musical Caroline or Change, a look at race relations that has direct ties to his childhood and which we see during the rehearsal process through its tentative Broadway debut. His relationship with his father is probably at the heart of this film. Neither of his parents was thrilled at his coming out when he was younger, and much of his Kushner's hard work and tenacity seems to come from wanted to prove to his father that being gay was not a setback to a happy life. His father's speech at Kushner's wedding to his longtime companion will probably have you in tears.

Mock doesn't only focus on the current projects Kushner is working to complete. She also allows him to walk us through the life circumstances that led to the writing and staging of Angels In America, the definitive theatre piece that meshes politics and the AIDS crisis. It's a work of rage, pain, suffering, and hope. Kushner may not have been the first person to draw the parallel between victims of AIDS and those who died in the Holocaust, but he certainly did popularize the notion. Seeing brief glimpses of footage of the original Broadway production is enough to send chills through your body, but watching Kushner react and discuss the adaptation of the play into a film is moving beyond words.

But in more recent years, Kushner has embraced his position as a popular artist to be an outspoken activist. There's a clip in Wrestling with Angels in which he speaks before a group at JP Morgan Chase about gay rights (presumably he's there to make a case for same-sex financial sharing benefits), and hilarious. I don't mean to make the film sounds like one dour lesson after another; it's actually a film filled with a great deal of humor. There's a clip of a commencement address he made recently that is also quite funny and memorable. The guys knows how to work a room and write for an audience, not by pandering to them, but by making them just a little uncomfortable and then rewarding them for putting up with his politicizing.

One of the most biting examples of his work is shown in the film as well, a bit of one of his newest works called Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy, inspired from a line in Brothers Karamazov and by Laura Bush's statement that the book is her favorite. Marcia Gay Harden is shown reading from the work at an anti-war event, in which she plays Mrs. Bush reading from the book to a group of children who have died in the Iraq War. Not surprisingly, the scene is played for laughs.

For those of you who are fans of Kushner's screenplay (co-written by Eric Roth) for Steven Spielberg's Munich (including myself, since I named it the best film of 2005), the film is not mentioned once in Wrestling with Angels. However, put in the context of the rest of Kushner's beliefs, the moral struggles contained in that film makes so much more sense. If you are curious about Kushner's history with that project, I strongly recommend picking up the Munich DVD and sifting through the many documentaries, which feature him prominently.

I suppose I entered into Wrestling with Angels with an idea that I was going to gain some insight into a writer's mind, which is absolutely the case. But the film adds dimensions to Kushner I'd never imagined existed. In many ways, he's the standard by which many activists and artists hold themselves against. When he dedicates himself to a project (as we see him do countless times in the movie), he is relentless in his commitment. One never senses that he saves his best work for certain types of works. Instead, we establish that the man devotes his soul to every thing to which he lends his name. The film, like the man, is an inspiration about living a life in which your art and life are one in the same.

Capone