NO SMUT, NO DIRT, just Tony the Mensch — and that’s fine.
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In the case of Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, which opens this Friday at the Kendall Square, director Freida Lee Mock’s typically hagiographic approach can be forgiven. So what if Kushner walks through the movie without any display of temperament, saying encouraging things to eager students, hugging chubby old ladies, getting along with his brother, being respectful to his father? And his only bad words are for outright villains: Adolf Hitler, Roy Cohn, the Taliban, George W. Bush? And his only vice, as far as we can ascertain, is a monstrous desire for chocolate-chip cookies?
What a charming guy, what an arresting and witty speaker, what a curious secular Jewish thinker, what excellent politics, what a mensch! The truth is, I don’t want to know the smut and dirt about the Angels in America dramatist, whom I admire more than ever thanks to this intimate, moving documentary.
Mock makes the interesting decision to structure the first third of the film with hardly any allusion to Kushner’s homosexuality, or to Angels in America. It’s only after we’ve been backstage at an Off Broadway production of Kushner’s Afghanistan play, Homebody/Kabul, that we’re told he’s gay. That’s when the documentary travels to Lake Charles, Louisiana, his boyhood home. “I was this sissy. I thought boys were cuter than girls at six,” the former bar mitzvah boy tells the camera. But he waited until Columbia University to come out. Just like his hero in Angels in America, he called home on a public phone and announced, “Mother I’m a homosexual.” She cried for six months.
His dad, Bill Kushner, explains here how he finally came around, sending Tony a letter that said, “I would be proud to be Tchaikovsky’s father.” Today, Bill and Tony are best pals. Bill does a lovely toast at his son’s wedding to Entertainment Weekly editor Mark Harris. That’s a moving moment in the film, but the best scenes of all surround the HBO filming of Angels in America: Kushner on the exterior set in Central Park, when actors and playwright look up in awe at the actual stone angel that inspired this great and beautiful American drama.
Freida Lee Mock won a Best Documentary Oscar with her 1994 Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, which is about the architect of Washington’s Vietnam War Memorial. She considers her Kushner film a natural follow-up. “I found their personalities oddly similar,” she said at last April’s Full Frame International Documentary Festival in Durham. “They both operate at the intersection of art and politics.
“I wrote a letter to Tony, sent him some of my work. Eventually, we talked on the phone, I told him about the life cycle of a movie, from film to video and DVD. He said, ‘I want to be a DVD!’ That was the tipping point.
“There was a three-year time frame that I filmed. Sometimes I felt like a stalker, popping up everywhere. Tony was hilarious and inspiring and serious. But as much as he’s a public figure, there’s a certain shyness.
“When he was helping bring out Florida Democratic voters to the polls in the 2004 election, he was doing his work as a private citizen. He didn’t call me and let me film until the final day. But he did not say anything ever about me doing it this way or that, since he really liked Maya’s film.” Kushner opted to skip the Sundance premiere of Wrestling with Angels, and when Mock appeared at Full Frame, he still hadn’t dared watch it. “He’s getting encouraged to see the film. Mark Harris loves it, his father loves it. But when Maya first saw her documentary with a thousand people, she died a thousand deaths. So I understand.”