A valentine to Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner, author of the epic millennial trumpet blast

Angels in America

, has never doubted that he's living in interesting times -

interesting

in the euphemistic sense of the proverbial Chinese curse. As an artist and citizen, he has felt a responsibility to respond to contemporary political upheaval through his plays and copious remarks as the quotable go-to guy now that Susan Sontag and Arthur Miller have died.

Kushner represents a potentially enormous subject for a documentary, even if at 50, this relatively late-bloomer (Angels wasn't completed until he was in his mid-30s) is still too young to have his career assessed. Freida Lee Mock's Wrestling With Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner opts for a narrow, up-close-and-personal perspective. Her film is wide-eyed with admiration, lending the feeling of an elaborate home movie made by a cousin who doesn't want the Thanksgiving dinner invitations to stop.

But this uncritical cinematic embrace doesn't do justice to a playwright who never met a Brechtian dialectic he didn't want to ponder more deeply.

Divided into three acts ("As a Citizen of the World," "Mama, I'm a Homosexual Mama" and "Collective Action to Overcome Injustice"), the film concentrates on a brief but momentous period in recent American history, from Sept. 11, 2001, to the 2004 presidential election.

Wrestling With Angels has a rough, low-budget directness that doesn't quite achieve the intimacy it desires, and the incorporated production footage seems clumsy in the extreme. Anyone seeking an approximation of Kushner's uniquely cerebral theatricality will have to look elsewhere.

Wrestling With Angels is neither compelling enough for people with little knowledge of the playwright's work nor insightful enough for those of us who have followed his career closely.

Directed, produced and written by Freida Lee Mock, cinematographers Bestor Cram, Don Lenzer, Eddie Marritz, Chris Paul, Terry Sanders, distributed by Balcony Releasing.

Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.

Parent's guide: Unrated.

Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse, Ritz 16 New Jersey.

EndText