Doc of a Dramatist

Wrestling with Angels

Directed by Frieda Lee Mock

Given the volume and ambition of his plays and politics, the reasons why documentarian Frieda Lee Mock trailed Tony Kushner for three years seems implicit. But Mock has made a hagiography (an idealized biography) more than a documentary, and it often shows Kushner in a terribly pretentious light. When Kushner calls New York Theatre Workshop (which produced his play Homebody/Kabul after 9/11) a “little theater on East 4th Street,” those in the know will gag since he’s referring to a multi-million dollar Off-Broadway nonprofit—the hothouse where Rent was born.

Of the film’s three segments, the second is the best—when Mock follows Kushner to his boyhood Louisiana home to celebrate his father’s milestone birthday and, more generally, to help understand someone who wears his admirably super-liberal politics on his sleeve. Still, Wrestling could use less of Kushner Kushner-izing and more from those around him. There’s an excellent scene in which Marcia Gay Harden reads from a Kushner play, echoing the part where Laura Bush reads The Brothers Karamazov to dead Iraqi children, so why only show rapturous audience faces—why not a Harden quote? We see Mike Nichols at two openings—how about a quote, Mike?

Perhaps Mock would argue she merely chronicled Kushner, and that might be her best defense. Here, he’s giving a commencement address that calls more attention to his writing than to his advice to graduates; there, he’s meeting students at NYU during rehearsals of his musical Caroline, or Change, his humility face painted on. Here, he’s in Florida on Election Day 2004 helping disenfranchised voters vote. There, he says to the camera, “I don’t want to be ghettoized because of my politics,” which is completely ridiculous. Of course that’s precisely what he wants—and that’s why he’s one of the great dramatists of our time. Honestly, Kushner isn’t Wrestling with Angels. He’s wrestling with himself in a heavenly hell of his own design.