Pacino's Grasp at Redemption in Roy Cohn

To be forward, I will admit that I firmly believe that Brokeback Mountain is by no means the great American gay epic of this decade. It's a good story, it's pretty, but it is a love story told against the background of a boring run-down part of the country. Instead, give credit where it is due and let HBO take the prize with Angels in America.

Seriously, it has an all-star cast, it's based on one of the most acclaimed plays written in the 1990's, and it deals with closet mentality, marriage, AIDS AND politics before people, way more than Mr. Ang Lee did.

This is Tony Kushner's testament to everything he lived through and saw as the gay community changed from a party to a mass funeral. Plenty has been written about the characters, including the vicious Roy Cohn, a closeted McCarthyite haunted by Ethel Rosenberg's ghost as he dies of AIDS. In the final moments of the play, Cohn grasps salvation as he accepts himself and bequeaths AZT to untold needy patients.

It's an interesting casting choice with Al Pacino, because he was the star of one of the most anti-gay film of the 1980's, Cruising. Vito Russo was a central figure in protesting this blatantly homophobic story of a cop sent undercover to find a gay serial killer, and in turn realizes his latent homosexual and murderous tendencies.

Pacino refuses to this day to discuss the film. It has in recent years it has gained the oddity status reserved for Plan 9. Does Pacino bring a specific nuance to the role, searching for his own redemption from those he offended two decades ago?

Roy Cohn was a prominent McCarthyist lawyer who lived a closeted life while searching for "inverts and warped personnel". He later prosecuted both Rosenbergs to the fullest extent of the law. He died in the closet of AIDS in 1986, insisting he had liver cancer.

What is Cohn in Kusher's eyes? He is the personification and agent of the power-hungry apathy which is allowing AIDS to spread as "the gay cancer". He finds true harmony at juggling phones as he does in the opening scene featuring his first offer to transfer Joe to DC. He lives on status, clout, bullying tactics, and being a good gossip hound. He cares more for status as opposed to happiness, because only one guarantees power. Only in his final moments does he reveal his true emotions, his true lusts, his true motivations. In the end he's just a smarmy bastard who won't get outdone by his rival, finally making Ethel Rosenberg sing.

The figure of Cohn is the figure of the closet incarnate, bitter, manipulative, and vengeful. He represents the passing of an era with the beginning of drug availability he portrays, but also an ending the the closeted era of the 1950's that spawned him.

representation of the God who abandoned Heaven on the day of the Great San Francisco Earthquake. The cinematic Cohn has a much more optimistic end than his theatrical counterpart, who is last seen on-stage soliciting his services as a defense attorney to the Hebrew letter aleph, the play'sCohn instead exits in the salvation and acceptance of the gay community with the recitation of the kaddish dictated by Ethel Rosenberg, representing the embrace of his native Jewish faith. And it seems Pacino is also.