Angels in America is large. Not the widescreen expanses of burning sands large of epics like Lawrence of Arabia, although it has some of that too. Angels in America is large because it contains multitudes. In a year that was a parade of disappointing films, each one tinier and more self-absorbed than the next, Angels was willfully grandiose, an epic ranging across time and space to conjure up a vision of a world in crisis. Better than anyone could have dreamed of, Angels was not only the best thing on television this year, it was the best film of the year, period. If HBO had bothered to stick it in some Beverly Hills theater for a week for an Oscar-qualifying run, it would have deservedly run away with almost every major award. Even Mystic River, the best of the studio product this year, feels a little puny in comparison.

While practically every television pundit of note, from The New Yorker’s Nancy Franklin to the Village Voice’s Joy Press, weighed in on Angels, surprisingly little commentary has been supplied by film critics. I know we live in an age of compartmentalization, where everyone has their carefully measured-out specialty, but jeez, folks, Angels in America is, you know, a movie, after all. In order to alleviate the critical wasteland surrounding this landmark film, which (mark my words) will be remembered, discussed, and studied long after Master and Commander, Cold Mountain, and (yes) Lost in Translation are reduced to footnotes.

Over the credits, the camera glides on the wings of eagles, starting at the Golden Gate Bridge and traversing the length of the country, passing American landmarks like the Gateway Arch before swooping over the Manhattan skyline. The camera makes a beeline for the lush greenery of Central Park, centering in on the angel’s statue atop Bethesda Fountain. As it settles under the angel’s face, her chin lifts, and her gaze moves heavenward. This sequence establishes two of the film’s major tropes, extended, played with, and stretched like taffy over the course of its six hours: forward motion, and the relationship of humanity with the spiritual world. Angels in America is a story of relentless transition, and the film begins in the midst of two of these transitions: the death of Louis Ironson (Ben Shenkman)’s aged grandmother Sarah, and the discovery of Louis’ lover Prior Walter (Justin Kirk) that he is HIV-positive. As Mrs. Ironson’s eulogist, Rabbi Chemelwitz (nicely played by Meryl Streep, totally unrecognizable) points out, she was “not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania.” Movement, of individuals and groups, historical and present-day, forms the nucleus of Angels in America. Louis lives in the same neighborhood (the Lower East Side of Manhattan) in which his grandmother had arrived as a penniless immigrant. Joe and Harper (Patrick Wilson and Mary Louise Parker), reversing the trek made by their forebears, have journeyed east to the unfamiliar territory of New York City for Joe’s judicial clerkship. Harper, feeling abandoned by her cold husband, increasingly identifies with the Mormons of Brigham Young’s time who journeyed to Utah, spending much of her time at the local Mormon Visitor’s Information Center, gazing idly at the motionless diorama of hearty settlers. Rebelling against the received history of tradition, Harper tries to imagine what the Mormon women’s lives were. Voicing her disapproval of the positive spin put on the Mormon journey, she waits for the woman of the diorama to begin speaking, saying of her, “I bet her story isn’t so jolly.” In her fantasy life, Harper takes a page out of the Mormon book as well, wandering all over the world in search of a measure of peace, from Antarctica to the night flight, finally racing the setting sun.

Nichols creates pleasing visual approximations of these journeys, utilizing a long overhead tracking shot following Louis and Prior at the beach, closing with a view of the empty beach, and the pair’s footprints. This eloquent image becomes a symbol of the journeys taken by each character as they travel through their own lives. Similarly, when Harper is standing on her building’s roof, she looks out at the skyline of downtown Manhattan, including the towers of the World Trade Center. While most uses of the WTC image in the two-plus years since their destruction have been crass or heavy-handed, Nichols’s film, with its moral and historical gravitas, makes the towers’ presence not only acceptable, but necessary. In that sense, Angels in America is the book of all our lives, not easily dismissed as “that AIDS story.” The World Trade Center is here for the same reason that Kushner’s play brings in Mormons, pilgrims, Eastern European Jews, and Ethel Rosenberg: to serve as a reminder that we live in history, not outside it. Angels in America is that rare work of art that is capable of illuminating our roles in the historical tapestry, and our relationships with what has come before us, and what is yet to come.

Credit must be given to Nichols for, above all, not interfering with what was already perfect about Angels in America: the beauty of its language. The magnificence of Kushner’s language, and the astonishing breadth of his ideas, were the most exceptional aspect of the original play, and they exist, for the most part untouched, in the film version. Kushner is universally acclaimed as the great playwright of our times because of his ability to simultaneously create a highly credible contemporary reality, and place it in an appropriate historical and social context. This may sound like a matter of little consequence, but try and think of the last film (or cultural product of any kind) that managed to provide such a wide-ranging snapshot of a time and place while proving at the same time to be capable of insightful historical critique.

Any where you turn in Angels in America, history intrudes, peeking through in the most unexpected places. Contrary to the postmodernist assumption that we are adrift, cut off from our past, and unable to make any but the most perfunctory, nostalgic reference to what has come before us, Kushner suffuses his entire play with the ever-living past. It’s a burden, but it can also be an object lesson for the future. Perhaps the most affecting scene in Angels in America is Prior’s meeting with his two forebears, both also named Prior Walter. In an astonishing leap, Prior’s ancestors tell him of their untimely deaths. As the first Prior notes, “The pestilence in my time was much worse than now. Whole villages of empty houses. You could look outdoors and see Death walking in the morning, dew dampening the ragged hem of his black robe. Plain as I see you now.” The past is alive in our times, and in our bodies, and as Ecclesiastes tell us, there is nothing new under the sun. For those suffering under the burden of contemporary existence, be it the scourge of AIDS, the horror of September 11, or the Republican revolution of Ronald Reagan, this is the essence of wisdom, and enormous comfort.

Nichols ingeniously creates a cinematic language that works somewhat similarly, making reference at crucial points to great films of yore. Rather than the empty quotations of a film-school grad, Nichols’s references, much like Kushner’s, pay specific homage to touchstones of the past to invest his work with the grandeur and heft that he (appropriately) feels it requires. When Prior and Harper meet in their shared fantasy, Nichols pays homage to the dreamlike mise-en-scene of Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, undulating arms protuding from the walls grasping torches, Harper gazing into a makeup mirror when surprised by the Beast (Prior). Not unlike Cocteau’s Beast, Prior is an exemplary individual cast out by society for his disfigurement. Nichols, seeking to place the scourge of AIDS in its appropriate historical context, uses Cocteau here for his sense of sympathy for the stricken. Later, he makes oblique reference to The Seventh Seal with the monk’s cowl Prior dons after receiving word from his angel that he is to serve as a prophet. He is one of Bergman’s monks come back to Eighties New York, and the result is both farcical (it is hard not to laugh at the idea of Prior as a prophet of old) and suitably petrifying. After all, what is the prophet’s task but judgment?

Marshall Berman, in his groundbreaking book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, describes Goethe’s Faust, Part II as the inaugural work of the modern era. The play takes place almost entirely within the space of a giant construction site, on which Goethe is planning on tearing down an old German village, and replacing it with a modern metropolis. In Berman’s description, all of our modern world can be seen as taking place on Goethe’s construction site. Modernity requires constant and unceasing upheaval, and its absence does not bring blessed peace, but withering and death. The building of modernity is never-ending, and the turmoil is significant, but motion, to Goethe and Berman, is life. Prior goes up to heaven, where the angels ask him to bring a message of stillness. The budding prophet, rightly understanding the underlying message of the contemporary world, tells the assembled angels, “We can’t just stop. We’re not rocks—progress, migration, motion is…modernity. It’s animate, it’s what living things do.” Much like Faust, Prior is an avatar of modernity, asking others to see the patterns behind their everyday existences. Angels in America is the story of our lives.