Angels in America (2003)

Jeffrey Wright: Mr. Lies, Belize

Photos 

Quotes 

• Roy Cohn : [under the impression that Belize is the Angel of Death]  Can I ask you something, sir?

  Belize : [going along with it]  "Sir"?

  Roy Cohn : What's it like? After?

  Belize : After...?

  Roy Cohn : This misery ends?

  Belize : Hell or heaven?

  Roy Cohn : ...heh...

  Belize : Like San Francisco.

  Roy Cohn : A city! Good! I was worried... it'd be a garden. I hate that shit.

  Belize : Mmmm. Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens.

  Roy Cohn : Isaiah.

  Belize : Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths. And everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain't there.

  Roy Cohn : And Heaven?

  Belize : That was Heaven, Roy.

  Roy Cohn : The fuck it was!

• Mr. Lies : Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.

• Belize : I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. Nothing but a bunch of big ideas and stories and people dying, and then people like you. The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word free to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on Earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come with me to Room 1013 over at the hospital and I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy, and mean. I live in America, Louis. I don't have to love it.

• Belize : Look at that heavy sky out there.

  Louis Ironson : Purple.

  Belize : Purple? What kind of a homosexual are you anyway? That's not purple, Mary, that color out there... is mauve.

• Harper Pitt : I wish I could go traveling. Things aren't right with me.

  [Harper opens cabinet door in bathroom to remove pill container. She closes the door which reveals Mr. Lie's reflection in the mirror. She gasps.] 

  Mr. Lies : Cash, check, or credit card?

  Harper Pitt : You startled me.

  Mr. Lies : Cash, check, or...

  Harper Pitt : I remember you. You're from Salt Lake. You sold us the plane tickets when we flew here. What are you doing in Brooklyn?

  Mr. Lies : You said you wanted to travel.

  Harper Pitt : How thoughtful!

  Mr. Lies : Mr. Lies of the International Order of Travel Agents. We mobilize the globe. We set people adrift. We are adepts of motion, acolytes of the flocks. Cash, check, or credit card, name your destination.

  Harper Pitt : Antartica, maybe? I want to see the hole in the ozone. I heard on the radio...

  Mr. Lies : We'll arrange a guided tour. Now?

  Harper Pitt : Soon, maybe soon. I'm not safe here, you see. Weird stuff happens.

  Mr. Lies : Like?

  Harper Pitt : Like you, for instance. Just appearing. Or last week. Well, nevermind. People are like planets, you need a thick skin. Joe stays away and now, well look, my dreams are talking back to me.

  Mr. Lies : The price of rootlessness, motion sickness. Only cure, keep moving.

  Harper Pitt : I'm undecided. I feel that something's going to give. It's 1985... fifteen years to the third millennium. Maybe Christ will come again or maybe the troubles will and the end will come. And the sky will collapse and there'll be terrible rain and showers of poison light. Or maybe my life is really fine... maybe Joe loves me and I'm only crazy thinking otherwise. Or maybe not. Maybe it's even worse than I know. Maybe I want to know, maybe I don't. The suspense, Mr. Lies, it's killing me.

  Mr. Lies : I suggest a vacation.

• Belize : Real love isn't ambivalent. I'd swear that's a line from my favorite best-selling paperback novel, "In Love with the Night Mysterious", except I don't think you've ever read it. Well, you ought to, instead of spending the rest of your life, trying to get through "Democracy in America." It's about this white woman whose daddy owns a plantation in the Deep South, in the years before the Civil War. And her name is Margaret, and she's in love with her daddy's number-one slave, and his name is Thaddeus. And she's married, but her white slave-owner husband has AIDS: Antebellum Insufficiently-Developed Sex-organs. And so, there's a lot of hot stuff going down, when Margaret and Thaddeus can catch a spare torrid ten under the cotton-picking moon. And then of course the Yankees come, and they set the slaves free. And the slaves string up old daddy and so on, historical fiction. Somewhere in there I recall, Margaret and Thaddeus find the time to discuss the nature of love. Her face is reflecting the flames of the burning plantation, you know the way white people do, and his black face is dark in the night and she says to him, "Thaddeus, real love isn't ever ambivalent."

• Belize : I live in America, Louis. I don't have to love it. You do that. Everybody's gotta love something.

  Louis Ironson : Everybody does.

• Roy Cohn : I want a white nurse. My constitutional right.

  Belize : You're in a hospital, you don't have any constitutional rights.

• Harper Pitt : I got this tree from the great Antarctic pine forest, right over the hill.

  Mr. Lies : There are no pine forests in Antarctica.

  Harper Pitt : This one's a blue spruce.

  Mr. Lies : There are no blue spruce in...

  Harper Pitt : I chewed this pine tree down with my teeth. Like a beaver. I'm hungry, I haven't eaten in three days. I'm gonna use it to build something. Maybe a fire. Lucky I brought these.

  Mr. Lies : Snow'll melt

  Harper Pitt : Let it. I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die. But there's still the rest of you. There's your breasts and your genitals... They're amazingly stupid, like babies or faithful dogs. They don't get it, they just want him. Want him.

  Mr. Lies : Eskimo's back.

  Harper Pitt : I know. I wanted a real Eskimo, someone chilly and reliable. An Eskimo dressed in seal pelts. Not this. This is just some lawyer, just...

  Joe Pitt : Hey, buddy.

  Harper Pitt : Hey.

  Joe Pitt : I looked for you. I've been everywhere.

  Harper Pitt : Well, you found me.

  Joe Pitt : No, I'm not looking now. I guess I'm having an adventure.

  Harper Pitt : Who with?

  Joe Pitt : No one you know. No one I know, either.

  Harper Pitt : ls it fun?

  Joe Pitt : Scary fun.

  Harper Pitt : Can I come with you? This isn't working anymore, I'm cold.

  Joe Pitt : I wouldn't want you to see.

  Harper Pitt : You think it's worse than what I imagine? It's not.

  Joe Pitt : I should go.

  Harper Pitt : Bastard! You fell out of love with me.

  Joe Pitt : That isn't true, Harper.

  Harper Pitt : Then come back!

• Harper : You mean like no Eskimo in Antarctica.

  Mr. Lies : Correcto. Ice and snow, no Eskimo. Even hallucinations have laws.

  Harper : Well then who's that?

  Mr. Lies : [surprised]  An Eskimo.

• Belize : [seeing that Roy appears dead]  Is he...

  Ethel Rosenberg : Mm hmm.

  Roy Cohn : [rising from his bed]  No I'm not! I fooled you, Ethel! I knew it was you the whole time! I can't believe you actually feel for that Ma stuff! I just wanted to see if I could finally, FINALLY, make Ethel Rosenberg sing! I win!

  [He starts to flatline again] 

  Roy Cohn : Oh... fuck.

• Roy Cohn : Butterfingers spook faggot nurse, I think you have little reason to want to help me.

  Belize : Consider it solidarity, one faggot to another.

• Belize : You know what your problem is, Louis? Your problem is you're so full of piping hot crap the mention of your name draws flies.

• Prior : I had a wet dream.

  Belize : Mmm. The Calvin Klein man?

  Prior : No, it was a woman.

  Belize : Are you turnin' straight on me?

  Prior : An... unconventional woman!

  Belize : Grace Jones?