Look up! Look up! Prepare the way...The Messenger is coming! Oscar(R) winners Al Pacino ('Scent of a Woman'), Meryl Streep ('Kramer vs. Kramer') and Emma Thompson ('Howards End') lead an all-star cast in this two-part film directed by Mike Nichols ('The Graduate') and written by Tony Kushner, based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Set in a Reagan-era 1985 in which fantasy and reality interact and the AIDS epidemic is in full swing, the film follows a diverse group of real and imagined characters. Among them are Roy Cohn (Al Pacino), a fictionalized version of the closeted conservative; Hannah Pitt (Meryl Streep); Joe Pitt, Hannah's closeted Mormon son (Patrick Wilson); Joe's hallucinatory wife Harper (Mary-Louise Parker); Prior Walter (Justin Kirk), a gay man with AIDS; Prior's lover Louis (Ben Shenkman); Belize (Jeffrey Wright), a nurse who tends to Cohn and is a friend to Prior; a 'messenger' Angel (Emma Thompson); and an assortment of others.
