City of Angels (1998)

City of Angels arrives from 1998 as a loose remake of Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, relocated from a divided Berlin to a Los Angeles that the screenwriter insisted was metaphorically representative of America. Nicolas Cage plays Seth, an angel who watches over the dying and falls for Meg Ryan's heart surgeon, Maggie. The film's celestial bureaucracy is staffed by mostly white faces, with Andre Braugher appearing as the fellow angel Cassiel. His presence is ensemble casting of the ordinary kind, an actor doing a job, not a diversity initiative. Nothing about the role announces itself as a statement, and the film does not ask it to.

Maggie has a scalpel and a career, which grants her a measure of professional agency unusual for the era's romances. She is also, functionally, the prize. Seth trades immortality for her, and the narrative arranges itself around his longing. That is the shape of the genre, and the film does not interrogate it. The screenplay does gesture toward the idea of angels moving among the city's different ethnic cultures, though this remains a line of dialogue and never becomes a subject. Race is scenery here, not theme. The same holds for matters of identity and desire: there is no LGBTQ presence, no subtext, no hint.

The film does carry ideas. It muses on faith, mortality, and the worth of physical experience, and it does so by having Seth feel rain and pain and love. The thinking is dramatized, never preached, which keeps the sermonizing to a minimum. Beyond that, the ledger is bare. No environmental concern, no economic critique, no attention to body image, no neurodivergent characters. The revision of history is not on the table either; the film revises a previous film, not the past. The rest is a glossy romance about an angel who wants to be human, and the culture it reflects is the culture of 1998, which had other things on its mind.

In closing, this is a competent studio weepie that understands the assignment of its genre and declines every invitation to editorialize. We file it under romance, mortality, and the reliable commercial appeal of a man who gives up everything for a woman who is about to be hit by a logging truck. The angels watch. The audience weeps. The categories remain undisturbed.

{"thematic_tags": ["remake", "box_office_number_one"]}