BUZZED BY 'ANGELS'

From the blast of all the trumpets, you'd think the new millenium had re-arrived Sunday night. Everyone from big fry like Frank Rich and John Leonard to small fry like Dan Oldenwald hailed the coming of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" on HBO.

"Much of what will attract viewers," Oldenwald wrote, "will surely be the bigness of the event -- the all-star director Mike Nichols, the explosive special effects, the power of Kushner's words, the first ever on-screen pairing of Oscar winners Pacino and Streep. Yet viewers are in store for so much more."

In Salon, Laura Miller called Nichols' TV adaptation "not a great film, exactly, but a film that makes the greatness of Kushner's play readily available."

I beg to differ. It's not a great film any way you slice it. Nor does it do anything for Kushner's play except diminish it. Viewers got so much less.

The common complaint that big films come off poorly on the tube applies doubly in this case to big plays. It's hard to imagine how Nichols spent $60 million when the production looks like a routine TV drama, despite the special effects. Actually, in contrast to the play, which largely dispensed with realistic scenery and left most of the design to the imagination, Sunday night's "big event" often looked so set-bound and old-fashioned in the way it was shot that routine TV dramas have more edge.

So what was good about "Angels"? The performances by Justin Kirk as Prior Walter and Jeffrey Wright as Belize. I also liked Mary-Louise Parker as Harper, and Streep did well in all her roles (Morman mom, Ethel Rosenberg and the hat trick of an old graybeard rabbi).

Unfortunately, Emma Thompson was no more than ordinary and Al Pacino was only OK as Roy Cohn. I guess we should thank somebody, Nichols maybe, that he does Cohn without chewing the scenery. Or maybe we shouldn't. My trouble is, I'll never forget Ron Liebman's portrayal, a more bitter, sardonic characterization that was also damned funny. Pacino plays Cohn head-on. The oblique humor of the role, its grandiosity, isn't allowed in. Ironically, the usual over-the-top Pacino style might have worked better than taking Cohn square.