GROUNDED 'ANGELS'

Finally someone who doesn't believe the HBO hype. Here's big bad Dale Peck on why "Angels in America" doesn't work on TV. His analysis, posted Friday on Slate, makes an excellent point about why the rabbi's speech to a congregation of mourners in last week's opening scene failed to strike the right chord (particularly a joke that worked so well in the play). Which set everything off on the wrong foot.

Peck makes many other good points, although he gets pretty long winded circling the single, most important reason without ever pinning it down. He mentions differences in narrative approaches between the film and the play; sets in the film that "come across as cluttered, unnuanced, unnecessary," locations shots that "seem shuffled in from a mismatched deck," jarring close-ups, jumpy camerawork and editing, and a poor feel for the play's language. But he basically throws up his hands: "Ultimately, though, the real problem is that Angels is and remains a play, not a movie."

< FONT color=#003399>"Buzzed by 'Angels' " said as much, but didn't bother to go into all the details. So let's be explicit: The real reason "Angels" doesn't work on TV -- or didn't in the first half and is not likely to in the second half tonight -- is that the literalism of film spells so much out that little or nothing is left to the imagination. The entire purpose of production design in a film is to define what is seen and heard with total specificity. This narrows the conditions and context of the story. Characters, period, mood, social nuances are locked into place within a texture that particularizes every event, every gesture. The symbolic content, if any, is reduced to an empirical display of the actual. "Angels" on stage not only escaped that straightjacket, but as a play laden with symbolic content thrived on its multiplicity of meanings.