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.
