Touched by an 'Angel': Ellen Burstyn Is Ascendant Once Again

The sandwich is a three-layer structure, unless you count the peanut butter and the jelly. Which reminds me of my mother. And so does "The Stone Angel." Before I get into trouble, let me say that Mom has not gone 'round the bend, a la the movie's heartbreaking/infuriating Hagar Shipley (Ellen Burstyn), but almost anyone will respond to the movie's domestic "sandwich" -- the phenomenon in which one generation watches its parents turning into children before its own children have quit the nest.

Director-writer Kari Skogland's adaptation of Margaret Laurence's 1964 novel is not intended as intergenerational sociology, of course. It is gauzy, is occasionally sexy, makes passion into a mixed virtue and is about an interesting old woman taking stock of her tumultuous life. Some of its characters are underwritten, and much of its story line seems to follow a rusty narrative railroad track through its rural Canadian setting. But it does have Burstyn, always a first-rate actress, and "The Stone Angel" makes one keenly aware of at least one reason why that is: There's no neediness. There's no sense that she'll die if you don't like her. In "The Stone Angel," she clearly doesn't care if you actively hate her character -- who, in turn, couldn't care less what anyone thinks.

Hagar lives with her son Marvin (Dylan Baker) and his less-sympathetic wife, Doris (Sheila McCarthy), and responds to their most innocuous remarks with snide ones of her own. There are many such comments, which is part of the problem: It's quite possible Hagar is being gaslighted by boredom and that her son and his wife are the perpetrators. Hagar will be familiar to a lot of viewers who have dealt with parents or grandparents who are losing their connection to real time, reality, the bathroom, and who react with a mix of anger, argument and fear. Frankly, she's impossible. But what Burstyn makes clear right away is that just because a person is older and failing doesn't mean she's ready to be treated as an infant, or that she hasn't had a life. And that life, quite possibly, was a lot more interesting than yours.

Hagar's flashbacks -- which, despite her faltering memory, we are meant to accept as gospel -- go back to the rural (and fictional) town of Manawaka, where she grew up a kind of privileged prairie princess. (The beautiful newcomer Christine Horne plays the younger Hagar, and we need to see more of her. Immediately.) She's the daughter of a prosperous but clearly mad Scotsman (Peter MacNeill) who actually believes that Hagar, whose considerable sex drive has been in gear since she was about 13, will stay with him through his dotage. She "abandons" him, and is never forgiven, when she weds the Adonis-like Luddite Bram (Cole Hauser), a local reprobate considerably below Hagar's station. It's a disaster. The lout never quite grasps that a girl willing to defy her father and an entire town to marry the wrong boy would suddenly become a lamb, even for the sake of that boy.

The thing is, we see this coming because we've seen it a million times. You want to tell the movie, "Get back to old Hagar, the crazy lady who's roaming the countryside by Greyhound!" Skogland does, but the movie's schematic calls for the seesawing of past and present until a fusion of reverie and reality is achieved. Despite this, the moral of Hagar's story -- whether life should be lived logically or with reckless passion -- remains more a question than a lesson.

Burstyn is wonderful to watch: Much of her screen time is spent playing older than her real self, but she plays younger, too. We know what a young Burstyn looked like, yet she makes her middle-aged "Stone Angel" persona into the plausible extension of Horne. It's physiological alchemy.

Emotionally and dramatically, however, "The Stone Angel" is both a front-loaded and backloaded movie (toward the end, we return to Marvin and Hagar): The most moving moments are between Hagar and the adult Marvin, who is being torn by his love for his mother and his sense of responsibility to his wife. When they are alone, he and Hagar have an easy rapport, their shared past providing a buttress against the storms of the present. But then Doris enters the room, and Marvin transforms -- not just mentally but physically (Baker is his usual brilliant self and will no doubt be overlooked by every awards-bestowing organization that recognizes supporting-acting performances.) He isn't strong. He wants to be, but each woman defines strength differently (as in, how it meets her own ends). Marvin wants peace and knows he has to throw himself under the bus to get it. He eventually reacts by lashing out at both of the women he loves.

Skogland might have spared us the Dylan Thomas afterword and brought things to their inevitable conclusion a bit earlier, and with a bit less of that patronizing regard older people get when someone's not quite sure they can read the menu or find their shoes. We get it, all right. And we all will, eventually, if we're lucky. But not always with the rigorous self-assessment of a Hagar Shipley.

The Stone Angel (115 minutes at Landmark's Bethesda Row) is rated R for sex and vulgarity.