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‘An Angel at My Table’
By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
June 21, 1991
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Jane Campion's "An Angel at My Table" is a big, sprawling, unshapely thing, insufferably verbose and, at the same time, touched with magnificence. The film, which was designed as a three-part miniseries for Australian TV, follows the tragic life of the New Zealand author Janet Frame, and Campion's intention, it seems, was to capture every formative incident in the artist's biography, every classroom humiliation, every family disaster, every romantic blind alley and cruel twist of fate.This comprehensive urge is a virtue, but it's a strangely unsatisfying one. We're shown everything -- the poverty-stricken childhood, the family disasters, the years shut away in a mental hospital, where she was incorrectly diagnosed as schizophrenic and given more than 200 applications of shock therapy -- and yet we feel as if something crucial has been left out, something essential. With Frame as its subject, perhaps the film was destined to have a muddled heart. The writer's entire life was a struggle for definition, a fight against the unbearable amorphousness of being. In the autobiographies that serve as raw clay for Campion's explorations, Frame writes about the "homelessness of self." She wants desperately to connect, to find her niche, but there's something essential missing in her too, and nearly every opportunity ends in disaster. Even as a child, Frame (played in this first section by Alexia Keough, who looks like the ingenue in a Weight Watchers production of "Annie") seems unequal to almost every situation. She's a real ugly duckling -- dirty, ignorant and socially maladroit -- and "Angel at My Table" shows the painful, fumbling steps by which she, almost despite herself, grew into a very peculiar sort of literary swan. The movie has power, and a great part of its impact comes from the manner in which Campion forces us to suffer through Frame's defeats with her. Watching the film, we're faced with a curious split in our reactions. For a good portion of her young life, Frame was almost perversely inert; she participated in her own life but from an apathetic distance, as if she were her own drowsy puppeteer, and for much of the film we're torn between empathy and wanting to slap some sense into her. During her long hospitalization she flounders without the slightest trace of will, as incapable of acting on her own behalf as a laboratory rat. When a cure seems improbable, sheer happenstance saves her from being lobotomized when a volume of her poems wins a prize, drawing outside attention to her evil circumstances. It's hard to know just how to respond to a lot of what's put on screen here, and Campion doesn't help us much -- she seems to have fallen under Frame's affectless spell. For long stretches the camera appears to have been focused on incidents that haven't yet been processed, as if Campion herself weren't quite sure what was going on or what to make of it. We're never sure exactly what Frame's problem is (is she just pathologically shy?) or what possible connection there could be between it and her talent. About all Campion seems certain of is that Frame was some sort of blameless, cosmic victim, a kind of backwater Job. Thematically, the movie is about the function of art as a refuge for the frustrated and lonely-hearted, and undoubtedly what the director means to convey is a spirit of triumph. For this excruciatingly withdrawn woman with flame-red hair and rotting teeth, books and writing are the whole world -- her savior and sole companion. If there's a triumph here, it's one of imagination; Frame does, at last, find a home for herself, but Campion never enters it. We're never even given a sense of what she's like as a writer. What saves us from indifference is the sheer dimension of the pain endured by this gifted woman -- that and a towering, naked performance by Kerry Fox. As the grown-up writer, Fox has the same skinless emotional frankness that Debra Winger used to have; she involves us in every breath the character takes. She brilliantly delivers what an actress must -- her character's behavior -- and we hang on to it while, at the same time, lamenting for what Campion cannot deliver -- the key to its meaning. Still, even if it fails to solve the riddle of its subject, the movie, in its own opaque, subterranean way, cuts into us. Though its final chord is celebratory, there's so much gut-wrenching suffering in this tale that our hearts feel anchored in sadness. "An Angel at My Table" is rated R for sensuality and language.
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