An Angel at My Table

Another of the movies that I had sitting on my DVR for quite some time that was about to expire was on that TCM had on its Imports programming block, even though it's in English. That movie, from New Zealand, is An Angel at My Table.

The movie is based on the three-volume memoirs by New Zealand author Janet Frame, and is told in three parts which each bear the name of one title in those memoirs. Frame was born in 1924, and in a smaller city of the South Island which, as I understand it, was not the wealthiest area at the time as everything was moving north to Auckland and Wellington, never mind the economic depression that would have hit just as Frame would have started attending school. It was also an era when parenting was much stricter, so childhood wasn't exactly a happy time. Worse, the first part of the memoirs tell us that one of Janet's sisters drowned at a young age, while her brother suffered from what was likely epilepsy. Still, Janet at one point is given a school assignment of writing a poem given an opening line, and she writes one that's well received, to the point that she gets published in the local newspaper.

Fast forward to the mid-1940s. Janet (played as an adult by Kerry Fox) needs a profession to earn her way as an adult, and had long thought of becoming a writer. But to make money, she decides on her other desire, which was to become a teacher. Eventually Janet gets to the point where she goes to a real school to do the student-teacher thing. However, for some reason when the schools inspector shows up to watch the student teachers, Janet feels that she's unable to go on and just gets up and runs away from the school, suggesting that she's not going to teach and instead take on a menial job while working at being a writer. She attempts suicide once before another of her sisters drowns, with this latter incident sends her over the edge so to speak and into a mental hospital. The doctors have already diagnosed her with schizophrenia, which was almost definitely a misdiagnosis since Janet doesn't seem to have been hearing voices or any of the other classical symptoms of the disease. But since neuropsychiatry was primitive back in the late 1940s, Janet is forced to spend eight years in the mental hospital, where she's subjected to some 200 electroshock treatments before the doctors suggest brain surgery. The latter is only averted because she's been keeping up with her writing and getting a well-received book of her poems published.

For the third act, Janet gets a stipend that allows her to go to Europe to work on her writing, the feeling being that having more experience out in the wide world will make her a better writer. She goes to Spain, where she meets Bernhard, an American student spending the summer there. They begin a relationship, but it's going to be a doomed one since he has to go back to the States at the end of the summer. Still depressed (I wouldn't be surprised if Frame did suffer from depression that was misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, but the movie doesn't quite address this), she takes on more menial jobs while trying to write and eventually becoming a successful writer. I'm not giving much away with that since Frame was well enough known in New Zealand at the time the movie was made.

An Angel at My Table (taking its name from the second of the third volume of the memoirs), was released in 1990, only after the third memoir was published. Director Jane Campion had been impressed by the first volume and wanted to make a movie on it, but Frame herself requested Campion wait until all three volumes of the memoir were written and published. I mention this because this has something to do with the one big criticism I have with An Angel at My Table.

The movie is well-acted, and the production design is quite good as well. However, Campion's original intention, not being a feature film director at the time the first memoir came out, was to film the memoir as a TV miniseries in New Zealand. The movie as finished has the feel of something that was in fact plotted as a TV miniseries. And, like The Emigrants and The New Land, I think the material her is something that would indeed have worked well as a miniseries, especially with commercial breaks at the appropriate spots. But what we get is a movie that runs almost an hour longer than My Left Foot, coming in at 158 minutes. And boy does it feel long, and like there's still a lot that we're missing out on. So while I can mostly recommend An Angel at My Table, be forewarned that it's a slow and long film.